AT the start of last season, you could have got odds of more than 100-1 on Blackpool winning promotion from the Championship. Next Saturday, however, Ian Holloway’s side will be tackling Wigan on the opening weekend of the topflight season.

In contrast to the increasingly predictable Premier League, the Championship is a division in which anything can happen.

Every side kicking off this weekend will harbour hopes of celebrating promotion in nine months time, but while Blackpool were last season’s surprise packages, it is worth remembering that Newcastle and West Brom were tipped for the top-flight from the off.

Class and ability still count, and while the Championship is a league in which most sides are equal, some remain more equal than others.

Middlesbrough start this season’s programme as favourites, and having failed to bounce back at the first time of asking last term, there are plenty of reasons to suggest things should be better this time around.

Gordon Strachan has not so much cut his cloth this summer as fashioned it into a kilt, and Boro’s Scottish core should provide the strength and solidity that was lacking on Teesside last season.

Middlesbrough will not have things their own way, however, and it is easy to make a case for up to ten other sides when it comes to identifying promotion possibles.

The three sides that were relegated from the Premier League will always have a chance, even if two of them – Portsmouth and Hull – will start the new campaign with major financial hurdles to overcome.

While Thursday’s High Court ruling saved Pompey from the threat of liquidation, the south coast club are still the subject of a transfer embargo that severely limits their ability to sign players.

In the middle of last week, their official club website listed 11 registered players, none of whom were a goalkeeper. Survival and stabilisation will be the main two aims at Fratton Park this season.

Similarly, Hull dropped into the Championship with an unsustainable wage bill and a significant amount of debt, and Nigel Pearson’s failure to move on a number of his highest-paid players has prevented him from making the improvements he no doubt envisaged when he agreed to leave Leicester.

Admittedly, Newcastle were in a mess when they kicked off last season, but Hull are in a bigger one and it is hard to imagine them finishing in the top two.

Burnley could, largely because Brian Laws appears to have wheeled-and-dealed effectively this summer.

The sale of Steven Fletcher to Wolves raised £6m, and while the likes of Dean Marney, Chris Iwelumo and Ross Wallace are not in the striker’s league, they will nevertheless form the basis of a competitive Championship squad.

Beyond the Clarets, the group of leading challengers is likely to include Nottingham Forest, Reading and QPR, three sides who flattered to deceive somewhat last season.

Forest fell away in the final month after challenging Newcastle and West Brom for the majority of the campaign, Reading finished like a house on fire after filling a relegation spot in November and QPR under-performed spectacularly until Neil Warnock’s appointment in March. All three sides should be there or thereabouts this time around.

In Robert Earnshaw and Dexter Blackstock, Forest boast one of the most prolific forward lines in the Championship. Reading have done well to hold on to Jimmy Kebe, Shane Long and Gylfi Sigurdsson, three players who shone in the latter stages of last season, while Warnock has bought astutely, poaching Shaun Derry and Clint Hill from Crystal Palace and shelling out £750,000 to sign goalkeeper Paddy Kenny from Sheffield United.

Kenny’s former employers are bound to competitive, and will be eyeing a play-off place along with Roy Keane’s Ipswich and Dave Jones’ Cardiff City.

The two sides automatically promoted from League One, Norwich and Leeds, could also be decent outside bets for a play-off place, even if the latter could struggle to replace Jermaine Beckford’s goals following the striker’s free transfer to Everton.

Scunthorpe are favourites for the drop, and this could well be the season when the Lincolnshire club fail to punch above their weight.