The football season gets under way again on Saturday – or at least it does if your team isn’t in the Premier League, which starts a week later. My beloved Queens Park Rangers are off to Vicarage Road to take on Watford and I’ll be there with my three sons to cheer them on. We ‘did the double’ over the Hornets last season – the only team we beat home and away – so there’s a smidgen of hope. But there are also plenty of reasons to be pessimistic, and not just about the opening game.

According to Opta, a British sports analytics company, QPR are going to finish dead last in the Championship. It got a supercomputer to run 10,000 simulations of how the season is likely to play out and 23 out of the 24 teams won the title at least once, with the only exception being the Super Hoops. Our chances of coming last according to the computer are 31.6 per cent, higher than any other team, and our chances of finishing in the bottom three, which means relegation to League One, are 62 per cent.

The bookies concur, with William Hill putting the odds of QPR being relegated at 7/2, and only two teams – Rotherham and Plymouth Argyle – being given a worse chance. The pundits, whether amateurs on YouTube or professionals on Sky Sports, are equally gloomy. I haven’t aggregated all their predictions, but my impression is that Rangers finish in the bottom three more often than any other team. I’m tempted to put a bet on them going down myself.

Why such low expectations? First of all, we almost got relegated last season. After a strong start in which we were briefly top of the league, we lost our manager to a more glamorous club (Glasgow Rangers), sacked his replacement after 12 games, and then brought in Gareth Ainsworth, the 49-year-old manager of Wycombe Wanderers, who looks like the lead singer of a 1970s rock band. He managed to keep us up, but only just, winning three of his 13 games in charge. Over the course of the season we conceded 71 goals, the second worst defensive record in the league.

To be fair to Ainsworth, he did OK at Wycombe, getting them promoted from League Two to League One in 2018 and then to the Championship in 2020, although they went back down the following year. The problem is, the no-frills style of football he likes his teams to play – fast and direct, with long balls hoofed up the pitch by the centre backs, hoping to find a striker lurking on the edge of the box – isn’t suited to QPR’s squad, who prefer to play it out from the back and pass it around in front of their opponents, probing for weaknesses.

It’s the difference between old-fashioned English football and the more modern European variety, between Roy of the Rovers and Kylian Mbappé. QPR are full of young men who fancy themselves as flair players and want an opportunity to show off their skills, so are unlikely to respond well to Ainsworth’s back-to-basics, get-stuck-in approach.

That wouldn’t matter so much if he’d been allowed to rebuild the team over the summer, but QPR are hampered by the Financial Fair Play rules. Having overspent in previous seasons, we’re only allowed to splash out on new players if we can find buyers for some of our old ones, and to date we’ve managed to sell just two. Ainsworth has snagged five new names, all free transfers, but one is a 36-year-old goalkeeper and another– a promising young striker – has already picked up an injury. We got a premonition of how much trouble we’re in at a friendly against Oxford United last Saturday. The League One team beat us 5-0.

It’s possible that the prophecies of supercomputers and pundits will be wrong – at the beginning of the 2022-23 season no one predicted that Luton Town would end up being promoted to the Premier League. For his part, Ainsworth says he’s delighted expectations are so low, telling Clive Whittingham, the author of a QPR blog, he saw that as a ‘positive’. ‘We’ve got some predictions we can shove where the sun doesn’t shine,’ he said. ‘I know I have a group of players around me here who can beat anybody on their day. If we can keep having our day, we’ll definitely put egg on a few faces of people who’ve said we’ll finish last.’

I like a bit of optimism in the face of adversity, and one of the benefits of supporting QPR is that it fosters that attitude because the alternative is so bleak. When I asked 15-year-old Charlie how he felt about the prospect of getting relegated, he was remarkably upbeat. ‘Look at it this way,’ he said. ‘If we end up in League One we’ll be able to go to lots of stadiums we’ve never been to before.’ Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.