Analysing the 2025-26 EFL fixtures
When are each club's easiest and toughest runs?
Following on from the Premier League version last week, I’ve combined the newly-released EFL fixture lists with an aggregation of bookmakers’ outright odds to highlight each club’s runs of tough and easy matches.
Each row in the matrices below lists a club’s league fixtures in chronological order, colour-coded by opposition strength. The clubs themselves are sorted and numbered by where the odds imply they’ll finish in the table, which allows teams in the grid to be identified.
The strength categories can be a bit tricky to optimise, as ideally they should be both fair and of roughly equal size. Fortunately, this season the odds are clustered in such a way that there’s a clear “top seven” in all three divisions and a clear “bottom seven” in two out of three, so I’ve run with that as the neatest option.
I’ll re-run these calculations just before the start of the season and update these graphics if the odds have shifted significantly.
Championship
Relegated Leicester have been given a gentle reintroduction to the second tier, as they face four of the seven weakest teams in their opening five fixtures. It’s a similar story for Bristol City, who follow up a tricky opening game at Sheffield United with six consecutive games against opponents expected to finish in the bottom half of the table.
Oxford are among the relegation favourites again and could find themselves in the drop zone early on with four tough matches in their opening seven.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see Blackburn limp over the finish line at the end of the season given their horrible run-in: all of their last nine fixtures are against clubs predicted to finish in mid-table or better, including six of the top seven.
League One
It looks set to be a tough start for Plymouth’s promotion challenge as they meet five of their expected rivals in the first nine fixtures.
Wigan could finish the season strongly as they have one of the easiest run-ins: their final meeting with an expected top seven team is in early March and they face six of the seven weakest tams in their last eight games.
The tail end of the season could go the opposite way for Port Vale, whose last 13 opponents include all of the expected top seven but no relegation candidates.
League Two
Walsall narrowly missed out on promotion last season and - as last week’s post on squad retention shows - have lost a lot of their players over the summer. We can now add a tough opening schedule to their list of problems, with all of their first seven opponents expected to finish in the top half (including four who are backed to finish above them).
Newport are predicted to struggle and their tough start will make it difficult to confound that expectation early on. They will face six of the division’s seven strongest teams before the end of September while only two of their first 11 opponents are projected to finish in the bottom half of the table.
Barrow’s season starts with back-to-back games against the three toughest teams, although they then don’t meet any more of the expected top seven until December.