Analysing the 2025-26 Premier League fixtures
When are each club's easiest and toughest runs?
As I do every season, I’ve combined the newly-released Premier League fixture list with an aggregation of bookmakers’ outright odds to highlight each club’s tough and easy runs of matches.
Each row in the matrix 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.
I’ve tweaked the categories a bit this season to better reflect the grouping of the odds. The five strongest clubs are shown in dark red and the next five in lighter red, with the same pattern in blue for the weaker teams. You can also use the numbers down the side of the grid to identify opponents.
I’ll be doing the same for the three EFL divisions when their fixtures are released next week.
Thomas Frank’s successor at Brentford will need to hit the ground running, as they will play five of the seven strongest teams before the end of October. Burnley have also been handed a tough reintroduction to the Premier League, with mostly “top half” opposition early on.
Arsenal and Man Utd may find it difficult to build early momentum as each face three of the five strongest teams early on.
Meanwhile newly-promoted Sunderland have been handed a gentle reintroduction to the top flight; their first meeting with one of the “big five” isn’t until gameweek nine.
Leeds could finish the season strongly: they will get all of their toughest games out of the way by the end of February, leaving them with a relatively gentle run-in.
I will re-run these calculations just before the start of the season and update this graphic if the odds have shifted things significantly.
Note: the first version erroneously had Newcastle above Man City - now corrected. Embarrassingly I was blindsided by something I caught in time last season, which is that Man City’s probabilities are skewed by the potential punishment for FFP breaches.
A surprisingly little known secret about sports betting is that long term markets are very easy to trade with bookmakers that have a large number of markets to choose from at any one time.
(And the way to exploit that is to bet in multiples. Singles don’t make enough to make it worthwhile as you can’t lay )
And one of the reasons it’s easy is because fixtures tend to come in identifiable groups of harder and easier games.
Of course it’s easier to identify these groups during the season than before when we actually know more about the quality of teams.