Analysing the 2025-26 Premier League fixtures
When are each club's easiest and toughest runs?
UPDATE: This post was originally published on fixture release day, but has now been updated with the latest odds.
As I do every season, I’ve combined the 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, which are always more polarised than in the EFL divisions. The four 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 also did this for the three EFL divisions when their fixtures were released the following week (again updating it on the eve of the season to allow for changes in the odds).
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 predicted top five in their opening five fixtures.
Meanwhile newly-promoted Sunderland have been handed a gentle reintroduction to the top flight: like Chelsea their first four games are against teams likely to finish in the bottom half, while they and Aston Villa go the joint-longest before meeting a “big four” team (in late October).
If Leeds find themselves in a relegation battle as expected then a “great escape” could be on the cards. All of their games against the expected top four will be out of the way before March, leaving them with a relatively gentle run-in.
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.