Breaking down the 2024-25 Premier League fixtures

A time-honoured Experimental 361 tradition

One of the first football data visualisations I ever created as a blogger was a fixture difficulty matrix. While everyone plays everybody else home and away each season, the order in which this happens can have a huge impact.

A tough (or easy) start can set the tone for the rest of the season. Managers can be sacked after a run of poor results during a tough sequence, only for their successors to be credited with a “new manager bounce” when the schedule inevitably eases. The chances of grinding out enough points to secure a top four finish or move out of relegation danger will depend on the quality (and motivation) of opponents encountered during the run-in.

What I’ve done here is to take the newly-released fixtures and combine them with an aggregation of the leading bookmakers’ odds to highlight where each club’s tough and easy matches appear to be. Each row in the matrix below lists a club’s league matches in chronological order, colour-coded based on opposition strength. The clubs themselves are sorted and numbered by where the odds imply they’ll finish in the table.

I’ve coloured the strongest-looking clubs (based purely on the odds) in red and the weakest-looking in blue, but you can use the numbers down the side to identify which fixtures are which.

Due to how the odds are bunched up, I’ve separated out the top seven rather than keeping things symmetrical with a top and bottom six.

Manchester City are title favourites once again, but their credentials will be severely tested by a punishing run of fixtures beginning in late January. They will face five of the expected top seven in a row, just after the league phase of the new Champions League format is set to conclude.

New Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca should be thanking the fixture computer for a gentle start to his tenure. After a tough opener against champions City his new charges don’t face another Champions League challenger until October.

There are likely to be contrasting trajectories in the Midlands. Aston Villa could start the season well, as four of their first six matches are against teams expected to struggle. This is balanced by a tricky run-in that sees them play tough sides in four of their last six, so they will need to have built up a points cushion by mid-April to avoid falling away.

Meanwhile Wolves may find themselves in the relegation zone early on with five tough games in their opening eight. If newly-promoted Leicester also struggle as expected then they will have the chance to pull off a “great escape”, with all of their last five games against clubs who are likely to be in the bottom half.

There is an interesting wrinkle this season with Manchester City and Chelsea’s odds, as the relegation market is pricing in the possibility of them being relegated as punishment for breaching Financial Fair Play rules. Therefore I have excluded these from the calculation as they are not a fair reflection of the teams’ strength.

If the odds shift significantly before the start of the season, which can happen as a result of transfers, injuries etc, then I will re-run these calculations.