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The Premier League has revealed its full fixture list for the 2025/26 season.
With little margin of error, it’s going to be important to get off to a fast start. Every team in the Premier League will be desperate to hit the ground running when the season gets underway in August but it’ll be easier for some than others.
Clearly, it’s difficult to predict who will start well and who won’t. But it’s certainly possible to consider the relative theoretical difficulty of every club’s early matches based on how their opponents performed last season.
2025/26 Premier League fixture difficulty out of the gate
Aston Villa manager Unai Emery (Image credit: Alamy)FourFourTwo has done exactly that with our very own Fixture Slipperiness Supercomputer.
Allocating a clever and mysterious indexed fixture difficulty score to every opponent based on where they finished last season, we’ve calculated the toughness of the first six fixtures for every team.
Burnley manager Scott Parker (Image credit: Getty Images)There’s good news for Aston Villa, who begin 2025-26 with the easiest set of fixtures. West Ham United and Nottingham Forest will also be targeting a positive jump out of the blocks.
Newly promoted Burnley have been handed the most difficult set of opening fixtures by far, followed by Crystal Palace and Leeds United.
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Sunderland begin the season with the seventh most difficult fixtures and last season’s lowest-ranked surviving teams – Tottenham Hotspur, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Manchester United – are all in the middle of the fixture difficulty table.
Of the realistic Premier League title hopefuls, it’s Arsenal who face the toughest start. Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City each have a much friendlier welcome to the new campaign.
Here’s the full relative difficulty table for the first six Premier League fixtures of the season.
Burnley: 143 pointsCrystal Palace: 133 pointsLeeds United: 120 pointsArsenal: 119 pointsFulham: 116 pointsNewcastle United: 109 pointsSunderland: 109 pointsBrighton & Hove Albion: 106 pointsManchester United: 106 pointsBournemouth: 101 pointsTottenham Hotspur: 95 pointsWolverhampton Wanderers: 93 pointsEverton: 91 pointsBrentford: 88 pointsManchester City: 86 pointsLiverpool: 84 pointsChelsea: 80 pointsNottingham Forest: 77 pointsWest Ham United: 76 pointsAston Villa: 75 points
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