Recommended reading

Premier League fixtures difficulty REVEALED: Arsenal have tough start, with Aston Villa handed a favourable first six matches

By published

Villa finish with back-to-back fixtures against Liverpool and Manchester City so they'll need to start quickly

Arsenal's Spanish manager Mikel Arteta (L) and Aston Villa's Spanish head coach Unai Emery (R) watch from the touchline during the English Premier League football match between Aston Villa and Arsenal at Villa Park in Birmingham, central England on February 18, 2023.
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta (Image credit: GEOFF CADDICK/AFP via Getty Images)

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 looks on from the dugout during the Champions League last 16 first leg match against Club Brugge at Jan Breydel Stadium in Bruges, Belgium on 4 March, 2025

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.

Scott Parker helped Burnley yield an impressive 100 points in 2024/25 - and they still didn't win the title!

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.

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.

  1. Burnley: 143 points
  2. Crystal Palace: 133 points
  3. Leeds United: 120 points
  4. Arsenal: 119 points
  5. Fulham: 116 points
  6. Newcastle United: 109 points
  7. Sunderland: 109 points
  8. Brighton & Hove Albion: 106 points
  9. Manchester United: 106 points
  10. Bournemouth: 101 points
  11. Tottenham Hotspur: 95 points
  12. Wolverhampton Wanderers: 93 points
  13. Everton: 91 points
  14. Brentford: 88 points
  15. Manchester City: 86 points
  16. Liverpool: 84 points
  17. Chelsea: 80 points
  18. Nottingham Forest: 77 points
  19. West Ham United: 76 points
  20. Aston Villa: 75 points
Chris Nee
Chris Nee

Chris is a freelance writer, author of the High Protein Beef Paste football newsletter and owner of Aston Villa Review. He's based in Warwickshire and is the Head of Media for Coventry Sphinx.