Finally the day has come when we can start to plan our lives for the next eleven months, as the all-important fixture list for the 2025/6 season was announced this morning. And someone in the Premier League must have sense of history, as it includes a highly significant date for our first meeting with Manchester United.
We begin with a home game against Everton, and our first fixture change has occurred already, as this is now showing as a Monday night game, presumably at the behest of one of the TV companies. This is almost another nod to history, as a memorable trip to Everton was our first game back in the first division in 1990, but our first glimpse of their shiny new stadium won’t be until January 24th.
Our first away game in this campaign will be at Arsenal on the second Saturday, August 23rd. We then have Newcastle at home, but that is followed by 5 or 6 relatively easy fixtures (on paper at least), which might help us to build up a bit of confidence and ease our way back into Premier League life.
As there are fewer games to fit in a Premier League season there are few midweek trips to moan about, and our only such game outside the Christmas holiday period is Newcastle away on Wednesday January 7th, which isn’t that onerous. Chelsea have to come to us in midweek, but we don’t care about them.
Speaking of Christmas week, that involves going to Sunderland on Saturday December 27th and Liverpool on the following Tuesday, but at least they’re not among the furthest away trips. But of course the first fixtures most of us would have looked for would have been the two games against our dear rivals from the wrong side of the Pennines.
And lo and behold, the home game with Man United is on January 3rd, so get that chant ready! And pray that the TV companies don’t ruin everything by moving the game to another day! The away game at the theatre of wet dreams is towards the end of the season on April 11th, if the Glaziers haven’t driven them into bankruptcy before then.
One final historical reproduction is playing Brighton at home in the penultimate game, as we did in our relegation season of 1981/2, and our narrowly relegation-avoiding season of 2021/2. Hopefully things won’t be quite as fraught this time around. We finish at West Ham’s unlovely ‘London Stadium’, in a game that may or may not be critical.
For contractual reasons we are not allowed to publish the full fixture list, but you can find it here on the club’s official website..
Sadly, the most important sentence will be the one right at the bottom, which warns "Please note, all fixtures are subject to change.” With a record number of games to be broadcast in the coming season, who knows when these games will actually take place once the TV Companies have got their talons into the fixture list.