The 2026-27 Premier League season kicks off this Friday, but which clubs have the hardest fixtures to start the campaign, and which teams have the easiest?
The 2026-27 Premier League season is upon us. Kicking off on Friday with reigning champions Arsenal hosting last season’s Championship winners Coventry City at the Emirates Stadium, it promises to be another thrilling battle at both ends of the table.
Of course, each team will play 38 games over the course of the Premier League season, playing the same opponents along the way. But the order of those fixtures does matter. Having a great start to a Premier League campaign can make or break a season.
Only one team who’ve gone on to win the Premier League title have lost more than once across their opening five games in a season. That was Manchester United in the inaugural 1992-93 campaign (two defeats), but back then they had four more games to recover due to it being a 22-team competition.
For teams expected to be near the bottom of the table at the end, making an encouraging or demoralising start can set the tone.
Overall, 103 teams have won their opening two games of a Premier League season, and just three of those were relegated that campaign: Wolves in 2011-12, Hull in 2016-17 and West Brom in 2017-18. Tottenham did come close to becoming the fourth last season, but they eventually secured survival on the final day.
So, performing well early on can make a big difference, and this is where assessing fixture difficulty can give us a good guide for how each team will perform.
Using the Opta Power Rankings, we can quantify how easy (or difficult) each team’s early Premier League schedule is.
As a reminder, these Power Rankings rate a frankly enormous number of teams (more than 10,000) across the globe based on a system that scores the current strongest side with an Opta Power Rating of 100 and the weakest at zero. The scores are then used to rank the teams in order of strongest to weakest.
Focusing on the Premier League, we looked at the average Opta Power Rating of each team’s opponents to measure fixture difficulty.
These range from Arsenal (the number one team in the world with a Opta Power Rating of 100.0, and therefore the hardest to play against) to Hull City (ranked 47th in the world with an Opta Power Rating of 88.4 and therefore the ‘easiest’ team to play against in England’s top flight).
With the Premier League having five matchdays before an extended three-week international break beginning at the end of September, it feels an ideal cross-section of the 2026-27 schedule to analyse.
So, what does the data say?
Fixture Difficulty Across the Opening Five Matchdays
It’s a fairly kind start to life as Liverpool manager for Andoni Iraola, according to the Opta Power Rankings at least.
Iraola’s first Premier League match as the Reds’ boss sees him head to Newcastle United’s St. James’ Park on MD1, which is never an easy place to go, but with Eddie Howe and key players Bruno Guimarães, Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali departed, it might be a good time to face them.
Matches against Nottingham Forest (H), promoted side Ipswich Town (A) and Fulham (H) follow before he returns to Bournemouth on MD5.
The opponents of those five games have an average Opta Power Rating of 91.2, the lowest facing any team in the Premier League across Gameweeks 1-5.
There’s been a lot of change at Manchester City this summer, with Pep Guardiola replaced by Enzo Maresca in the dugout. Influential midfielder Rodri also left for Barcelona, although the £116 million signing of Elliot Anderson may soften that blow.
Fortunately for Maresca, he also has one of the kinder hands to deal with across the first five matchdays – on paper at least. The MD4 trip to rivals Manchester United could come at a bad time should they start slowly in their first three games, though.
United are also deemed to have one of the easier starts to the season. Remarkably, for the first time since 2016-17, the Red Devils start with an away game, but it is at least against the lowest-ranked side in the league in Hull. Michael Carrick’s men then host more promoted opposition in Ipswich Town, before travelling to Everton.
Carrick will be looking to continue the momentum United ended 2025-26 with under him now he’s got the permanent job at Old Trafford. They won a league-high 39 points after his initial appointment in January, which was three more than Arsenal.
The Gunners enter a season as reigning champions for the first time in 22 years, and the pressure will be on to perform from the start. An opening-day home game against promoted Coventry City is deemed one of the kindest fixtures to start a Premier League season with, but a trip to Aston Villa and a London derby at the Emirates against Chelsea follow, meaning Matchdays 2 and 3 present much tougher hurdles.
Frank Lampard led Coventry to the Championship title last season, winning the league with an 11-point cushion over Ipswich. His reward? The toughest start to the 2026-27 Premier League campaign.
The Sky Blues’ first five opponents average an Opta Power Rating of 93.9, with much of that down to away games against last season’s top two, Arsenal and Man City.
Bournemouth have the joint-most difficult start alongside them, with new manager Marco Rose facing a baptism of fire. A daunting trip to the Etihad Stadium to face Man City awaits on MD1, while they head into the long international break after hosting former boss Iraola at the Vitality Stadium on Sunday 20 September.
How Sunderland cope with the addition of a European schedule in 2026-27 following their exceptional seventh-place finish last season will make for intriguing viewing.
Régis Le Bris’ side will face a minimum of eight additional games thanks to their qualification for the UEFA Europa League, which will also see them contend with a Thursday-Sunday (or Thursday-Monday) schedule in the first half of 2026-27.
Their opening five Premier League matches come out as the third hardest of the 20 Premier League sides (93.7), with the main reason being games against Arsenal and Man City on MD4 and MD5, which sit either side of their first match in European competition for 53 years.
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Premier League Fixture Difficulty: Assessing the First Five Matchdays of 2026-27 Opta Analyst.
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