How the Premier League fixture list is compiled

Retro · Saturday at 15:45

In the Premier League, since every club plays every other club twice, you'd think the order wouldn't matter since it's all the same mathemagically, so just select the team pairings and dates at random, right? In reality it's rather more complicated than that as so many factors have to be taken into account such as clashes with other competitions, not having two clubs whose stadiums are close together playing at home on the same day and much more. In short, it's really complicated! I'd love to see what goes on behind the scenese to figure all this out.

Find out the work that takes place to schedule all 380 matches

The release of the Premier League fixtures is always eagerly anticipated as fans discover when their team will be playing each opponent in the new season.

But how exactly are the fixtures decided?

Producing the full fixture list is the result of a meticulous and painstaking process that lasts almost half a year and involves the scheduling of 2,036 matches across the top four divisions.

Fixture-list compiler Glenn Thompson, of Atos, an international IT services company, explains how it all works.