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2017/18 Premier League fixtures


Paco
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“It’s a double-edged sword,” Scudamore toldBloomberg. “When your most popular club isn’t doing as well, that costs you interest and audience in some places.”

 

“There’s lots of fans around the world who wish Manchester United were winning it again, but you have to balance that off against, generally, we’re in the business of putting on a competition and competition means people can compete.

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It's all the same shit every year and people still think it's all random. Hilarious.

 

It's not entirely random

 

 

There are the "golden rules" of sequencing. In any five matches there should be a split of three home fixtures, two away or the other way around. A team will never have more than two home or away matches in a row, and, wherever possible, you will be home and away around FA Cup ties.
A club will never start or finish the season with two home or two away matches because it would be unfair for a team to finish with two aways, especially if they are looking for points.

Around the Christmas period, if you are at home on Boxing Day you will be away on New Year's Day or the equivalent date and we will also try to maintain a Saturday home-away sequence throughout the season wherever possible.

 

Most clubs will have a partner club that they cannot clash with. There are the obvious ones - Manchester United and Manchester City, Liverpool and Everton - and then when you get into London it gets a bit more complex and less obvious.

 

Around March, the Premier League sends to each of its member clubs a form asking them to fill in three things: Are there any dates they wish not to be at home? That is answered in conjunction with the local police. They will also be asked which club they want to pair with and whether there are any teams they do not wish to play at home on Boxing Day.

 

From looking at the sequence we know how many of these dates we can meet. When we can't, the Premier League will ask the club which of the requests are most important. We cannot accommodate everything but, on average, we satisfy higher than 85% every year.

We cannot do anything until we know the composition of each division, which is, obviously, after the last Football League play-off. Then we can start looking at the main bit of compiling the fixtures. It is a matter of placing each of the clubs in a pairing grid, which basically defines the dates they will be at home.

For every date in the season, the fixture computer knows who is at home and who is away and then it will mix them up randomly to determine which matches will take place on which date.

 

If we have got any issues, we might have to go back and start again to produce a different set of fixtures. I'm reviewing the fixtures all the time to ensure other things can be met.

In the 2012/13 season, for example, there was a requirement from the Metropolitan Police not to play high-profile matches until after 8 September because of the Olympics and Paralympics.

Traditionally the Premier League, the Football League and Atos representatives will review the fixtures for two days, looking at every date in the season to make sure that wherever possible we have met everything we have been asked to.

 

This season the Football League's fixtures will be released on a separate date which has led to a slight change in this review process.

 

The computer is very useful during the review because if we do not want a certain fixture on a particular date, it will give us alternate dates for that fixture to be moved to. It can be that changing one match may require 40 other changes.

 

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