In the mind’s eye, it is an enormous piece of machinery, rattling, rumbling and flashing its lights intermittently. For minutes it will make an almighty din until — ping! — a narrow thread of ticker-tape paper emerges from its innards detailing precisely how the season ahead will be shaped.
The fixture computer is part of football folklore. It is cursed for sending your club to Norwich City on a Tuesday night and thanked for that gentle start to a season which was absolutely long overdue. It can’t hope to get everything right with its perceived in-built biases against every fanbase but it is cherished all the same. It gives us structure, something to plan for.
And all its latest work will be presented for thousands to devour next week as the Premier League and its 20 clubs announce their fixture lists for 2022-23 on Thursday morning (at 9am UK time). The English Football League (EFL) follows suit seven days later, presenting a sheet of commitments to its 72 clubs.
Fixture release day is the culmination of eight months of planning. Those involved call it “the impossible job” but once the world is allowed to see all those fixtures — 2,036 in total, across the top four divisions of English football — there is a collective sigh of relief.
Primarily from Glenn Thompson, who is the man at the heart of it all.
Thompson works for Atos, the IT company that has delivered Premier League and EFL fixtures for the last 30 years. Until 1982, it was done by hand — written out, with pen and paper — but the annual honour now belongs to Thompson’s laptop. In goes all the necessary data, and out come those fixtures.
It is a random, automated process at its core, but with a bundle of caveats that make it a far more complex operation. There is sequencing (more on that later), there are algorithms and pairing grids, and the date requests of individual clubs to consider, before all is revealed.
There will be grumbles. There are always grumbles. But by the end, the coming season will have its map.
“You can’t satisfy everyone,” Thompson has said. “It’s a compromise across all clubs. You can’t do anything to favour any one club.”
At the peak of his powers, Sir Alex Ferguson was not always a friend of the fixture computer.
“Our programme did not do us any favours and we have been handicapped by the Premier League,” the Manchester United manager said in 2009, bemoaning that his side had been drawn away to a string of dangerous opponents immediately after midweek Champions League ties.
“They tell me it’s not planned. Bloody hell. I’ve got my doubts. Next year we will be sending somebody to see how it happens, I can assure you.”
Jose Mourinho has been down a similar road. No, really.
At his cantankerous best in 2005, fresh from winning a first Premier League title, he was angered for the same reason, as Chelsea were consistently given domestic away games after Champions League ties. Arsenal, meanwhile, a Champions League fixture in those days, were “always at home”. Mourinho inferred this was due to Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein’s position as a board member at the FA.
“Why do you (the media) have nothing to say about that?” he asked. “Is it only Jose Mourinho who looks at the fixtures who finds something very strange?”
Thompson is used to being depicted as the dastardly menace out to sabotage clubs and will knowingly roll his eyes at the suggestion of his fixtures being rigged. “Over the years you get used to it,” he said.
The compilation of a season’s fixtures is not a transparent process and nor can it ever hope to be. Unlike a cup draw, televised live for a watching world, it is too laborious and detailed for that.
If Ferguson really wanted a peek behind the curtain, he would see a project that effectively begins in November of every year.
That is the point where the FA, Premier League and EFL come together to produce a joint fixture schedule that encompasses all of the following season’s domestic football calendar. Dates will be locked in for the FA Cup, EFL Cup and EFL Trophy ties that punctuate the league season, avoiding clashes with European and national-team commitments.
If those are the bones of the fixture list, flesh is added in early spring. Questionnaires are sent to every club, who are asked for views and observations on the schedule placed in front of them. That brings the opportunity for feedback, with clubs able to make date requests to their relevant league.
One club might be keen to play away from home on the same weekend a major public event is taking place in their town or city.
Another might also request away games either at the end or beginning of a season, because of planned ground improvements. That was the case with Liverpool in 2016-17, when their first three league matches, taking them up to the September international break, were all away from Anfield as they added the finishing touches to their new main stand. Their first home fixture that season wasn’t until September 10.
The Premier League and EFL will do their utmost to accommodate date requests but offer no guarantees. The EFL, for example, typically receive between 80 and 90 date requests from their 72 clubs in any given season. They estimate about 85 per cent of those get granted.
Another key component of those feedback forms is which other team a club want to be paired with, thus avoiding the potential for them both playing at home on the same day.
Plenty of pairings are a given. Liverpool do not play home games in the same round of fixtures as cross-city rivals Everton. The same with the top flight’s two Manchester clubs, United and City. Local police forces are also involved in that stage of the process, limiting the threat of stretched resources in the emergency services.
Pairings can also span different divisions. Newcastle United and north-east neighbours Sunderland do not play home games on the same weekend, despite not facing each other since 2016 and being in different leagues again for 2022-23. Likewise Aston Villa of the Premier League and Championship Birmingham City.
Areas with the greatest density of clubs, such as London, the West Midlands and the north west, also act together. The aim is always for an even spread of clubs in a region playing at home and away each match day.
“One of the key factors in a fixture list is not giving clubs problems down the line,” says Paul Snellgrove, the EFL’s long-standing competitions manager. “We want to ensure that the season runs as smoothly as possible.
“We engage with police forces up and down the country. Every one. A good example would be the Sheffield clubs. South Yorkshire Police wouldn’t want the two Sheffield clubs to have a home fixture on the same day. Same for Port Vale and Stoke and any number of two-club cities.
“The West Midlands is another example. Police wouldn’t be happy if there were five home games one Saturday and then one the next. We try and ensure a fair spread.”
From that comes a pairing grid, which defines the dates when a club will play at home. Each club gets allocated a box within that grid and when the time is right, once the last of the three EFL play-off finals has been played in late May, Thompson’s computer will randomly generate who faces who on any given date the following season.
There are other considerations, though.
A methodology known as sequencing breaks the season up into sets of games, with those then reversed in the second half of the campaign. In any five-game set, clubs cannot have more than three home or away matches.
Initial fixture lists, before the inevitable rearrangements bring changes, also ensure every club’s season begins and ends with one away game and one at home. A similar rule applies to the busy Christmas period. If a team are away on Boxing Day (December 26), they are assured of a home game for the New Year’s Day round of fixtures.
Both the Premier League and EFL attempt to deliver something close to a local game for all clubs at that time of year. The term is used loosely, with some clubs unavoidably in footballing outposts, but Boxing Day fixtures will always come against an opponent as close as possible to you geographically, to better limit travel.
The 12 weeks leading up to fixture release day will see a host of bodies included in the Fixtures Working Party, such as the Football Supporters’ Association, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the British Transport Police.
“We look at whether we have got clubs from the same area travelling on the same train lines across the EFL and the Premier League on the same day,” Thompson says. “We want to avoid having various pinch-points on the rail and road networks.”
As much as it pains the loyalist supporters of EFL clubs, some of those horrendously long away trips for Tuesday night matches are actually created on purpose.
“We need to ensure clubs can maximise their Saturday fixtures, in terms of attendance and in terms of revenue they take over the gates,” Snellgrove has said on the EFL podcast.
“They want big local fixtures to happen on a Saturday — when most fans can attend, when it’s a lot easier for travelling fans to attend. The upshot of that is that some of the more lengthy journeys will occur midweek. It’s something we’re conscious of, so we try and ensure a fair spread.
“We always have to ensure we’re not giving a club a massive local derby on a midweek when the attendance could be 10-15 per cent down on what it might be on a Saturday.”
A provisional fixture list, produced by Thompson’s computer software in early June, will be reviewed by the Premier League, the EFL and Atos representatives across two days, to ensure as many requests as possible have been accommodated.
“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,” says Thompson, who estimates working between 70 and 80 hours each week in the run-up to fixture release day. “It can be that changing one match may require 40 other changes.”
The final step is distribution to the masses — first to the clubs and media, and then to supporters.
After that comes that traditional rush of excitement and complaints, before the TV companies gradually tweak and tinker for their live coverage over the next nine months.
An added, unique, complication for 2022-23, of course, is having a World Cup played slap-bang in the middle of the season. An immovable, non-negotiable object in Qatar that cannot be shifted.
For the Premier League, that means a seven-week break has to be accommodated. Games played on the weekend of November 12-13 will be the last in the top flight until Boxing Day, with the season also beginning at an earlier date on the August 6-7 weekend and ending on Sunday, May 28.
That means the next Premier League season will span 295 days, as opposed to the 282 the last one took. It will consist of 34 weekend match days, three in midweek and one on a bank holiday.
Any Premier League players featuring in the World Cup final on Sunday, December 18 would, in theory, have only eight days before their domestic club returned to action on Boxing Day.
The last 16 of the Carabao Cup is scheduled for the midweek including Wednesday, December 21.
A window for preparation for the World Cup will be almost as tight.
England’s opening group game, against Iran, will come on Monday, November 21 — just eight days after the final pre-tournament Premier League matches. The FA has asked the Premier League to avoid pitting any Big Six clubs against one another on those early November dates to limit the intensity of fixtures immediately before the World Cup begins. That request is expected to be granted.
The EFL has its own issues related to Qatar 2022.
The Championship season will also be paused from November 13 but only until December 9, a period that covers the group stages and last-16 ties. Clubs could still have players involved in the World Cup by the time action resumes on December 10 (the day of the second two World Cup quarter-finals) but postponements could be possible if three or more are kept away.
Leagues One and Two will continue uninterrupted throughout the World Cup, with the potential for round-of-16 games (two per day from Saturday, December 3 to Tuesday, December 6) and quarter-finals (two each on December 9 and 10, with the latter a Saturday) on the same day as their league fixtures.
No third or fourth-tier club will want a home game clashing with an important England fixture (the World Cup draw means Gareth Southgate’s men would begin any tie in that first knockout round at either 3pm UK time on the Saturday or 7pm the next day) and rearrangements, if only to change kick-off times on a particular date, will be a given.
The fixture list compiled by Thompson will eventually carry a reduced resemblance to the one created in June but, if nothing else, it gets everything ready to do it all over again.
(Lead image produced by Sam Richardson)
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