The Premier League will announce next season’s fixture list on Wednesday at 9 a.m. BST (4 a.m. ET).
The league, which will see its usual 380 fixtures next season, has committed to giving every team at least 60 hours of rest between matches over the festive period, with no games to be played on Christmas Eve.
The Premier League said the schedule takes almost 18 months to plan, with a computer generating a random list of fixtures that is then scrutinised for factors such as travel, policing and scheduling clashes to take into account.
“For me it is at the start of the year when I get the playing dates from the Premier League,” fixture planner Glenn Thompson who also plans the Football League calendar, told Premier League.com.
“We [with the computer] start when we know the composition of each division, so after the last Football League playoff. We place each club in a pairing grid, which defines the dates they will be at home.
“For every date in the season, the fixture computer knows which clubs are at home and who are away and then it will mix them up randomly to determine the matches.”
He added: “You can’t satisfy everyone. It’s a compromise across all clubs; you can’t do anything to favour any one club.
“There are 2,036 matches across the Premier League and Football League over a nine-month period, and the ideal solution is to ensure that those matches can all be played when scheduled.”
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