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The Fixture List

hypersonic

hypersonic

Striker
Contributor
Was thinking about the teams coming up and how well we started this season.

We played a lot of low to mid table sides early which was important to get us going and then we've played a lot of the better sides straight after big European games for them.

I know a lot of fans bemoan the fixture list in general for congestion and unfairness, but I wonder if there's ever been an analysis done on the best times to play certain teams, and which clubs are over/under achieving based on fixture 'luck' (or if it even exists)
 
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Would love to know this but don’t know if any

You increasingly see media quantify “difficulty” of matches based on league position, which is helpful to a degree
 
We have definitely had some breaks so far, as you say, playing teams at the 'right' time, maximising goals (almost every away goal turned into points), and having more than our share of luck in a few games (for a change). But mostly, it has been how well a group of underrated players have immediately blended so well together. Encouraging for next season that a bad run didn't turn into a collapse, especially after safety was achieved. Still a bit of work to be done to confirm that, though.
 
Teams playing in Europe though especially those in the champions league I would assume have bigger squads of equal quality to be able to absorb the extra games.
 
Newcastle in December were moaning because of fixtures around their Leverkuson game. I think the argument was the Premier League fixture schedules don’t help English teams in Europe. They had us & Burnley either side. Literally the two lowest ranked teams they could have played when the fixtures were announced.

It all works itself out, but I do agree we had a good set of fixtures to get points on the board.

Ideally we want to avoid promoted teams away before October kicks in
 
Performance drop off after European games has been studied and the points per game drop off is almost negligible.

It's nowhere near as impactful as people think.
 
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