Every pre-season FPL plan starts with the same question: whose players do the fixtures actually favour? The Premier League publishes its own Fixture Difficulty Ratings for exactly this reason, and the 2026/27 numbers are unusually lopsided — one club has a genuinely elite opening run, two have a genuinely brutal one, and the three newly promoted sides don't all face the same level of difficulty, despite starting from the same place in the table. Here's the full breakdown.
The Best Early Fixtures: Liverpool, Then a Three-Way Tie
The Premier League's own ranking puts Liverpool clear at the top with an average FDR of 2.6 across their first five matches — away at Newcastle United, home to Nottingham Forest, away at Ipswich Town, home to Fulham, then away at Bournemouth. No other club avoids last season's strongest sides as completely, which is exactly the case our Rising Stars piece and Best Teams to Invest In piece both build on for Isak and Ngumoha. Just behind on 2.8 is a three-way tie between Manchester City, Manchester United, and Brentford — different clubs for different reasons, but all three genuinely favourable. City and United both benefit from missing each other until later in the run and from newly promoted opposition early doors, which is why Haaland and Bruno Fernandes are the two most obvious captaincy shouts on the fixture list alone. City's run includes home matches against two of the three promoted sides — Bournemouth in Gameweek 1 and Coventry City in Gameweek 3 — either side of a trip to Crystal Palace, while United open away at Hull City before hosting Ipswich Town in Gameweek 2. Brentford's case is the cheapest one of the three, built around Ouattara rather than a premium name, and running home to Tottenham Hotspur, Sunderland, and Chelsea alongside trips to Leeds United and Bournemouth across the same five matches.
The Worst Early Fixtures: Bournemouth and Coventry, Then Fulham and Hull
At the other end, the Premier League's fantasy-focused analysis rates Bournemouth and Coventry City joint-worst at 3.6, with every one of Bournemouth's first six matches scoring 3 or higher — a run that includes away trips to Manchester City and Newcastle United, plus a home match against Liverpool. Coventry's is barely easier: away at Arsenal and Manchester City either side of a tough middle stretch. Fulham and Hull City sit just behind at 3.4. Fulham's is the more unusual case — after an opening match against a Chelsea side with no European football to juggle, they face four straight matches against clubs competing in Europe this season: Sunderland, Crystal Palace, Liverpool, and Manchester United. Hull's run reads as tough in the way you'd expect for a newly promoted side, but with one useful exception covered below.
The Three Promoted Sides Don't All Have It Equally Hard
Hull City, Coventry City, and Ipswich Town all came up from the Championship, but their opening schedules aren't remotely equal. Hull (3.4) and Coventry (3.6) are both among the four hardest runs in the entire league. Ipswich, by contrast, lands in the division's genuinely mid-table difficulty band at 3.2 — no easier than most established Premier League clubs, but nowhere near as brutal as the other two promoted sides. That's a meaningful difference if you're deciding whether to give any promoted-side asset an early look: Ipswich's players are working from a fairer platform than Hull's or Coventry's, for what that's worth against three sides that are still, on paper, the weakest in the division regardless of schedule.
The fixtures themselves make the gap obvious. Hull's first five run: home to Manchester United, away at Coventry City, home to Aston Villa, away at Chelsea, away at Newcastle United — one genuinely winnable match, against Coventry, surrounded by four difficult ones. Coventry's own run is arguably worse: away at Arsenal, home to Hull City, away at Manchester City, home to Brighton, away at Nottingham Forest — again just the one clear opportunity, against Hull. Ipswich, by contrast, get home to Sunderland, away at Manchester United, home to Liverpool, away at Crystal Palace, and away at Everton — still no pushovers, but a schedule that at least resembles what a genuine mid-table club would expect, rather than the gauntlet Hull and Coventry are facing.
Everyone Else Sits in the Middle
Seven clubs — Arsenal, Aston Villa, Brighton, Chelsea, Ipswich Town, Leeds United, and Sunderland — all carry an identical 3.2 average, the Premier League's own definition of a genuinely neutral early schedule: no standout reason to buy in on fixtures alone, but nothing to actively avoid either. For a club like Chelsea, covered in our Best Teams piece for having no European football at all this season, a neutral fixture list is arguably fine — the fixture congestion advantage plays out over months, not just the opening gameweeks.
A fixture run only tells you who to look at first — it never tells you who to actually buy. Liverpool's 2.6 average is only useful because Isak and Ngumoha are already justified on their own underlying numbers; the fixtures are the reason to look now rather than the entire case.
The Oracle Takeaway
Liverpool have the best average opening fixture run in the league, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Brentford share the next-best tier, and Bournemouth and Coventry City have it hardest of anyone.
Three things worth doing with this: don't treat the numbers above as fixed — Oracle's own fixture difficulty tool lets you screen any club or compare two head-to-head using a transparent, checkable formula, and broadly agrees with the Premier League's own numbers on ranking even where the exact averages differ slightly, since the two use different underlying algorithms. Check the specific run for any player you're considering rather than trusting a club-wide average alone. And read the run past Gameweek 5 before committing a squad slot for the long term — an easy start is a reason to buy early, not a reason to hold all season.
FPL Oracle screens every club's fixture run automatically and reweights it as the season progresses, applying it against your specific squad rather than a generic ranking. Browse the live Player Hub once prices are confirmed, or ask FPL Oracle directly whether your squad is actually built around the right fixture swings.
Are you buying into Liverpool's fixture run, avoiding Bournemouth's forwards, or ignoring fixtures altogether for Gameweek 1? 👇