Eight years later, Premier League fans will see Sunderland again. The team, nicknamed "Black Cats", was successfully promoted to the Premier League along with Burnley and Leeds United. Liverpool will also closely monitor its schedule to determine a good spot in the key matches to win the Premier League title. Arsenal and Manchester City will surely do their best to stop the Reds led by Slott.
Although the schedule seems to be released a little early, the Premier League official revealed that the whole process actually takes about six months because it takes a lot of data to be processed. The work is run by Atos, a French company located near Paris. They enter information such as international match days and European match dates into the system to generate a schedule. Next season, nine Premier League teams will participate in European competitions. Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea and Newcastle will compete in the Champions League, while Aston Villa and Crystal Palace will compete in the UEFA Cup, and Nottingham Forest will participate in the UEFA qualifiers. This makes the schedule even more complicated.
In addition, factors such as the geographical location between clubs and police resources need to be considered to ensure that the resources are not too dispersed. In this case, metropolitan areas with multiple clubs like Manchester, Liverpool and London have become a problem. Manchester and Liverpool’s two teams (Manchester City and Manchester United, Liverpool and Everton) cannot play home games on the same day. This problem is relatively small due to the rich resources and the large number of teams in London.
When setting the schedule, there are three iron laws that cannot be violated: first, in five games, each team must play three home games and two away games, or vice versa, no team can have a 4 plus one; second, no team can play two home games or two away games in a row at the beginning or end of the season; finally, the team cannot play two home games or two away games in a row during Christmas (Boarding Day and New Year's Day).
Based on these factors, Atos and Premier League and EFL officials will manually review the schedule. If any errors are found, the entire process will restart until finally approved and officially announced. On Wednesday, June 18, the schedule of the new season will be officially announced.