Next season

Next season's Premier League fixture are released this morning. This is a very exciting day for football fans, especially fans of the newly promoted clubs. Wolves and Birmingham have been there before but Burnley have made it the Premier League for the first time.

I was glad to see Burnley win the play off final against Sheffield United, mainly because I like seeing new teams come up and we've all seen Sheffield United yo-yoing up and down over the last 20 years.

The fixtures are created by a computer and are supposedly random but I've begun to doubt just how random they are over the last few years.

Funny how Manchester United seem to play one of the other so-called 'Big Four' in one of the last few games. This would happen occasionally if the fixtures really were random but when Chelsea were the main title challengers, it was Manchester United against Chelsea in an end of season 'title decider'.

The satisfying thing as a United fan is that even though the TV companies may put pressure on the Premier League to have a big game at the end of the season to decide who wins the championship, it never quite turned out that way and the title was usually sewn up before that game making it a meaning tie with lots of reserve and youth team players given a run out instead.

So my predictions for United's fixtures next season are one of the newly promoted teams in the first couple of games, probably the first game, and one of Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and/or Manchester City in the last 4 games of the season finishing up away to a team likely to be relegated guaranteeing them a big crowd and some lovely TV money.