The fixture list for Arsenal includes Premier League matches and Cup competitions. The following provides a lay of the land for Arsenal competition during this season.

This year, Arsenal will compete in the FA Community Shield, Barclays Premier League, UEFA Champions League, FA Cup, and Carabao Cup. It also competes in a thing called the Emirates Cup, sort of a meaningless pre-season competition at the Emirates….that Arsenal has often won but has small value. The point is likely to get game ready for the Premier League.

Community Shield is the game that precedes the start of the Premier League season. The previous year’s winner of the Barclays Premier League plays the previous year’s winner of the FA Cup. This year, it features Manchester City and Arsenal. Arsenal won the Premier League last year, and Man City won the FA Cup. Community Shield may be light of some of the best players as they come back from vacation following the World Cup. As a result, it’s also somewhat meaningless (unless your team wins, naturally). The excitement of the Community Shield is mostly that it’s the first competition in the Premier League after we’ve had to adjust to no more World Cup matches and a summer with no Premier League.

Barclays Premier League is the top division of English football, representing the best 20 clubs as determined in most recent season play. Each team plays all 19 other teams twice, home and away. The winner of the Premier League is the one that amasses the most points across the season, with 3 points awarded for a win and 1 point for a tie. Losers get nothing (as in life). The first tiebreaker for teams with equal points is goal differential (goals for minus goals against). The next tiebreaker is goals scored.

The three teams that have the worst records after the season have to drop to the English Football division just lower than the Premier League, the Championship. And each season three teams come up from the Championship to the Premier League. The top team comes directly and the remaining two teams are promoted via a playoff of the teams ranked 3-6. Underperforming in the Premier League becomes infinitely costly for the teams, as they lose TV rights dollars, ability to attract/retain players, audience. And outperforming in the Championship produces the reverse.

Not only is the league exciting in terms of who wins, it is also exciting in terms of who performs badly enough to go down to the next division. The bottom of the Premier League tends to be tighter than the top and there often is drama until the end about who will ultimately be relegated to the Championship. There is also often some drama about which teams will earn Premier League places 2-5. They will qualify for the UEFA Champions League. There is also a tier of teams below 5th place that qualify for other European competitions.

Barclays Premier League runs from August to May. The best years are the ones in which the last game of the season settles most of the positions for best, top 4/5, and bottom three. Rare and beautiful. Many screens are required to follow the drama because that day, every single game starts at the same time.

Arsenal won the Premier League last season for the first time in 22 years. It is very hard to repeat. Man City has successfully done it in recent years but the usual experience of a winner is to struggle in the next year. There is reason to believe we could repeat, but fate often has a way of intervening. We shall see.

UEFA Champions League is a quasi-league (that’s more like a cup competition) involving the 36 best clubs in Europe based on their placement in the various European leagues. The top five teams from the previous season’s Barclays Premier League automatically qualify. Last season, Arsenal finished first in the Premier League, so it automatically qualified for the Champions League this year. Play for this competition is interspersed during the normal Premier league season, from September to May. The competition begins with league play where a qualifying team will play 4 matches home and 4 matches away against different teams they are drawn with. The same point system as Premier League is applied (3 for win, 1 for tie, 0 for loss, goal differential is first tiebreaker), and the top 8 teams progress automatically to the round of 16. Teams in 9th – 24th play in a home/away playoff against another team to progress into the Round of 16. The benefit of qualifying higher than another team you might face in a knockout round is twofold. First, if you finish in the top 8 you’ll be pared with a presumably less skilled team that made it into the round of 16 through a playoff. Second, you’ll play your home match after the away match. The round of 16 is a knockout round where two teams will play home and away. The winner on aggregate score goes on in the competition quarter finals, and semi finals. The Champions League final is a single game that occurs in Madrid on June 5, 2027. The very last gasp of the season.

In the more distant past, Arsenal usually managed to stay afloat until the round of 16 at which time they lost badly at home and then put on an amazing away match to come up just short. In the recent past, however, Arsenal have been moving closer and closer to victory in this competition. They made it to the semifinals in 2024 and to the finals in 2025, managing to end the match in a 1-1 draw with Paris Saint-Germaine and losing in the ensuing penalty shootout.

This season is our season. Naturally.

FA (Football Association) Cup is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) football competitions in the world. There are few restrictions in terms of the English clubs that are eligible to compete, so competition includes teams of all levels. It is a single-elimination competition. You lose; you’re out. There are many multiple rounds of competition and the draw for each round is unseeded; there is no attempt to pair weak with strong to produce the best competition in later rounds. The luck of the draw determines whom your team plays and where, home or away. However, teams from the highest divisions don’t join the competition until later rounds. Premier League teams join the competition in Round 3. At that point, the weakest teams have mostly have been eliminated, but there is still a tremendous amount of diversity in team quality throughout the competition. The unseeded nature of the competition produces the effect many refer to as the “magic of the cup.” David meets Goliath and sometimes prevails. To up the magic quotient, the semifinals and final match are held at the legendary Wembley stadium, the final now being the week before the last game of the Premier League season. Next final will be May 22, 2027. In 2025, Arsenal made it to the quarter finals before losing to Southampton (a team in the Championship). A bit embarrassing, but in the scheme of things we may have won the Premier League by having a little less competition that we would have as the season end closed in. Man City won in the final last year but had a reasonably grueling schedule that may have contributed to their falling short in the Premier League. They will console themselves with two major trophies for the season.

Carabao Cup is the English League cup, featuring the top 92 teams based on placement in the top divisions of the football league, including the Premier League. It is also single elimination except in the semi final round, where two legs are played, home and away. Top divisions and teams playing in the Champions League enter the competition in later rounds. As cups go, it’s the one that the bigger teams seem most willing to take chances on player selection, fielding a team of young players or players who otherwise don’t see much of the light of day. If they manage to beat the competition, good enough. If not, it’s often seen as one less competition capable of producing injuries and fatigue. (This is also somewhat true for the FA Cup. Teams try to calibrate exactly how much they need to do to pass the competition, and sometimes fall short.) Nobody seems to beat themselves up too much over exiting the Carabao Cup. The big regret from last year is that we made it all the way to the final and were beaten comprehensively by Manchester City. So much effort and distraction only to fall short. We also looked bad and the outing made me really doubt whether we could keep on track for the Premier League.

Mikel Arteta wants to successfully compete in all four competitions, but it would be hard not to notice that he values the Premier League and Champions League most highly. If he had to pick just one this year, I think it would be the Champions League.