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Premier League 2025/26: The Hardest Tickets to Buy, Explained
The 2025/26 Premier League fixture list has just been announced. Now, we wouldn’t be human if our eyes didn’t scan the list and land on some of those blockbuster matches. They come early this year, with Manchester United hosting Arsenal on the first weekend.
We’ve picked four high-profile matches, each with a different home team, to demonstrate just how hard—how impossible—it is to buy Premier League tickets for big matches in 2025/26 if you’re an ordinary member.
For a casual fan who goes to a handful of games a season, these fixtures are totally out of the question, at least when it comes to general admission tickets.
Welcome to the mystifying and highly complicated world of buying tickets for the most popular Premier League matches.
Below, we break down the most unattainable Premier League tickets this season, and exactly why getting them through official channels is almost impossible.
Note that dates and times are provisional and are likely to be altered for TV schedules.
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Liverpool vs Arsenal Tickets: How Hard Is It to Attend in 2025/26?
A headache: That’s the way to describe the process of buying Liverpool tickets when Arsenal comes to Anfield (Weekend of 30 August).
First things first, it would really help your chances to get to this match if you entered the Bulk Members Sale in July, when 10,000 tickets are sold for the game.
Starting with a ballot, this is one of two main sales periods for Liverpool’s Premier League tickets, the other taking place in November.
But fans with a Liverpool Membership (All Red Full) can’t just sign in and try to buy tickets for any game. Looking back, in 2024/25 you needed to have attended at least 4 Liverpool home matches in 2023/24 to enter the ballot for LFC vs Arsenal tickets.
Expect similar restrictions for Liverpool vs Arsenal tickets in 2025/26, which are right up there with the hardest Premier League tickets to buy.
Then, if you’re in the ballot, you’re in a lottery, which had a season-wide success rate of just 29% in 2024/25.
Away from the ballot, your chances would also really improve if you went to a lot more than 4 Liverpool home matches last season. Regulars who attended 13+ home PL matches (68% of all available) in 2023/24 were pretty much guaranteed tickets for this fixture in 2024/25.
Everyone else had to take their chances, either in the ballot or face a mad scramble in the extremely limited Additional Members’ Sale around 2 weeks before the match.
After that, as a tantalising last hope, there’s the Liverpool Ticket Exchange, with tickets appearing (and disappearing) up to 2 hours before kick-off.
Getting Away Tickets for Liverpool vs Arsenal
Now, if you think it’s hard to buy home Liverpool tickets for this match, Premier League away tickets for fixtures like this are on a different level of prohibitive.
For Arsenal fans the 3,000 away tickets for Liverpool at Anfield will be sold only to those who have accumulated enough Loyalty Points.
For a match like Liverpool away it will be about 20 to 25 points. You earn 1 away point per game, and to keep the system fresh your total is wiped after 3 seasons.
Now, keep in mind that the only fans who can earn Loyalty Points are Arsenal season ticket holders, Platinum Members (Club Level season tickets) and members of the Arsenal Travel Club, which is currently closed to new members.
Liverpool vs Arsenal Ticket Access Rating: Locked Down
Don’t hold your breath as tickets for this match are behind a loyalty wall!
Arsenal vs Manchester City Tickets: What Red Members Are Up Against in 2025/26
Dealing with the lottery system of the Arsenal ticket ballot, introduced for the 2023/24 season has a few fans pulling their hair out. And it’s no different when Manchester City come to N5 on the weekend of 20 September.
The club is kind enough to post the exact statistics for the ballot for every fixture at Emirates Stadium.
For Arsenal vs Manchester City tickets in 2024/25, this match had the joint-lowest success rate of any Premier League match on the fixture list; just 7% for normal Red Members, which is the same as when the club hosted Real Madrid in the Champions League.
In other words, you’d need serious luck—just 1 in 14 applicants landed a seat.
The fallback option is the Arsenal Ticket Exchange, with 4,045 fans with Arsenal membership able to get tickets on that platform for this fixture back in 2024/25.
Getting Away Tickets for Arsenal vs Manchester City
Most clubs sell tickets in a way that is simply unfair for newer fans. And that is the story when it comes to Manchester City.
The sales process for Man CIty away tickets is nearly the definition of a closed shop. These tickets are put on sale according to how many Ticket Points you have. And how do you get Ticket Points?
Well, by attending matches.
Talk about a Catch-22. For an opponent like Arsenal, the threshold will be high enough to keep out all but those few City fans who have built up massive totals by renewing their Manchester City season ticket for upwards of 12 years.
There are reports of fans with a season ticket for a decade not having enough points to attend even low-demand Premier League away matches.
Arsenal vs Man City Ticket Access Rating: A Lottery
All we can do is wish Red Members the best of luck in the Arsenal ballot.
Chelsea vs Liverpool Tickets: How Hard Are They to Get in 2025/26
When it comes to a restrictive sales system, there are Loyalty Points, and then there are Chelsea Loyalty Points
It is extremely difficult to buy Chelsea tickets for home matches, especially if an important team like Liverpool is coming to SW6 (weekend of 4 October). That is because these Chelsea games are sold on a Loyalty Points basis.
The main part of the problem is that there are a lot of Chelsea season ticket holders, around 28,000 in a stadium that holds 40,341.
Remove away fans and hospitality tickets, and you don’t have a lot of room for fans with a simple Chelsea membership trying to buy tickets.
To illustrate, you needed at least 61 Loyalty Points to qualify for Chelsea vs Liverpool tickets in May of 2024/25.
Those points were accumulated across the entire 2024/25 season. Bearing in mind you get 1 point for attending big games, home & away, 3 points for all other EPL matches, and 5 points for cup games (up to the final stages), you can see just how hard it is to amass 61 points
Our advice to fans who want these tickets is to get to as many matches as possible in the first few weeks of the season.
The drawback? Loyalty Points from 2024/25 will still determine eligibility for big matches for the first month of 2025/25.
Getting Away Tickets for Chelsea vs Liverpool
One of the matches Liverpool’s large contingent of away fans will be looking forward to is Chelsea away. It’s a long trip, but also a match against a bitter rival, with more than bragging rights on the line every season.
The bad news is that if you have to ask what it takes to be able to buy Liverpool away tickets, there’s a high likelihood that you don’t qualify, especially for an oversubscribed match like this one.
Liverpool introduced a credit system for away tickets (1 credit for 1 match attended) in the 2000s, and that was the ideal time to get on board. Because almost 20 years later many of the same long-term Reds fans are still first in line for away tickets.
On the upside, only away credits accumulated the previous season count when you’re trying to buy Liverpool away tickets.
On the downside, and this is really dispiriting, you will probably need at least 9 away credits and as many as 15 to qualify for a match like Manchester United.
Chelsea vs Liverpool Ticket Access Rating: A Slog
Expect long-haul commitment and deep loyalty point reserves—this one’s for the ‘proper Chels’ die-hards only.
Manchester United vs Liverpool Tickets: What Makes This Rivalry So Hard to Access?
Scheduled for the weekend of 2 May, 2026, this potentially climatic derby would normally be top of the list for the hardest Premier League tickets to buy in any given season.
But in 2025/26 there are maybe too many questions surrounding the ticketing situation for the 21,000 members’ tickets at Old Trafford.
Following a partial takeover in 2024/25 Man Utd have raised ticket prices, to the point that almost all of the cheapest tickets are now at least 50% more expensive than they were at the start of 2025/26. This may deter some Red Devils fans.
There has also been an overhaul in the match category system and the way general admission tickets are sold—a low-odds ballot followed by sporadic ticket releases, or drops.
So, confronted with all of these questions, and keeping in mind that some matches at Old Trafford went on general sale in 2025/26, we’ll wait and see how tough it will be to buy tickets for this potentially season-defining match.
One thing for sure is that tickets for Liverpool away fans will be impossible to come by. The credit threshold for these Manchester United vs Liverpool tickets in 2024/25 was 10 away credits, with the sales window starting at 15.
Manchester United vs Liverpool Ticket Access Rating: Prospects Look Grim
For this one, we’ll see how the season pans out, but if Man Utd have a good campaign, these tickets will be a nightmare to get.
How Regular Fans Can Still Get to Big EPL Matches
We’ve looked at the hardest Premier League tickets to buy in 2025/26, and our conclusion is that an ordinary Premier League membership is rarely, if ever, going to be enough.
One option is to use the secondary market. Ticket Compare works with reliable resale sites as well as the clubs’ authorised ticketing partners, compiling a lineup of tickets for every match on the Premier League fixture list.
This includes those hard to buy Premier League fixtures that we have covered in this article, and away tickets, which are always in such short supply on the primary market.
As you read this, we have thousands of Premier League tickets on sale, from as little as $56 for the cheapest tickets. Tickets went on sale as soon as the Premier League 2025/26 Fixture List went public, so you browse and buy today.
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