Which Premier League Matches Are Hardest to Get Tickets For in 2026/27?

Buying a Premier League membership does not necessarily mean you can buy a Premier League ticket.

For some of the biggest matches in 2026/27, a new member is locked out of the main sale before demand is even considered. Elsewhere, membership gets you into the ballot, but your chances of actually landing a seat can be painfully small.

If we are talking specifically about home general admission tickets, Liverpool vs Manchester United is perhaps the standout candidate for the hardest Premier League ticket to access from scratch. Liverpool membership alone is not enough as the principal sale for this fixture requires previous home attendance.

Brentford vs Liverpool, at one of the smallest grounds in the league, gives us a much less obvious example. A standard My Bees member needs at least 100 Ticket Access Points just to reach the ordinary sales process, with the same threshold applying on the Ticket Exchange.

Then there are clubs such as Arsenal, where a new member can apply without years of accumulated loyalty but has to take their chances in a heavily oversubscribed ballot.

Welcome to the mystifying and highly complicated world of buying tickets for the most popular Premier League matches.

Here are five fixtures that demonstrate just how different the word hard can be.

Premier League Tickets

^{No Membership Needed}

Fixture	Date	Can a New Ordinary Member Enter the Main Route?	Main Barrier
Liverpool vs Manchester United	22 November 2026, 16:30	No	At least 4 previous home credits required
Brentford vs Liverpool	17 October 2026	No, through the standard My Bees route	100+ Ticket Access Points needed
Leeds United vs Manchester United	18 October 2026, 14:00	Yes	Only 53.1% of the normal match-by-match GA allocation goes to the General Members Ballot
Newcastle United vs Sunderland	5 December 2026, provisional	Yes, with membership	Huge demand and limited member inventory
Arsenal vs Tottenham Hotspur	1 May 2027, provisional	Yes	Low-probability Red Member ballot

Later-season Premier League dates and kick-off times are subject to change as television and cup schedules are confirmed.

Liverpool vs Manchester United Tickets: When Membership Is Not Enough

A headache: that is a fair way to describe the process of buying Liverpool tickets when Manchester United come to Anfield.

Liverpool vs Manchester United takes place at 16:30 on Sunday 22 November, but the important date for many supporters came several months earlier.

When buying Liverpool tickets, Liverpool's All Red system rewards previous Premier League home attendance. For 2026/27, members with 13 or more qualifying home credits from 2025/26 have a guaranteed opportunity to buy for every league game. Those with between four and 12 can enter the ballot for the biggest fixtures.

Members with fewer than four credits are excluded from the principal sale for Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool's final home league match.

That makes Liverpool vs Manchester United particularly difficult for somebody starting from scratch.

You can buy an All Red membership in 2026/27, but if you did not accumulate four Liverpool home credits during 2025/26, you cannot simply enter the main Manchester United ballot.

Even supporters who have crossed that threshold are not guaranteed a ticket unless they have reached 13+ credits.

Liverpool's own figures illustrate the wider pressure on tickets. Across the two main All Red members' sales in 2025/26, 52% of members applied for Premier League home tickets and only 34% of those applicants obtained at least one ticket through those sales during the season.

That is not a Manchester United-specific success rate, but it gives an idea of the competition before we even narrow the field to one of the biggest tickets at Anfield.

What can a new Liverpool member do?

There is a later escape route. Returned tickets can become available through Additional Members Sales closer to the fixture, with eligibility set on a match-by-match basis.

That gives members outside the main ballot a possible route rather than making attendance literally impossible. The problem is that you are waiting for a small supply of returned seats for one of the most sought-after fixtures of Liverpool's season.

In other words, the toughest part of buying Liverpool vs Manchester United tickets is not simply winning a ballot. For a new member, it is becoming eligible for the main ballot in the first place.

Brentford vs Liverpool Tickets: The 100-TAP Barrier

Brentford vs Liverpool on 17 October may be the most surprising fixture on this list.

When it comes to Gtech Community Stadium tickets, we’re talking about one of the smaller grounds in the Premier League, and Brentford divides its home matches into ticket categories according to factors such as demand, capacity, security and rivalry.

Four opponents sit in the highest Category A* band for 2026/27: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United.

For a standard My Bees member, paying for membership is only the first hurdle.

To buy a Category A* ticket, you need at least 100 Ticket Access Points, or TAPs. Members with 300+ TAPs get the first opportunity to buy from 50% of the members' allocation, before any unsold seats become available to the 100+ group.

The restriction follows supporters onto the Ticket Exchange. A My Bees member with fewer than 100 TAPs cannot simply wait until a season ticket holder returns a seat for Liverpool and snap it up there.

That creates an unusual situation.

At Arsenal, a new Red Member can enter a major-match ballot and hope to get lucky. With Brentford tickets, a standard new member with zero TAPs does not reach the ordinary sales process for Liverpool at all.

TAPs operate on a five-year rolling basis, so this is a system built to reward recent, sustained attendance rather than somebody who has simply bought membership for the current season.

The Bees Overseas exception

Brentford does provide a separate route for overseas supporters.

Bees Overseas members can enter an international ballot, with 100 tickets reserved for each home Premier League fixture. This means the 100-TAP barrier should be understood as applying to the normal My Bees sales route rather than every possible official route into the stadium.

For a standard domestic member starting from zero, though, Brentford vs Liverpool is an unexpectedly difficult Premier League ticket to buy.

Leeds United vs Manchester United Tickets: Membership Has Its Own Hierarchy

Leeds United vs Manchester United at Elland Road on Sunday 18 October gives us another variation.

A new My Leeds member is not locked out of these Leeds tickets altogether. They can enter the General Members Ballot.

The difficulty is what happens to the ticket allocation before that ballot takes place. Approximately 7,500 general admission seats are available for match-by-match sale at a typical home league fixture, excluding seats subsequently returned through the Ticket Exchange.

Its 2026/27 allocation model divides those tickets roughly as follows:

Ticket Route	Share of Approx. 7,500 GA Tickets
My Leeds Priority	11.3%
Home Tracker	35.6%
General Members Ballot	53.1%

So almost half of that initial match-by-match allocation is earmarked for other membership routes before the ordinary ballot is considered.

The Home Tracker is particularly interesting. It is available to 2026/27 members who bought tickets for at least 11 Leeds home league or cup matches in 2025/26, and Leeds gives that group a 50% chance of success within its reserved allocation.

How the sale works

With Leeds hosting Man United, the process starts with My Leeds Priority members on 28 September.

The Tracker ballot opens on 29 September for qualifying high-attendance members. The General Members Ballot then opens on 1 October for My Leeds members who have not already obtained a ticket.

That means somebody buying their first Leeds membership can have a genuine chance of attending the match.

They are simply entering the process behind two other pools, one based on enhanced membership and another specifically designed to reward supporters who attended heavily during the previous campaign.

It is a useful reminder that being a member and being at the front of the membership queue are not necessarily the same thing.

Newcastle United vs Sunderland Tickets: The Derby Squeeze

Newcastle United vs Sunderland is currently listed for Saturday 5 December, although the date and kick-off time remain provisional until the relevant broadcast selections are made.

This may be the strongest less-obvious derby candidate among the hardest Premier League tickets to buy.

Through the club, Newcastle home match tickets are reserved for Mags, Mags+ and Junior Mags members through the club's ballot, Member Sale and Ticket Exchange.

The problem is the size of the pool left for those members.

Newcastle has more than 35,000 season ticket holders, accounting for roughly 70% of the home support at a typical Premier League match. The vast majority of the remaining home inventory goes towards the membership system.

Demand is enormous. Newcastle received more than 1.27 million applications across its home ballots during 2025/26.

That does need some context. The club also reported that 99% of members entering at least ten ballots during the season secured a ticket at some point, while 96% of those entering five or more were successful at least once.

So it would be wrong to say that Newcastle tickets in general are almost impossible to obtain. The Tyne-Wear derby is a different proposition.

Take an already heavily subscribed ground, remove more than 35,000 seats through season tickets, then put Sunderland into the remaining member allocation. The exact 2026/27 ballot demand and success rate will only become clear when Newcastle opens the sale, but this is precisely the kind of individual fixture where the normal season-wide numbers need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Why the reverse fixture is harder again

The previous Sunderland home derby shows just how different the away ticket problem can be.

Newcastle received 2,528 tickets for its trip to the Stadium of Light in 2025/26. Every Newcastle season ticket holder could apply, but the tickets were allocated principally in loyalty-point order, with only a small number balloted among applicants beneath the cutoff.

The tickets were also non-transferable, with identification checks used to protect the loyalty system.

The exact allocation and threshold for the 2026/27 derby should not be assumed until they are announced.

So a Newcastle member has a chance in the home ballot; somebody trying to follow Newcastle away at Sunderland begins with a season ticket and then faces another layer of historic loyalty.

Arsenal vs Tottenham Tickets: A Pure Ballot Problem

Arsenal tickets give us almost the opposite problem to Liverpool. There is no four-match historic attendance wall preventing an ordinary Red Member from entering the relevant home ballot. Buy Arsenal membership, enter during the application window and take your chances alongside everybody else in that membership pool.

The problem is the probability. Arsenal has published ballot figures for its first two Premier League home matches of 2026/27. Red Members had a 12% success rate against Coventry City and 11% against Chelsea.

That does not mean Arsenal vs Tottenham on 1 May will have an 11% success rate. The north London derby ballot has not taken place, and the fixture itself is many months away.

It does show how difficult Arsenal's system can be even when there is no historic loyalty qualification.

An unsuccessful applicant initially gains access to Arsenal's Ticket Exchange, where returned seats can appear as the match approaches. For supporters who lose the ballot, that becomes the next official route.

For a completely new Arsenal supporter, the process is therefore refreshingly straightforward compared with Liverpool or Brentford: Buy Red Membership, enter the ballot and hope your application is drawn. Simple does not mean easy though.

Why Premier League Away Tickets Are Even Harder

Home and away general admission tickets are difficult in fundamentally different ways, which makes ranking them together misleading.

A home member may be battling ballot odds or a points threshold. For high-demand away matches, the starting requirement can be possession of a season ticket, followed by years of accumulated away attendance.

Liverpool's trip to Bournemouth on 20 September 2026 is an extreme recent example.

Liverpool received only 1,361 away tickets. The guaranteed sale began at 19 Premier League away credits, with 18+ and then 17+ windows opening subject to availability.

For 2026/27, those balances were based on away matches attended during 2025/26. Ticket forwarding was not available.

In practical terms, a supporter needed a record close to attending every league away match in the previous season just to occupy the meaningful sales windows for that tiny allocation.

Sunderland's 2026/27 system makes the point just as clear. Around 90% of the club's general admission away allocation is distributed through Black Cat Point phases. The other 10% goes into the Season Ticket Plus ballot, which is itself only open to season ticket holders.

An ordinary Black Cats Adult member cannot simply join an away ballot for Newcastle.

That is why the hardest Premier League away tickets can be harder in an absolute sense than any home ticket in this article. They are simply not an apples-to-apples comparison with a standard membership ballot.

How Regular Fans Can Get to High-Demand Premier League Matches

The first lesson from all of these examples is to check the qualification rules before buying membership.

Membership may put you straight into a ballot, as at Arsenal. It may put you at the back of a multi-layer process, as at Leeds. Or, for an individual fixture, it may be of very limited use unless you already have a substantial attendance history.

Official Ticket Exchanges can provide another opportunity when season ticket holders or members return seats, although clubs may carry the original eligibility rules across to the exchange.

Official hospitality is another route for supporters who do not qualify for general admission, albeit at a substantially higher price.

Where official general admission is exhausted or inaccessible, the secondary market provides another option. Ticket-Compare.com is a comparison platform rather than the ticket seller itself, bringing together listings from multiple pre-vetted resale sites and official hospitality partners so supporters can compare the options available before clicking through to the relevant site.

Across the Premier League fixture list, Ticket-Compare.com has thousands of tickets listed at any one time, with options from $54. Availability and prices vary substantially according to the fixture, seat and platform.

Which Premier League Tickets Are Hardest to Get?

There is no single answer until we define what hardest means. For a supporter starting from scratch, Liverpool vs Manchester United is one of the strongest candidates for the hardest home general admission ticket to access. Buying membership does not overcome the four-credit qualification requirement for the principal sale.

Brentford vs Liverpool is the surprise. Through the standard My Bees route, a supporter needs 100 TAPs before membership becomes useful for either the ordinary sale or the Ticket Exchange.

Arsenal vs Tottenham represents a different problem. A new Red Member can enter, but recent Arsenal ballot figures demonstrate how low the probability can be once everybody eligible applies.

And if we include Premier League away tickets without qualification, the difficulty moves to another level entirely. Tiny allocations combined with season ticket requirements and accumulated away loyalty can leave a new supporter years away from meaningful access.

That is what makes the hardest Premier League tickets difficult: sometimes you need luck, sometimes you need loyalty and, for a handful of fixtures, you need both.

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