Sunderland will start their 2023-24 Championship campaign at home to promoted Ipswich Town on Sunday, August - but how does the difficulty of their opening five games compare to their rivals?
Their first away game will be at Preston North End before a home match with Rotherham United followed by a trip to Coventry City. They then host relegated Southampton at the start of September.
The full EFL fixture list was revealed on Thursday morning and statistically, Sunderland have one of the harder starts in the Championship, with the Opta Power Rankings used as a basis for calculating the difficulty of each club’s start. The rankings calculate the strength of 19,008 clubs from 391 domestic leagues across the globe and those rankings are then used to decide how hard a team’s run of fixtures are.
The rankings for the second tier start with Leicester City, ranked 126th in the world and ‘hardest’ to play against, all the way down to QPR, ranked 2,189th.
And below is the start of every team ranked, with the team at number one indicating the ‘easiest’ opening run of games and number 24 the most difficult, according to the statistical experts. See where the Black Cats rank...
1. Southampton
Opening five games: Sheffield Wednesday (A), Norwich City (H), Plymouth Argyle (A), QPR (H), Sunderland (A).
2. Leeds United
Opening five games: Cardiff City (H), Birmingham City (A),West Brom (H), Ipswich Town (A), Sheffield Wednesday (H)
3. Blackburn Rovers
Opening five games: West Brom (H), Rotherham United (A), Hull City (H), Watford (A), Plymouth Argyle (A)
4. Watford
Opening five games: QPR (A), Plymouth Argyle (H), Stoke City (A), Blackburn Rovers (H), Coventry City (A)