How hard Newcastle’s remaining Premier League fixtures are compared to Man United, Spurs & Liverpool - photos

With Newcastle United competing for European qualification along with the likes of Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Brighton, the percieved ‘difficulty’ of their remaining fixtures could make all the difference. As any top flight manager would say ‘there are no easy games in the Premier League’ yet the reality is all of them would take playing Bournemouth at home over Manchester City away.

Using data from the Opta Power rankings which were last updated just before the return of Premier League football this week, we can work out which side has the easiest and most difficult remaining fixtures - based on the rankings at least.

Opta state: “Opta’s Power Rankings is a global team ranking system that assigns an ability score to nearly 13,500 domestic football teams on a scale between zero and 100, where zero is the worst-ranked team in the world and 100 is the best team in the world.

“The Power Rankings are updated daily and currently rank teams from 183 different countries and 413 unique domestic leagues, providing a truly global rating system in men’s football.”

The rankings provide a slightly different and more analytical perspective of a team’s ability opposed to pure league position. For example, Manchester City are the highest ranked team in the Premier League according to Opta with a score of 100/100 despite sitting second behind Arsenal, who have a score of 95.1/100.

Newcastle United, who sit fifth in the table, are ranked seventh with a rating of 90.3/100 while 19th placed AFC Bournemouth are bottom in the Opta rankings with score of 81.3/100. View full list here.

Premier League sides have between 10 and 13 games remaining in their league season. Here’s every side ranked from easiest to most difficult remaining fixtures based on the average Opta world ranking of their opponents - complicated, we know!