Premier League Football: Fixtures, Kick-Off Times and African Players

The Premier League is the top division of English football, a league of 20 clubs who each play 38 matches a season, with three points for a win and the bottom three clubs relegated. It was founded on 20 February 1992, when the leading clubs broke away from the Football League, and its first season was 1992-93. In Lagos, Nairobi, Accra and Kampala it is the EPL or the English Premier League, and in Johannesburg it is English soccer on a Saturday afternoon, but it is one competition under every name.

The live table, fixtures, results and scorers sit above and update themselves after every match. What follows explains how to read them, when the games kick off in WAT, EAT, SAST and GMT, and where the African players fit into the story, from Nwankwo Kanu and Lucas Radebe to Mohamed Salah.

How Do You Read the Premier League Table, Fixtures and Results?

The table ranks all 20 clubs by points, and the module above refreshes it after every match, alongside the fixtures still to come and the scores already in. Reading across a row, P is games played, W, D and L are wins, draws and defeats, GF and GA are goals scored and conceded, GD is goal difference and Pts is the points total. The full Premier League table (the log, as readers in South Africa know it) carries every club and every column, and it is the first place to look when someone in the viewing centre wants to check how close their club is to the top.

What happens when two clubs finish level on points? Goal difference separates them first, and goals scored comes next if that is level too. The defining match here is the last day of 2011-12, when Sergio Agüero scored in stoppage time against Queens Park Rangers and Manchester City took the title from Manchester United on goal difference alone. So, the GD column is never decoration, and a late goal in a game already won can settle a title or a relegation place in May.

The Premier League fixtures list every match by gameweek (the league itself says matchweek, and both words mean one round of ten games), with kick-off shown in WAT, EAT, SAST and GMT. Matches are often moved for television and for cup ties, so the date beside a fixture is the one to trust, rather than a list saved at the start of the season. The Premier League results hold every final score, and they are the quickest way to check how a club has done against the sides around it in the table.

Who Are the EPL Top Scorers, and Where Are the Africans?

The top scorers and top assists lists above update after every match, and African players are flagged on both so that you can find them at a glance. The player who finishes the season with the most league goals wins the Golden Boot, which is the individual prize that supporters across all five countries argue about longest. The Premier League stats go deeper, with the goals and assists of every club and player set side by side, and they are the place to settle a debate before it gets loud.

Why does the Golden Boot matter so much on this continent? The answer is that Africans have won it and have broken records along the way. Didier Drogba of Ivory Coast took the award with Chelsea in 2006-07 and again in 2009-10. Mohamed Salah of Egypt scored 32 goals for Liverpool in 2017-18, which was then the record for a season of 38 games, and in the same year he became the first African to be named Premier League Player of the Season. Sadio Mané of Senegal, his team mate at Liverpool, belongs in the same conversation, and all of them are followed from Accra to Kampala.

What does the scorers list mean for a Super Eagles player? It could be argued that it is the loudest audition in football, because every goal and every assist is seen by the national team coach and by supporters at home at the same moment. The same is true for the Black Stars, Bafana Bafana, the Harambee Stars and the Uganda Cranes. So, when you see a flag beside a name on those lists, read it as evidence for a country as well as for a club.

What Time Do Premier League Matches Kick Off in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and South Africa?

Kick-off times are set in UK time, so the answer depends on whether the UK is on summer time. During UK summer time, a 15:00 kick-off in England is 15:00 WAT in Nigeria, 14:00 GMT in Ghana, 17:00 EAT in Kenya and Uganda, and 16:00 SAST in South Africa. When the UK clocks go back at the end of October, every one of those moves an hour later. The same match then starts at 16:00 WAT, 15:00 GMT, 18:00 EAT and 17:00 SAST, until the clocks go forward again at the end of March.

The reason is that none of the five countries changes its clocks during the year, while the UK moves its own by an hour twice. Nigeria is an hour ahead of GMT, South Africa is two hours ahead and East Africa three, and Ghana sits on GMT itself, level with the UK in winter. The fixtures module does the sum for you and shows each match in all four zones together, which helps if you are in Lagos and trying to agree a time to call a cousin in Nairobi at full time.

Weekend kick-offs in England usually run from early afternoon to early evening, and the fixtures module converts each slot, and that spread suits how the league is watched here. People gather in bars and viewing centres or at home with family, and plenty follow on a phone. In Uganda, fan clubs and viewing spots around Kampala are a big part of match day. For South African readers the rule of thumb is one hour ahead of England from late March to late October, and two hours ahead for the rest of the season.

How Can You Watch the English Premier League in Africa?

The league sells its broadcast rights region by region, so the channel that carries a match in Nigeria is not always the one that carries it in Kenya or South Africa. Across the five countries, live matches are shown mainly on pay television sports channels, delivered by satellite and through the streaming apps tied to those subscriptions. The where to watch line beside each fixture names the broadcaster listed for your country, and it changes when the listings change. Where a free to air channel or a radio station carries a game, the listing shows that too.

How should you plan around it? If you watch on a phone, a full match on a streaming app uses far more data than a highlights clip, so it is worth checking your bundle before kick-off and not at half time. Evening matches in England also run late in East Africa, where the three hour gap in winter can push the final whistle past midnight. But, the afternoon games fit every one of the five countries comfortably, and those are the ones that fill the viewing centres.

How Does the Premier League Work?

The format is as plain as football gets. Twenty clubs each play the other 19 twice, once at home and once away, which gives every club 38 games and the season 380 matches in all. A win is worth three points, a draw is worth one and a defeat is worth nothing. There is no final, so the club that finishes its 38 games with the most points is the champion.

That is the reason the title carries so much weight. A cup can be won with a good month and a kind draw, but a league of 38 games is closer to a full school year than a single exam, and it rewards the club that keeps turning up in February as well as in August. The practical lesson for reading the table is to look at games played before points. Clubs can have played different numbers of games at any point in the season, and the P column shows how many chances each one has had to collect points.

How Do Champions League Places and Relegation Work?

At the end of the season, the top of the table decides who plays in Europe. The highest finishers qualify for the UEFA Champions League, and the table module marks the qualification places as they stand, because the number of places is set by European competition rules and can change from one season to the next. Supporters in Nigeria and Kenya call the chase the race for the top places. The positions just below lead to the Europa League and the Conference League, and the winners of the domestic cups earn European places too, which can pass down the table when a cup winner has already qualified.

The bottom of the table is just as plain. The three clubs in the lowest places are relegated to the Championship, the division below, and three clubs come up to replace them. That is the relegation battle, and it is sometimes decided by goal difference on the final afternoon. A club in the bottom three is rarely far from safety, and what changes its season is usually ordinary: home wins against the sides around it, and tighter defending to protect that GD column.

Both races are where a forecast is most wanted and least certain. Our Premier League predictions give each call as a probability beside a reference price, never as a promise, and the calls that lose are published alongside the ones that win. Read the table first and the call second, which is the right order, because the table shows what a club has done and a prediction is only an estimate of what comes next.

Who Has Won the Premier League, and Which Records Still Stand?

Manchester United won the first Premier League title in 1992-93, and they hold the most, with 13. Every one of those came under Alex Ferguson between 1993 and 2013, a run that supporters of every club still measure their own side against. Manchester City then did something no club had managed in the history of the English top flight, winning four league titles in a row from 2020-21 to 2023-24. The list of champions in the records module carries every season, with the year beside each name.

Two seasons stand apart for a different reason. Arsenal went through the whole of 2003-04 unbeaten, taking the title with 26 wins and 12 draws, and they have been known as the Invincibles ever since. Nwankwo Kanu of Nigeria was part of that squad, which is one reason the Arsenal corner of Lagos has never let the subject drop. Then, in 2015-16, Leicester City won the first top flight title in their history, which ranks among the biggest upsets English football has seen and remains the best argument that the table owes nobody anything.

The scoring records belong to two strikers from different generations. Alan Shearer is the leading scorer in Premier League history with 260 goals, scored between 1992 and 2006, and that total has outlasted every challenger so far. Erling Haaland holds the mark for a single season of 38 games, with 36 goals for Manchester City in 2022-23, four more than the 32 that Mohamed Salah had set in 2017-18. Records for points, wins and goals by a club sit in the records module, where they update if a new one falls.

Which African Players Have Shaped the EPL, Country by Country?

Nigeria has as deep a history in the league as any country on the continent, and it starts with two names. Nwankwo Kanu won league titles with Arsenal, and Jay-Jay Okocha made Bolton Wanderers a club that Nigerians still speak of warmly. The line has continued through Alex Iwobi, who came through at Arsenal before playing for Everton and Fulham, Wilfred Ndidi, who spent years with Leicester City, and Calvin Bassey, who has played for Fulham. For the Super Eagles the league is a weekly test of readiness, because a player who holds his place in England arrives for international duty already sharp.

The reference point for Ghana is Michael Essien, who joined Chelsea in 2005 and won the Premier League title with them in 2009-10. More recently, Thomas Partey spent several seasons in the Arsenal midfield, and Mohammed Kudus has played for West Ham United and then Tottenham Hotspur. Ghanaian loyalty is spread across the big clubs rather than gathered behind one, so the useful habit in Accra or Kumasi is to follow the player. African players are flagged in the fixtures for that reason, and the Black Stars connection is set out on each club page.

The standard bearer for Kenya is Victor Wanyama, who played for Southampton from 2013 and for Tottenham Hotspur from 2016, and who showed a generation in Nairobi that the road from the Harambee Stars to England was open. McDonald Mariga is the other Kenyan reference point for success in Europe, having won the UEFA Champions League with Inter Milan in 2010, the first Kenyan to do so. In Uganda the connection runs through the stands, where the fan clubs of the big English sides are a fixture of match day.

The South African story goes back to the early years of the league. Lucas Radebe played for Leeds United from 1994 to 2005 and captained the club in the Premier League, and he is remembered there with real affection. Benni McCarthy joined Blackburn Rovers in 2006, and he set the national scoring record for Bafana Bafana with 31 international goals. Steven Pienaar followed at Everton, and he remains a favourite of Premier League watchers in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

When Does the Premier League Season Start and End?

The season normally starts in August and ends in May, and the exact dates for this season are shown in the fixtures module. Between those months the league pauses for international breaks, which usually fall in September, October, November and March. Those are the windows in which Super Eagles, Black Stars, Bafana Bafana, Harambee Stars and Uganda Cranes players fly home for qualifiers. It is worth remembering that a player who travels to Africa and back returns to his club with more miles in his legs than a team mate who stayed in England.

The winter is where the Premier League differs from most of Europe. There is no long break in December, and the festive programme around Boxing Day and New Year packs several rounds into a short stretch, which is a gift for anyone at home with family and a television. In the seasons when the Africa Cup of Nations is played during the European winter, African players leave their clubs for the tournament in the middle of that run. So, check the fixtures before you plan a holiday viewing schedule, because the busiest part of the calendar is also the one that moves most.

Which Clubs Play in the Premier League, and Where?

The clubs list above shows all 20 sides in the league this season, each with its stadium and a link to its own club page. The list changes every summer, because three clubs go down and three come up, so some of the names change often. The ones that rarely move are those known in Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana as the big six: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur. Fan clubs for Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea are strong in all five countries, and the argument between them is a weekly ritual.

But, the league has always been bigger than six clubs for an African reader. Leeds United matters in South Africa because of Radebe, and Bolton Wanderers matters in Nigeria because of Okocha. Southampton, for its part, has had a place in Kenyan affection since Wanyama. Each club page sets out the ground, the honours and the Africans who have worn the shirt, and it links on to the players themselves. If you are choosing a club to follow, the best method is the oldest one: pick the side whose player you would most want to see in your national team.

How Did the English Premier League Begin?

The Premier League began with a breakaway. On 20 February 1992 the clubs of the old First Division left the Football League to form a competition of their own, and the first season was played in 1992-93, with Manchester United as champions. There were 22 clubs for the first three seasons, and the league was cut to 20 from 1995-96, which is the format still used today. The 38 game season and the 380 match calendar that supporters now take for granted both date from that change.

How did an English league become a Saturday habit in Africa? Television carried it, and the players made it personal. Satellite broadcasts brought live matches to bars and viewing centres across the continent, and the arrival of Africans in title winning sides gave supporters a reason to choose a club and stay with it. For some years the competition carried a sponsor in its title and was known as the Barclays Premier League, which is why older fans in Nigeria and Kenya still search for that name and for its short form, BPL.

The names have multiplied since then. You will see it called the EPL or the English Premier League, although it is the top division of English football and all of these mean the same 20 clubs. Whatever you call it, the practical route is the same. Start with the table above, then read the fixtures in your own time zone before the next kick-off.