Look how they massacred my Boxing Day

The Premier League has betrayed us on English football's High Holy Day, so we'll make our own program.

It’s a tradition unlike any other: You wake up the morning after Christmas, belly stuffed and — depending on your age — grinning at your pile of presents or nursing a headache. You roll over, grab your phone, and have a look at The Fixtures. There are so many of them, all lined up in a row, ready to ferry you from morning to night down a river of football.

It’s Boxing Day, and there’s enough Premier League on the TV to help you forget that Christmas has already come and gone. After all, this is English football’s High Holy Day, a sacred date on the calendar. It’s to be observed from your sofa with the scent of a slightly withering pine tree wafting across the living room.

Except not this year. Look at how they massacred my boy.

There will be just one game from England’s top flight on the day after Christmas this year. One, and it’s pretty late in the day. The Premier League says this is due to a fixture pileup tied to the expansion of UEFA competitions. Somehow, the very real problem of an overstuffed football calendar means there can’t be more than one match on Friday. For the first time in recorded history, the football authorities are making decisions in the interest of player welfare — so they say — to give the players more time to rest between matches.

Meanwhile, only four top-flight teams have played since last Sunday: Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest, and Fulham. When they play this weekend, most teams will be on six or seven days’ rest. There’s also a whole slate of midweek matches next week — 12 Premier League teams will play on Tuesday — meaning many teams would have had more rest between matches in this Festive Period if they’d played on Friday, Boxing Day.¹

The powers that be really couldn’t throw a few more matches on the dear ol’ 26th? Even just three or four would see us through and deliver us from the Christmas hangover, chase away the creeping end-of-year existential dread. But we’re begging at this point, very much in vain. We’ve come an awful long way from that famous Boxing Day in 1963, when 20 top-flight teams were in action and bashed in 66 goals between them.

Anyway, we’ll have to make our own Boxing Day now that the authorities have betrayed us. The Premier League will need some backup from the Championship and the Africa Cup of Nations, now in full effect.

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Oh, and Merry Christmas to you and yours! Thanks for being with us here at The Football Weekend.

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We’ll start our improvised Boxing Day with MILLWALL vs IPSWICH TOWN, sixth hosting third in the Championship at 8 am ET / 1 pm UK. Both these clubs are very much in the promotion conversation, with Ipswich looking to bounce back up into the Premier League after relegation last season and Millwall seeking a first campaign in the top flight since 1990.

Then it’s down to Morocco for some AFCON, as EGYPT face SOUTH AFRICA at 10 am ET / 3 pm UK in a battle of Africa’s best. When he came on The Football Weekend to guide us through African World Cup qualifying, Maher Mezahi said South Africa is the rising team on the continent with a whole crew of players who are together at club level with Mamelodi Sundowns. Egypt, of course, are Egypt. Mo Salah is scoring, and they’re surely among the favorites if he keeps it up. Whoever wins here will take control of Group B.

The 12:30 pm ET / 5:30 pm UK window is suboptimal — thanks again, authorities — but you could check in on the nouveau FC Hollywood, WREXHAM, as they host SHEFFIELD UNITED. The latter have been surprisingly poor this season, as Premier League parachute payments have not been enough to keep them among the yo-yo clubs seeking promotion back to the big time. As for Wrexham, they’ve been disappointing if you truly believed they’d cakewalk their way through another division of the English league pyramid. As an alternative, there’s ZAMBIA vs COMOROS if you want some niche AFCON.

For some more mainstream fare from Africa’s continental sweepstakes, MOROCCO will face MALI at 3 pm ET / 8 pm UK. But the premier offering in that match window is the only Premier League match of the day: MANCHESTER UNITED vs NEWCASTLE UNITED. For some reason, this fixture sticks in my mind as one of my earliest memories of watching English football. 20 years ago, the commentator made some crack about “United v United,” and I never forgot it.

That was back when Manchester United were top of the world, or at least doing battle on the mountaintop every season. Their trajectory ever since has been down, and they haven’t been skiing. It’s been more like tumbling, head over haunches, back to earth. Sir Alex Ferguson is the ghost of Boxing Day past, lurking in the Old Trafford stands to remind a succession of current managers what the halcyon days looked like, and now it falls on Ruben Amorim to stop the tumble and get the club competitive again.

They are three points off the Top Four, to be fair, and three points clear of Newcastle down in 11th. It’s a testament to the parity of the league this season, and while the Magpies have suffered some bad results as they try to juggle domestic and Champions League commitments, they have every chance of competing for those European places once again. They’ll bring their share of injury concerns to Manchester, but their hosts have it worse: Bruno Fernandes pulled up with a hamstring problem during Sunday’s 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa, and the Red Devils will need to find a way to win on Boxing Day without their difference-maker-in-chief.

With AFCON firing on all cylinders, it’s a good time to listen back to that chat with Maher Mezahi, a football journalist based in Algiers who hosts the African Five-a-Side podcast:

The Road to World Cup 2026: CAF Qualifying

Chatting with Maher, I learned a ton about football on the African continent in 2025, including why some traditional powers like Nigeria are struggling:

There was also such an interesting window into how lobbying for changes to FIFA’s eligibility rules has allowed North African nations in particular to draw on their diasporas in Europe.

Whatever you’re watching on Boxing Day, I hope it’s a world-class couch session nestled into a warm and wonderful holiday week with friends and family. This world challenges us each and every day, but perhaps a little less this week. Thanks for spending a bit of it here with the Weekend.

1. Players who played Sunday would be on five days’ rest for a Boxing Day fixture — like Man United’s, who play Boxing Day and will play again Tuesday on four days’ rest. Teams that play this weekend instead of Boxing Day will have less recovery time for the midweek fixtures.