If you’re thinking about traveling from the USA to the United Kingdom to see the Premier League in the 2025-2026 season, you’re probably wondering what the process of buying tickets is like.

The first thing to know is that, if you’re used to the typical ticket-buying channels seen across North American sports, the process you’ll find here won’t be all that familiar. That was the rude awakening I received in 2019, when I began planning my first trip across the Atlantic to watch soccer.

Soccer clubs in the UK sell tickets to their home games, yes, but in the USA, the buyer’s first instinct often is to check Ticketmaster or some other independent outlet. And then there’s the secondary market — StubHub, SeatGeek and similar ticket broker services — where bargains can often be found and last-minute tickets are nearly always available.

It’s understandable that the market for soccer tickets in England is different, but before attempting to secure tickets myself, I didn’t understand just how different it would be.

The major clubs have strict control over the sale of their match tickets — and understandably so, because demand can often be through the roof. After all, we’re talking about some of the world’s most popular sports teams here.

Beginning with my first try six years ago, I have navigated the murky waters of trying to buy Premier League tickets on three separate occasions. I was all set to attend two matches — a Tottenham Hotspur fixture in the Premier League, as well as Manchester City’s showdown with Real Madrid in the Champions League quarterfinals.

That trip was scheduled for March 2020, though, and I don’t think I have to tell you why I had to abruptly cancel it.

The second time around, in August 2022, I returned to England at the start of the new Premier League season and managed to score tickets to THREE matches! And then, I added one more new stadium as part of another visit in the winter of 2024.

Now, I feel I have a good grasp on how to get into some of the UK’s most popular football grounds, which I’ll outline below. And with the Premier League having released their fixtures for the 2025-26 campaign, maybe you are also looking to score tickets to see live matches from abroad — be it from the USA or elsewhere.

Make no bones about it: Buying Premier League tickets can be a time-consuming, sometimes frustrating and possibly expensive exercise.

But if you truly want to see Premier League clubs in action, persistence is the name of the game during the ticket-buying process. Here are some tips for getting into your preferred matches.

Step 1: Choosing your dates

If you’re like me, you choose the dates in which you want to travel based on your schedule with work, school or other obligations, and then once that timeframe is set, then you go about seeing what events might be happening at your destination during that time.

First off, you have to make sure your dates fall within the normal soccer season in England. The Premier League season typically runs from the second weekend in August to the middle of May — in 2025-26, the first matchweek will be centered around Saturday, August 16, and the season concludes on May 24, 2026.

Meanwhile, Champions League matches throughout Europe coincide with this timeframe and typically culminate in the final in late May or early June. (In 2026, the final will take place on May 30 in Budapest.)

In English football, there are also domestic competitions, namely the FA Cup and Carabao Cup (aka League Cup), that coincide with the Premier League season.

Summertime is typically reserved for international competitions (the World Cup or European Championships, for example). If your visit is in late July or early August, close to the start of the new Premier League season, you may also have opportunities to watch preseason friendlies.

Step 2: Finding your fixture opportunities

It stands to reason that if you’re in the USA, finding a game for which to buy tickets is as easy as looking at a schedule for the Premier League, or the Champions League bracket, but it’s not that simple.

When the Premier League releases its fixtures for the upcoming season, matches are divided into “matchweeks” and scheduled for the Saturday of that week at 3 p.m. British time.

However, only some matches will wind up being played at that time; others — mainly ones involving popular clubs that visitors would often like to see — will get moved up to Friday, or back to Sunday or Monday, and kickoff times usually change as well. This is done to fill prime TV broadcast windows (not unlike the NFL “flexing” a game into the coveted Sunday night time slot), and also to allow clubs to participate in matches for other competitions.

It makes things tricky, though, for the traveler from the USA or elsewhere who wants to buy tickets for matches a few months ahead. In the Premier League, fixture times are set in stages, and for a couple months at a time. In the case of my first trip, I had to wait until late January to find out exactly when my target matches in mid-March would take place.

The Premier League usually sets a schedule for when fixture times will be announced, so it’s worth following them on social media to stay abreast of announcements. Similarly, it’s worth keeping an eye on dates for Champions League draws, but at least match dates for every stage are known before each season’s tournament begins.

Step 3: Should you buy a membership?

So how, exactly, do you buy tickets for the Premier League from the USA?

Well, it all begins with the individual clubs. Once you’ve identified a match that you want to attend, you should then check out the ticket-buying procedures put in place by the home club in question, outlined on each team’s website.

You’ll quickly discover, though, that for some Premier League clubs — at least, the very popular ones that can always count on a high demand for tickets — buying a club membership is required to even get into the team’s ticket portal.

For a yearly fee, a membership gets you perks including gifts, team store discounts and exclusive access to club-produced content, but of course the main benefit is it gives you the opportunity to buy tickets when they go on sale. Many teams’ memberships also are divided into tiers, with greater perks — and ticket-buying capabilities — built into the more expensive ones.

Each club controls its supply for matches regardless of what competition they’re for, be it a “regular” league match or for the Champions League, Europa League, FA Cup, and so on.

My original plans in 2020 included one Premier League match (Tottenham Hotspur vs. West Ham at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium) and one Champions League game (Manchester City vs. Real Madrid at the Etihad Stadium), so I bought memberships for both Spurs and Man City.

The second time around, the schedule gave me opportunities to see Tottenham, Manchester United and Arsenal. So indeed, I bought memberships for all three clubs — for myself and my wife, as every individual who wishes to attend a match needs his or her own membership.

Note that some teams structure their member ticket-buying rules differently. Back in 2020, Manchester City allowed its paying members to purchase multiple tickets under a single membership. That has since changed, as Man City now requires an individual membership per ticket purchased.

This falls in line with other schemes I’ve seen, including popular clubs like Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham and so on.

So yeah, it can get a little convoluted. But if you’re a fan of a specific club and want to follow them around, then it gets much simpler. Buy the one membership per member of your traveling party, and then you’ll have access to tickets for that team’s road matches, as well — as you likely know, European soccer stadiums all have designated visiting supporter sections.

Also, know that for the most popular clubs in England, the demand for tickets makes obtaining them on a single-match basis a challenge, and seniority (as in, how long you’ve held a membership and how many matches you’ve attended) is a primary factor in how clubs allow access to tickets.

If you really want to see a home match for one of these clubs without the hassle of competing with longtime fans, feel free to skip ahead to Step 5.

Step 4: Online sales

Once you have your memberships, then there’s nothing left to do but buy the tickets. There’s a unique challenge to this, though, as online ticket sales in Britain are conducted similarly to in the USA, but the time difference can make for some early wake-up calls.

To buy tickets for both matches in the spring of 2020, I woke up at 2 a.m. Pacific time (I live in Southern California) in order to secure seats. I was successful on both counts, so it was worth it.

That experience made me confident that I would score tickets fairly easily for my second go-round. But I failed to take into account the increased demand that comes with start-of-season excitement. For each of the three matches I targeted, I woke up in the middle of the night to buy tickets in the initial single-match release … and struck out each time.

At that point, it pays to know what alternatives you have. Each club has a ticket-resale scheme in place, which allows season-ticket holders to sell tickets they won’t use back to the club. It works similarly to Ticketmaster’s NFL Ticket Exchange, but with one key difference: Members wishing to give up their tickets can only recoup their face value, making them affordable to the buyer — that is, if you can get your hands on them.

In the case of the Spurs match I wanted to attend, it took three days of constantly checking the ticket portal, waiting for A) a pair of tickets to be listed, and B) moving quickly enough to beat everyone else lurking on the site for tickets. But I finally secured my two tickets, and at £60 per ticket (plus small fees), it wasn’t too bad.

Once you have your tickets in hand, pay attention to each club’s policy on how they distribute tickets. Entering the 2025-26 campaign, most Premier League clubs admit fans into the stadium using mobile passes — not mobile tickets, but passes denoting that the holder is a paying club member, with the ticket info for that particular match contained within.

This is another illustration of why the membership is everything when it comes to Premier League ticket buying. But there are ways around it, which we’ll get into in Step 6.

Step 5: Should you buy a hospitality package?

OK, you bought the membership and struck out during the various ticket on-sales, or you’ve decided last-minute to try and see a high-demand match, or you really, REALLY want to see a match at Anfield or Stamford Bridge and it’s proving nearly impossible. What to do?

There is one fool-proof alternative: the hospitality package.

They don’t come cheap (think somewhere between £300 and £500 per person depending on the club and the match), but usually anyone can buy them regardless of membership status, and they come with perks such as a catered meal, a stadium tour or merchandise discounts.

Every club offers them, and if you really are dead set on seeing the match you want and money is no object, well, buying a hospitality package will certainly help you achieve that goal.

Cost notwithstanding, buying hospitality tickets through the club at least gives you the peace of mind that you’re getting into the ground no matter what — and that you’ll be treated pretty well in the process.

Step 6: Should you buy tickets from the secondary market?

Of course, you might have a budget that precludes you from splurging on a hospitality package. If that’s the case, your main alternative is the secondary market.

Unlike in the USA, where ticket resellers are numerous and generally reliable even for the biggest events, scalping is a little more frowned upon in the UK. Premier League clubs tend to offer some stern warnings about not accepting tickets bought second-hand, going so far as to claim popular portals like StubHub are blacklisted.

That’s a big reason why memberships exist in the first place: They’re a way of assuring the clubs that the people who buy the tickets are the ones using them, and that people aren’t buying season tickets just to profit off them.

I can confess, though, that I have attended a match using tickets bought second-hand. I used a popular resale portal called LiveFootballTickets.com to buy tickets for an Arsenal match at Emirates Stadium — doing so only after I failed multiple times to get tickets for the match I wanted through the normal channels.

The purchase — which was perhaps a 75 percent markup from face value — put us in direct contact with the seller, who had to give us his mobile membership badge via text for entry to the stadium a few days before the match. In essence, I pretended I was this other person, a paid Arsenal member, for a day.

Entering the stadium went smoothly and we thoroughly enjoyed the match. However, during our wait in the queue I witnessed someone whose mobile pass was rejected multiple times at the scanner, forcing him to walk away in a huff to presumably get things sorted out elsewhere. I don’t know why that happened, but it was a reminder of how strict the ticket process is in England.

So in summary, while secondary options do exist and seem both reputable and reliable, they’re not foolproof. In the end, you’ll have be sure to understand the risk involved. My stance is that I would definitely consider buying tickets second-hand, but only as a last resort.

LiveFootballTickets.com, by the way, is not well-known in the USA but in my experience is very popular among fans of the Premier League and across European football for ticket-buying. Expect ticket listings for the 2025-26 Premier League season to appear within days (more likely, hours) of the schedule release.

Step 7: Enjoy the match!

Congratulations! You made it! I can attest first-hand that the thrill of attending a Premier League match in England is well worth the effort, and here’s hoping this guide helps you buy the tickets so that you can do the same in 2025-26.

Original publish date: August 4, 2020
Most recent update: June 18, 2025