La Liga schedule is released

The league has released the schedule of matches for 2019-20, and it is available here as a pdf.

As last season, the second half is not a simple repeat of the first with the home side reversed, and there are times when a team has two straight home matches or away matches.

I have not had a great deal of time to look at it yet, obviously, but the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas looks to be a doozy—we host Celta Nov 24, then play at the Mestalla, host Atletico Madrid, play away to Sevilla, and finally host Getafe.

Our first matches are (obviously the times and exact dates are not known yet):

Granada home 8/18 weekend, Levante away 8/25, Real Madrid home 9/1, Leganes away 9/15 (following an international break), Valladolid home 9/22, Barcelona away 9/25 (midweek), Betis home 9/29, Osasuna away 10/6. Then there is another international break.

Those first eight matches should give us some sense of what we’ve got ahead of us—two matches against the top two, five against teams we feel we should do well against, and one against a team we probably see as a possible rival for a top six finish (Betis). But it’s that stretch of five matches from Nov 24 to dec 24 I mentioned above that could really make or break us.