EFL confirms schedule for league and cups in 2020/21
The new football season’s schedule has now been fully confirmed, with the First Round of the Carabao Cup to begin the new season.
The first round of the League Cup will happen on the weekend of September 5th, with the 2020-21 League One season to begin one week later on September 12th.
The draw for the first round will take place on Sky Sports News on Tuesday August 18th, while the full league season’s fixture list will be announced at 9am on August 21st.
There will be 11 midweek matches in League One and Two as part of the schedule, with the season scheduled to run through until the weekend of May 8/9. The play-off finals will then take place 3 weeks later on the weekend of May 29-31.
One change that has been noted is that the Carabao Cup’s semi-finals will only take place over one leg.
Meanwhile, the FA Cup will not feature any replays for the revised 2020-21 season.
It will also feature one additional preliminary round, starting on September 1st. League teams will be introduced for the First Round proper, which will be on the weekend around Saturday November 7th.
The EFL has confirmed that the EFL Trophy will return for the 2020-21 season, and will again feature invited academy sides from Premier League and Championship clubs.
It will begin in the week commencing September 7th, and will run to a final at Wembley Stadium on March 14th 2021. The group stages for this will take place on August 18th on TalkSport.
This tournament will be known as the EFL Trophy for 2020-21, after a commercial sponsorship deal with car rental company Leasing.com expired.
For many of the clubs in Leagues One and Two, these will be their first fixtures since early March, when all football was suspended following the nationwide eruption of the coronavirus pandemic.