Opening Day in Numbers

Ahead of next week's fixture release day (Thursday 25th), we've dived headfirst into our opening fixtures over the past 30 years to extract some all-important numbers from our curtain raisers since 1996.

To use a football cliche from the off, Vale Park acts as a fortress on opening-day fixtures, with the Valiants only losing three times in 16 opening-day games held at our home, giving us an incredible 81.25% unbeaten record in Burslem on Match Day 1. 

Away from home, results have been a lot more volatile with five wins, four draws and five losses registered on the road in the last 30 years.

We've scored 42 goals on the opening day of the season (averaging 1.4 goals a game), with more than half of them coming on home turf, sitting on a combined +6 goal difference across home and away games. 

And speaking of goals, let's look at our biggest wins... 

In 2006, Leon Constantine scored two and Akpo Sodje scored a third as we beat Leyton Orient 3-0 at Vale Park. And in 2012 we beat Barnet 3-0 with goals from Louis Dodds, Jennison Myrie-Williams and Tom Pope. 

We've had two 3-1 wins on the road. We beat Luton Town in 2008 with Louis Dodds, Rob Taylor and Marc Richards on the scoresheet, whilst Michael Tonge, Antony Kay and Dan Turner scored our goals against Crawley Town in 2017. 

Since 1996 we have taken on 27 different teams on opening day with Walsall appearing twice (2004/05 and 2014/15) and Crawley Town being our first fixture on three separate occasions (2011/12, 2017/18 and 2020/21).

Our 16-season streak of avoiding defeat in our first fixture started in 2005 against Southend and ending in the 2021/22 season with 1-0 defeat away at Northampton Town, a game in which will be remembered for Lucas Covolan's Red Card in his first competitive game for the Valiants, however a season which will be remembered for that Wembley triumph, but that's not opening day, so I digress! 

So, in summary, what does all of the above mean for the 2026/27 season? Well, whether it's home or away that the super-fixture-creating-computer chooses for us, there's only one thing that we can almost certainly guarantee, and that is that you, the Vale faithful, will be in the stands backing us as we look to kick start our campaign.

Fixtures for the 2026/27 season will be released at midday on Thursday 25th June, with our website, app and social media updated at that time.