How to watch the Premier League without spoilers
If you follow the Premier League from the US, you watch a lot of it on delay. The big Saturday window is 10am Eastern, the early match is 7:30am, and on the West Coast that early match starts at 4:30am. Most of us press play on a replay hours later, and by then the result has been sitting in a dozen places on your phone.
Here's where it gets out, and what I'd switch off before the weekend.
When the matches are, in US time
Kickoff times move around each week for TV, but this season they've landed in the same handful of slots. In US Eastern time, from our own schedule data:
| Day | Usual kickoffs (ET) |
|---|---|
| Saturday | 7:30am, 10am (the busiest slot), 12:30pm |
| Sunday | 9am, 11:30am |
| Monday or Friday | 3pm |
| Midweek rounds | Afternoons, usually 3pm |
Take three hours off for Pacific time. The UK and US change clocks on different weekends in spring and fall, so for a week or two each year these shift by an hour.
The 10am Saturday slot is the dangerous one. Several matches finish at the same moment, so even if you're watching one of them live, every other result is landing around you.
Where the result leaks
Push alerts from club, league and fantasy apps
Club apps send goal alerts. News apps send full-time scores. Fantasy apps tell you a player just scored or kept a clean sheet, which is the score with extra steps. These are the leaks people forget, because they agreed to them in August.
On iPhone, turn them off per app: open Settings, tap Apps, tap the app, tap Notifications, and turn Allow Notifications off. If you'd rather not touch every app each weekend, keep the phone face down or in another room until you've watched.
The streaming home screen
NBC's coverage is split across NBC, USA Network and Peacock this season, and a lot of matches stream on Peacock. I couldn't find a hide-scores setting in Peacock's help pages. That means the service's own home screen, replay rows and highlight tiles are a risk. A highlight thumbnail of one player celebrating tells you enough. Use search to go straight to the full match replay instead of browsing the sports rows.
If you watch through YouTube TV, its help center describes a setting to hide scores: open a team or league page, select More, and turn on Hide all scores for this team/league. Google says it then applies across your devices.
YouTube recommendations
Match highlights go up on YouTube soon after full time, and the thumbnail is often the scorer. If you've watched Premier League clips before, they'll be on your Home page. YouTube's help center offers a few fixes:
- On a video's three-dot menu, choose Not interested or Don't recommend channel.
- Set a channel's notification bell to None.
- Turn off watch history. YouTube says that if you don't want recommendations on Home, you can delete and turn off watch history.
Or just don't open YouTube on a match day until you've watched.
The table
The Premier League table updates live. If your club moved from fifth to third, you know they won. Stay off the table, the fixtures-and-results page and any stats tab, and remember that a player's season goal count gives a scorer away too.
Widgets and Live Activities
A scores widget on your Lock Screen or Home Screen shows the result before you've unlocked the phone. Touch and hold the widget, tap Remove Widget, and confirm. For the Lock Screen, edit it and remove the widget there.
Some apps start a Live Activity for a match you follow and keep it on the Lock Screen until full time. In Settings, each app that uses them has an Allow Live Activities switch. Turn it off for every football app you have.
Group chats and social feeds
The group chat is where a 10am Saturday result does the most damage. Mute it until you've watched and tell people you're on delay. Social feeds can't be made safe on a match day, because a crest or a photo gives it away even if you mute words. Close them.
Smart speakers and podcasts
A morning briefing on a smart speaker can read you the scores. So can a podcast that auto-downloads a post-match episode with the result in the title. Pause both for the weekend.
A match-day checklist
- Turn off notifications for club, news and fantasy apps.
- Remove scores widgets and turn off Live Activities for football apps.
- If you use YouTube TV, hide scores for your club or the league.
- Search for the full replay. Don't browse the home screen.
- Mute the group chat and pause podcasts and briefings.
- Stay off the table until you've watched.
Our take
Most weekends there are ten matches and I have time for one or two. That's why The Lineup Is has Hide Scores. Turn it on and results stay off the app, the lock screen, notifications, widgets and Siri, but you can still see which matches are worth watching. So you can pick the one to watch on replay without learning how any of them ended. It's free. Here's how Hide Scores works, and the Premier League page shows this weekend's matches.
Sources: kickoff slots from our schedule data for the 2026-27 season so far; NBC Sports' 2026-27 coverage announcement; YouTube TV, YouTube and Apple support pages, all checked November 11, 2026.
The Lineup Is is an iPhone app that ranks every game by whether it's worth watching, with Hide Scores for when you watch later.
Get The Lineup Is on iOS — free — or see tonight's best games ranked right now. More from the blog.