The English Premier League’s summer tour will kick off in Philadelphia

Update: Tickets are now on sale. Click here for details on how to buy them.

The English Premier League is bringing a six-team exhibition tour to the United States in July, and Philadelphia will be one of its destinations.

Lincoln Financial Field will host all six teams over the weekend of July 22-23: Chelsea vs. Brighton, Fulham vs. Brentford, and Newcastle United vs. Aston Villa.

It will be the first major soccer event at the Linc since the U.S. women’s national team played there in August 2019. And while the visitors will come from abroad, there will be at least one local angle: Philadelphia-based Comcast spends billions of dollars on Premier League broadcast rights, and its TV and streaming channels will show all the games.

If you were expecting a different local angle, that’s for good reason. Hershey’s Christian Pulisic, the biggest American men’s soccer star, plays for Chelsea. But with a new manager coming this summer and an overstuffed roster of big players, it’s widely expected that Pulisic at least will test the waters on leaving the Blues this summer.

» READ MORE: Christian Pulisic’s ‘fearless’ drive has made a kid from Hershey a World Cup star

So if you want to buy tickets when they go on sale April 25, don’t assume you’ll be able to watch Pulisic here.

Those six teams aren’t the only English teams coming over. Manchester United and Arsenal are too, but separate from this. United will play Rob McElhenney-owned Wrexham on July 25 in San Diego and Dortmund on July 30 in Las Vegas and probably has another game to announce.

Arsenal will be the MLS All-Star team’s opponent on July 19 in D.C., and it might set up other games while in the States.

What about Leeds United, featuring Medford’s Brenden Aaronson and fellow American stars Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie? They’d sell a boatload of tickets here, and the club, and the Premier League surely knows it — not least because the San Francisco 49ers have a big stake in Leeds’ ownership.

» READ MORE: From Leeds to Philadelphia, Brenden Aaronson’s first Premier League goal was big news

The answer is found in the standings. Leeds is in serious danger of relegation, currently safe by just two points with eight games to go. A whopping nine of the league’s 20 teams are in the relegation fight. If Leeds goes down, it wouldn’t be able to be part of a Premier League tour.

All six touring teams are in the top 11, led by third-place Newcastle. Chelsea is the worst of them, remarkably, in 11th place and far off its usual place among the title contenders.

The Athletic reported that Fulham came in for Leeds so the league could stop worrying about whether Leeds would stay up. Fulham has its own big-name Americans in Tim Ream and Antonee “Jedi” Robinson.

» READ MORE: Zack Steffen opens up about missing the World Cup and returning to the U.S. men’s soccer team last month

Chelsea still should easily sell the most tickets of any of the teams involved because it has the biggest fan base. Newcastle could attract the most attention, though, because its majority owner is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The Saudi government has insisted it doesn’t control the team, but that is in dispute.

In the ongoing U.S. court case between the PGA Tour and Saudi-funded LIV Golf, lawyers for the PIF claimed sovereign immunity because the fund is “a sovereign instrumentality of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” and its chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan — who also chairs Newcastle United — is “a sitting minister of the government.”

That got the attention of not just the Premier League, which bars governments from direct roles in running its teams. When a PIF-led consortium bought Newcastle in 2021, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters told the BBC that if the league found the Saudi government to be involved in the team, “we can remove the consortium as owners of the club.”

It remains to be seen how the matter will play out.

The other venues for the Premier League’s tour will be Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium; Orlando’s Exploria Stadium; Harrison, N.J.’s Red Bull Arena; and Landover, Md.,’s FedEx Field.

» READ MORE: For Philly’s 2026 World Cup chair Dan Hilferty, it’s also about what happens before then

Interestingly, the Union also have a home game on July 22, against Mexico’s Club Tijuana in the new Leagues Cup tournament between MLS and Liga MX teams. The kickoff time for that game has not been set yet. We’ll see if it is set to not overlap with Chelsea-Brighton, which likely will draw a bigger crowd than Subaru Park’s 18,500-seat capacity.

Saturday, July 22: Chelsea vs. Brighton & Hove Albion in Philadelphia (7 p.m.)

Sunday, July 23: Fulham vs. Brentford (4 p.m.) and Newcastle United vs. Aston Villa (7 p.m.) in Philadelphia

Wednesday, July 26: Brentford vs. Brighton & Hove Albion (5:30 p.m.) in Atlanta; Fulham vs. Aston Villa in Orlando (7 p.m.); Chelsea vs. Newcastle United (8:15 p.m.) in Atlanta

Friday, July 28: Brighton & Hove Albion vs. Newcastle United in Harrison, N.J. (7:30 p.m.)

Sunday, July 30: Aston Villa vs. Brentford (noon) and Chelsea vs. Fulham (2:45 p.m.) in Landover, Md.