I have been calling Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham “the Big Six” my entire adult life, and I think this is the season I finally have to admit the phrase has stopped describing reality. Not because those clubs have suddenly become poor, they clearly have not, but because the actual evidence on the pitch this season makes the label look increasingly like lazy shorthand rather than an accurate description of the Premier League’s real hierarchy.
Here is the detail that should embarrass anyone still using that phrase without thinking about it. This season, two of the six clubs that supposedly define the Premier League’s elite, Chelsea and Tottenham, did not qualify for the Champions League at all. Meanwhile Aston Villa, a club that spent large parts of the last two decades bouncing between mid table mediocrity and outright relegation trouble, are in it. That is not a one off anomaly. That is a genuine crack in the foundation of a phrase football has treated as gospel for the better part of fifteen years.
The Numbers That Built the Myth in the First Place
I understand exactly why the Big Six label existed in the first place, and I am not pretending it was ever entirely nonsense. Analysis of Champions League qualification over the last decade and a half shows that out of every available slot, the overwhelming majority went to those same six clubs, with only a small handful of exceptions like Leicester’s astonishing title win, and more recently Newcastle and Aston Villa forcing their way in through genuinely improved performances rather than one freak season.
That kind of dominance builds a myth that becomes self reinforcing. Broadcasters keep repeating the phrase, pundits build entire debate segments around whether a seventh club can break in, and eventually the label stops being a description of current form and starts being treated as an immovable fact of English football, regardless of what is actually happening in a given season.
What Actually Happened This Season Should Have Killed the Phrase
Look at how Champions League qualification actually played out this time around. Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United and Liverpool secured their places through league position, which is exactly what you would expect from four traditionally elite clubs. But the fifth automatic spot went to Aston Villa, who finished fifth in the table, and then Villa’s own Europa League triumph created a knock on effect that pushed the extra European Performance Spot down the pecking order entirely, eventually filtering all the way down to Crystal Palace picking up Europa League football instead, alongside Bournemouth and Sunderland.
Meanwhile Chelsea and Tottenham, two names that have appeared in essentially every single version of the Big Six conversation since the phrase was invented, are sitting outside the Champions League completely this season. I do not think that is a temporary blip that football conversation will quietly forget about by Christmas. I think it is exactly the kind of season that historians will point back to when explaining why the Big Six framing eventually collapsed under its own weight.
Newcastle’s Rollercoaster Tells You Everything About How Fragile This Actually Is
Newcastle’s recent trajectory is genuinely the perfect case study for how unstable the traditional hierarchy has become. Not that long ago they secured Champions League qualification through a genuinely impressive league finish, positioning themselves as the clearest candidate to force their way into that exclusive top bracket on a permanent basis. Then, almost as quickly, they endured a run of results so poor that reports at one stage had them staring anxiously at a genuine relegation fight rather than a European finish, an almost unthinkable swing for a club with their financial backing and squad depth.
That volatility cuts both ways though, and it is exactly the point. If a club with Newcastle’s resources can swing from Champions League qualification to relegation anxiety within a matter of months, and if two traditional Big Six clubs can simultaneously fall completely out of Europe’s top competition in the same season, then the entire premise of six clubs existing in a permanently separate tier from everyone else starts to look considerably shakier than football conversation generally admits.
The Squad Value Numbers Complicate the Story Even Further
I wrote recently about this season’s squad value rankings across the Premier League, and even that data, which you would expect to reinforce the traditional hierarchy, tells a slightly more complicated story than a clean six versus fourteen split. Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea sit at the very top with active squad values north of nine hundred million pounds each. But Newcastle, sitting seventh with a squad value of seven hundred and five million pounds, are closer in financial terms to the bottom of that traditional six than that six is to each other internally.
Meanwhile Aston Villa’s squad value of four hundred and ninety five million pounds is a fraction of what the traditional elite are working with, and yet they are the club sitting in the Champions League this season while two supposedly bigger names watch from the outside. If financial resource alone determined footballing hierarchy, this season simply should not have happened the way it did. The fact that it did suggests coaching, recruitment and squad management now matter more relative to pure financial muscle than the Big Six framing has ever really allowed for.
Why Nobody Has Agreed on a Replacement
What genuinely fascinates me about this shift is that even people who accept the old framing is breaking down cannot agree on what should replace it. Some football analysis has started referring to Newcastle as something like a genuine seventh force, financially separated from the rest of the chasing pack even if they have not yet consolidated a permanent spot among the traditional elite. Others point to Aston Villa’s sustained progress under Unai Emery as evidence that the entire concept needs scrapping altogether rather than simply expanding to seven or eight names.
I do not think there is a clean replacement phrase waiting to be coined here, and I actually think that is the most honest conclusion available. English football’s hierarchy right now is genuinely fluid in a way it has not been for well over a decade. Chelsea and Tottenham remain enormous, historically significant clubs with the infrastructure and ambition to bounce straight back into that top bracket next season. But calling them part of a fixed, permanent elite tier while they are sitting outside the Champions League, and while Aston Villa are inside it, requires ignoring what is actually happening in favour of what used to be true.
What This Actually Means Going Forward
I think the honest way to describe English football’s current hierarchy is not six fixed names but something closer to a rotating group of eight or nine clubs, Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham, Newcastle and Aston Villa, all realistically capable of finishing inside the Champions League places in any given season, with the exact five or six occupants shifting depending on managerial stability, injuries and recruitment success in any individual campaign.
That is a considerably less tidy way of talking about the division than a fixed six club label allows for, and I understand why broadcasters and pundits prefer the cleaner version. But football has never actually been tidy, and this season in particular has made that point more clearly than almost any other in recent memory. Two of the clubs football has spent fifteen years treating as permanently elite are outside Europe’s top competition entirely, while a club many people still instinctively think of as a plucky underdog is sitting comfortably inside it.
The Big Six phrase will probably survive this season regardless, because these labels always outlive the reality that originally created them. But anyone still using it without at least acknowledging what has actually happened this year is describing English football as it used to be, not as it currently is.
