Newcastle United’s 6-1 win against Spurs may come to mark a shift in in our definition of which clubs are part of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’.
It may well be that history will come to regard Sunday’s 6-1 win for Newcastle United against Tottenham Hotspur to be a pivotal moment in the history of both clubs.
For Spurs, it marked yet another new low in a season that has been packed with cognitive dissonance. Yes, they are still in sixth place in the Premier League, but a quick look at the table shows that unless they arrest the slump in form that has seen them concede nine goals in their last two games, they could easily fall as low as eighth by the end of this season.
But enough about them. For Newcastle, both result and performance were equally important, but in an altogether more positive way. With just seven games left this season, they’re five points above fifth place, while winning so handsomely also did an excellent job of setting aside any late-season jitters that may have emerged after a surprisingly tepid performance at Aston Villa.
And taking a slightly broader perspective, it also serves as a marker for the general improvement of the team over the course of this season. In the space of 20 first-half minutes, the contrast could not have been clearer; one team played as though they’d only just been introduced to each other, the other as though they’d known each other for years. Sometimes, laying down that sort of marker can be important. It galvanises everybody within the club and reminds them why they’re there in the first place. It builds confidence and sends a clear and unequivocal message of their intentions.
None of this has been cheap, and the club’s owners may well be grateful to Chelsea’s vast splurges in the transfer market for making theirs look relatively sensible by comparison. Of course. what constitutes ‘sensible’ is debatable. Even Chelsea’s explosion inside a cheque book factory will look eminently sensible, should one of their expensively acquired trinkets turn out to be the next Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.
But if Newcastle have spent a lot of money – and a net spend of £256m is a lot, even if Chelsea’s was two-and-a-half times higher – at least they’ve spent it wisely, on building a team rather than on what looks like little more than an assortment of ill-fitting parts.
Football loves to bunch clubs together. The Premier League was initially established because of the machinations of what was called the ‘Big Five’ of Arsenal, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Spurs at the start of the 1990s, and now we have a ‘Big Six’ of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Spurs.
But the sands under this particular grouping are shifting. It now seems likely that only three of this six will be playing Champions League football next season (considering the advantages they have, it should be four every season), and with Chelsea labouring in the bottom half of the Premier League, even the apparently imminent arrival of Mauricio Pochettino will be unlikely to lift them above ninth place by the end of this season.
So is it time to reconsider the constitution of the ‘Big Six’? Nobody is going to argue about who makes up most of that particular grouping. Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United are all historically huge clubs, even if they have only won one Premier League title between them in a decade by this season’s end. The positions of Chelsea and Manchester City are based somewhat more on financial largesse and recent success, but their places in this group are assured.
The position of Spurs in these ‘Big Club’ groupings was always somewhat more dubious. In that original ‘Big Five’, they probably merited their place as a club that had won the FA Cup twice, the UEFA Cup and having finished in the top four on five occasions between 1980 and 1990. But their addition to a ‘Big Six’ was slightly more questionable. They’ve only finished in the bottom half of the Premier League twice in the last 20 years, but over that same time period they’ve only won one trophy, and that was 15 years ago. The club’s owners have built a stadium befitting of that ‘Big Six’ status, but whether the team itself has warranted that sort of hype over the last three years is considerably more questionable.
There was some talk at the time of Newcastle’s takeover that this would make it a ‘Big Seven’, but that always felt somewhat unsatisfactory. Seven is, after all, more than a third of the total number of club in the Premier League, and if we’re going to have an arbitrary grouping of clubs, we should probably also have an arbitrary limit on the number of clubs who can be members too.
Newcastle United seem to fit that bill. True enough, they haven’t won a major trophy since 1955 – no, I’m not including the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup either, and regardless even that was in 1969 – but they have a vast stadium, considerable support and now infinite money, subject to Financial Fair Play rules. Spurs are the reminder that a failure to actually win anything is not a bar to membership.
They certainly don’t get to be ‘underdogs’ anymore. You simply can’t do that, if you spend more than any other club in Europe in one transfer window. Newcastle United are amongst the Premier League’s landed gentry now, and we should all recalibrate our expectations of them accordingly.
None of this is to say that Eddie Howe hasn’t achieved something significant this season, after dragging them clear of the relegation places the year before. But there has remained an underlying element of continuing to describe them as gamely battling against ‘bigger’ rivals this season, even though that patently isn’t the case anymore.
Such is the nature of the modern world that rather than, say, wanting to dismantle the sort of vast inequality that is implied by the very existence of a ‘Big Six’, Newcastle supporters are likely happy enough to have broken into that grouping and will want to stay there. The club will feel the same way. The good news for them is that the vast resources now at their disposal means that this is almost guaranteed. Whether it’s a good idea to even have a ‘Big Six’ in the Premier League is a different matter altogether, but that particular ship sailed long ago.