From 2003/04 to 2008/09, we lived firmly in the Big Four era. Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool had a near-monopoly on the four Champions League places, with just one exception: Everton beat Liverpool into fourth place in 2004/05.
Manchester City and Tottenham joined the party to make it a Big Six from 2009/10 onwards. In the 13 seasons between then and 2021/22, those six teams made up the top six on six occasions.
Five of them were in the top six a further five times. Liverpool finished outside the top six three times from 2010 to 2013. Manchester United finished seventh under David Moyes in 2013/14. Liverpool (eighth) and Chelsea (tenth) both had bad years in 2015/16 to help open the door for Leicester’s title triumph. Arsenal finished eighth in 2019/20 and 2020/21, with Spurs one place ahead of them in the latter season.
Then came Saudi-owned Newcastle United and Aston Villa, who seemingly pushed us into the Big Eight era, as we here at FourFourTwo claimed in summer 2023. That was seemingly confirmed the following season: the top eight places were all filled by those eight teams.
Only it’s not quite worked out that way.
The Big Four era and - to only a slightly lesser extent - the Big Six era were both extremely entrenched.
Even those aberrations in the 2010s were down to the elite clubs having a transitional period – especially Liverpool’s wilderness years in the latter days of the Hicks and Gillett regime, when they were certainly not behaving or spending like an enormous club.
Let’s not get this wrong: Big Eight clubs have eaten up every top five place for what now looks like being five seasons in a row, with Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool joined on a rotating basis by Aston Villa, Chelsea, Manchester United, Newcastle and Tottenham.
But at the same time, those clubs have lost the aura of invincibility that was enjoyed by the financially-backed elite over the past two decades. Simply put, you still need bags of money to succeed, but it is no longer a guarantee against failure to anything like the degree it once was.
No Big Four or Big Six club ever finished far from their ‘place’ in their respective eras. To repeat: Liverpool were the only Big Four club to ever finish as low as fifth. Chelsea were the only Big Six club to ever finish outside the top eight, coming tenth in 2015/16.
But if the table stays as it is now, at least one Big Eight club will have finished in the bottom half of the table in three of the past four seasons. Chelsea came 12th in 2022/23. Manchester United and Tottenham came 15th and 17th respectively last season. Newcastle are now 14th – and most remarkably, Spurs are on course for relegation.
That has come in spite of the tighter PSR regulations that coincided with what is meant to be the Big Eight era. Those rules, which limit the losses clubs are able to make, should in theory have entrenched the richer clubs even further. Leicester’s dramatic decline after years of recklessly overspending on wages shows the perils of trying to keep up with the Joneses.
So what is happening? Why is it that money talked so loudly in the Big Four and Big Six eras that those clubs were virtually completely insulated against serious failure – but now it is possible for some of the richest clubs in the country to find themselves battling it out in the lower reaches of the Premier League table?
The answer, we think, is twofold. One is that the TV rights for the Premier League took a massive, massive hike in from 2016/17 onwards. That meant that the rich got richer – and have continued to do so by having Champions League money on top – but so did the rest of the division.
That’s important, because when it comes to player recruitment in a global market, Premier League clubs are not only competing with each other: they’re up against big teams from other countries, too.
Suddenly, even a fairly middling Premier League side could afford to pay more than almost any club in Italy, Germany or Spain bar the absolute powerhouses like Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Wolves are the best early example of the effect that had. They finished seventh in 2018/19 and 2019/20, largely thanks to their ties to Jorge Mendes allowing them to sign some of Portugal’s hottest young stars even when they were still a Championship club gambling on getting promoted to the top tier.
Even still, there was an upper limit. But what we have seen over the past few years is less about pure financial might: it’s been about the Premier League’s middle-class clubs spending the last decade getting much smarter about how they spend their money.
While some of the big eight have wasted their wealth on incoherent recruitment and inappropriate managerial appointments, there is a clutch of clubs who have excelled at getting the absolute most out of their squads.