Arsenal, Spurs & United pay price of Premier League’s imbalance

Champions League qualification is critical to any club with delusions of grandeur, so why are Arsenal, Spurs and Manchester United playing as though they don’t even want it?

While Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea were taking some finalising steps over divvying up this season’s silverware at Wembley, those who sit just below them in the Premier League were continuing to trip and stumble. The North London ‘Giants’, Spurs and Arsenal, could manage precisely no goals between them against Brighton and Southampton respectively, while Manchester United and West Ham, both with home fixtures against teams with one foot already planted in next year’s Championship, at least managed four points between them, although that might have been as little as one, had it not been for the divine intervention of San Cristiano of Old Trafford and Burnley’s inability to hold onto a lead at The London Stadium.

The idea of there being a ‘Big Six‘ in the Premier League is increasingly starting to feel like another lie that we’ve all hanging onto like a comfort blanket for the last few years. Six is a solid number. It implies an amount of variation in the dividing up of silverware and jeopardy throughout the course of the season, and a genuine six-club title race would be tremendously exciting. But there is no ‘Big Six’, certainly not in terms of the distribution of silverware in recent years. It is clear that there is now a ‘Big Three’ and that at least two of those clubs – the end of the Abramovich era at least places a question mark against Chelsea – will likely to continue to hoover up all the trophies put within their grasp, with the other three increasingly resembling the clubs below them in the Premier League table rather than those