5) Arsenal 2019, 2) Man Utd 2024 – Ranking the worst calendar years in Big Six history
Calendar year stats. Hmm. Not a thing, are they? In football? We don’t work in calendar years in football, do we? We’ve got a little thing we like to call seasons. There’s a bit of grey area around when precisely one ends and the next starts but we can all agree it’s not bloody January. It’s in the summer, isn’t it? The football seasons? Not January.
However. Do you know when calendar year stats are a thing? When they are funny. Because that trumps all. And you know what’s funny? Big football clubs showing the absolute entirety of their arse. And that happened in 2024, didn’t it?
So for that and no other reason other than the fact it’s now somehow 2025, here are the worst ever calendar-year efforts from Big Six clubs in the Big Six era. Shout at us if you want, but that era begins here in 2009, because that was the first time the Big Six were the top six in a calendar year, and despite the notable efforts below that has generally remained the case in most years since.
7) Arsenal 2020 – 52pts at 1.53pts per game
P34 W15 D7 L12 GD +9
Perhaps harshly included here because the points-per-game isn’t horrendous in that Covid-impacted year but the overall number of points is still very bad and placed Mikel Arteta’s side below both Southampton and Everton in the annual table.
Arsenal were actually unbeaten in the league in 2020 up until the pandemic paused the action in March, but having begun the year with a win over Manchester United, had drawn far too many winnable games against your Palaces, your Burnleys and your Sheffield Uniteds.
Project restart began with defeats at Man City and Brighton with further losses at Spurs and Villa as the Gunners limped home in eighth. But they did win the FA Cup, which remains for now Arteta’s only silverware for all his good works.
That trophy success didn’t translate instantly to improved league form, though, with the delayed start of the 2020/21 season featuring eight defeats in 16 games for the Gunners before the turn of the year.
6) Tottenham 2019 – 56pts at 1.47pts per game
P38 W16 D8 L14 GD +13
A seismic year for Spurs, but in hindsight it turns out to have been for all the wrong reasons. The first half of the year was spent bantering their merry way to the Champions League final while somehow winning an embarrassingly inept fight with Arsenal for fourth place.
Details of Arsenal’s own effort in that particular scrap will come soon enough, but at the risk of spoilers the sheer incompetence of that Arsenal run-in is really best summed up by the fact Spurs managed just 11 points from the last 12 games of the season and it was still enough. Seven of those final 12 games were lost in amongst all the various nonsenses from the Champions League run.
But that miserable league form, and defeat to Liverpool in Madrid, would bleed into the following season. Come the November international break, Mauricio Pochettino’s side had won just three of their opening 12 games to sit 14th in the table. Out went Poch, in came Jose Mourinho, and nothing has ever quite been right with the world ever since.
Spurs have tried more Born Winners, Unapologetic Entertainers and Nuno Espirito Santos in various desperate attempts to find a manager who could work with Daniel Levy the way Pochettino could. No luck so far.
5) Arsenal 2019 – 56pts at 1.47pts per game
P38 W15 D11 L12 GD +6
For all its faults, 2020 still marked a year of progress for Arsenal compared to the previous year’s efforts, at least on a points-per-game basis. Which is very much the least unfair basis.
Wolves, Palace and even Spurs were among the teams to outperform the Gunners in 2019, with a classic late-season collapse seeing Unai Emery’s side miss out on the Champions League with a run of three straight defeats to Palace, Wolves and Leicester allowing Spurs to stumble over the line for fourth despite their own antics (see above).
A frustratingly draw-laden start to the 2019/20 season did for Emery, who was replaced by Freddie Ljungberg initially and Mikel Arteta more permanently. He began, fittingly, with two more draws and a defeat to round out a miserable year for the Gunners.
4) Liverpool 2010 – 52pts at 1.44pts per game
P36 W14 D10 L12 GD +12
Rafa Benitez’s side had finished second in 2008/09 but seven defeats in the first half of the 2009/10 season had them well out of contention.
Despite that, they actually began 2010 in fine fettle, winning four and drawing two of their first six games of the year before a narrow defeat at Arsenal.
Further losses at Wigan and Manchester United and a costly home defeat to Chelsea on the penultimate weekend saw a team that began the year in a lowly seventh finish 2009/10 in the same spot.
Benitez left in the summer, and in came Roy Hodgson. This, it would be fair to say, would turn out to have been a mistake for all involved.
The stagnation of the previous season gave way to genuine peril, with Liverpool winning just one and losing four of their opening eight games of 2010/11 to find themselves in the actual relegation zone for a spell. A three-game winning run put paid to fears of the drop at least, but it turns out that ‘avoiding a relegation battle’ doesn’t really count as an achievement when you are Liverpool manager, and Hodgson’s team were soon back to their miserable worst anyway, losing four of their last six games of the year to sit 12th as 2011 began.
Hodgson somehow made it out of 2010 with his job intact. He did not make it out of January 2011.
3) Tottenham 2024 – 51pts at 1.38pts per game
P37 W15 D6 L16 GD +13
Are you not entertained? Spurs’ struggles this season really shouldn’t have been a huge surprise, representing as they do simply a continuation of a formline that was long established after the first quarter of the 2023/24 season, in which Ange Postecoglou so magnificently hoodwinked us all by winning a whole bunch of games before succumbing to his own nonsense.
The first few months of 2024 were actually Postecoglou’s best since that initial 10-game burst back in the autumn of his opening season. Spurs lost only twice in 11 games at the start of 2024 and their wins included a memorable 4-0 dismantling of Champions League rivals Aston Villa.
Then it all went horribly wrong, with a 4-0 defeat at St James’ Park – the scene of so many recent Spurs horrors – precipitating a season-ending run of five defeats in seven games in which the only bright spots came against relegated pair Burnley and Sheffield United as the Champions League dream died.
And there has been no real improvement in the first half of 2024/25, a Spurs season thus far marked out by frequent stupidity and a total absence of consistency. You simply cannot trust a side that in the space of 19 games has won games 5-0, 4-0, 4-0, 4-1, 4-1 but never 1-0 or 2-1 and has also contrived to somehow lose nine times. As well as the 6-3 nonsense against Liverpool, Spurs have completed the neat trick of managing to lose games 1-0, 2-1, 3-2 and 4-3 already this season. A 5-4 defeat is only a matter of time.
The best stat about this season, though, is that it is now officially Tottenham’s worst half-season start to a Premier League campaign since 2008/09, a year when they infamously had only two points from eight games and things got so bad they had literally no choice but to appoint Harry Redknapp.
2) Manchester United 2024 – 51pts at 1.38pts per game
P37 W14 D9 L14 GD -1
And yet somehow, Spurs managed not to be the worst Big Six team in 2024. A genuinely heroic effort from Manchester United, this, begun by Erik Ten Hag and really quite magnificently carried on by Ruben Amorim, all with Sir Jim Ratcliffe being the most crudely-drawn ‘evil billionaire’ supervillain imaginable in the background. Superb stuff.
Lots of these terrible years seem to have begun deceptively well, and this is another. United started with a 2-2 draw against Spurs – surely neither could have fully predicted the misery in store over the 12 months to come – and then a run of four straight wins in February.
Defeats to Fulham, Man City and Chelsea soon arrived to dispel the notion that United might actually be good, and a hefty defeat at Palace followed by a grimly predictable home loss to Arsenal left United mired in eighth and relying on the FA Cup for salvation.
That duly came, but at the cost of allowing Ten Hag to survive the mortifying, confidence-shedding job review to which he was subjected in the summer.
But four defeats in the first nine games of the season finished him off, to the surprise of literally nobody not employed by Manchester United. And yet United have somehow already managed to lose more league games under Amorim than they did under Ten Hag this season.
1) Chelsea 2023 – 48pts at 1.12pts per game
P43 W12 D12 L19 GD -8
A genuinely wild year of managerial jiggery-pokery even by Chelsea standards culminated in 2023 delivering numbers that no Big Six team has come close to matching in the last 15 years. Although we do have high hopes for a particular pair of idiot clubs in 2025.
The year began with Graham Potter in charge, the former Brighton boss having replaced Champions League winner Thomas Tuchel in September 2022.
Desperate not to be seen to panic, Chelsea’s madcap new owners kept faith in Potter for far longer than was healthy for anyone involved, somehow not pulling the pin until a 2-0 defeat to Villa in early April that was already Chelsea’s fifth league defeat of the year.
Having been so desperate to avoid being seen to panic, Chelsea then leant fully into full-scale panic by inexplicably selecting Frank Lampard as the steady interim hand to steer them through the remaining weeks of the season. He lost six and won only one of his nine league games in charge.
Chelsea then appointed former Spurs boss – a nice twist on the usual order of things there – Mauricio Pochettino, a man who was always going to have a hard time winning over the fans at Stamford Bridge.
While he would eventually get the hang of it in the second half of the season – albeit not sufficiently to save his job – the first half of the season was distinctly choppy. Defeat at Wolves on Christmas Eve was Chelsea’s eighth in the first half of the season to leave them once again mired in mid-table as Auld Lang Syne rang out and the fireworks went off.