Top 10 Big Six banter seasons features Spurs, Arsenal, Liverpool, Man United classics
This season is on track to be most banter-heavy Premier League season since the banterpocalypse of 2015/16.
Arsenal could still do the funniest possible thing, only to discover that Spurs have somehow done an even funnier possible thing. And that’s before we even start on whatever it is Chelsea currently think they’re up to.
But none of this is new territory for these clubs.
Here are our top 10 banter seasons by Big Six clubs. Yes we probably are wrong to have missed out that one. And that one. This could very easily have been a top 30. Spurs alone could fill a top 10.
Banter is nothing if not subjective, though. Your mileage may well differ, but these are our picks. Today, anyway. Probably be different again if you ask us tomorrow. So please don’t.
If you want to be nice, check out the best 10 seasons by Premier League clubs instead.
Arsenal 2021/22
Arsenal sit right now at the start of a few weeks that are perhaps unmatched in significance since the final weeks of the Invincibles season.
There is a chance to do something truly extraordinary, to walk off into the summer as both Premier League and European champions having decisively put to bed the bottling memes for good. There is also, inevitably, the less likely but still alarmingly real prospect of yet another second-place finish – which would be easily the most painful yet from the position they have crafted for themselves – and the same fate in Europe.
In such a situation all Arsenal will be able to console themselves with is the thought that this run of painful second-place finishes for a brilliant team has come after a season where they were so unforgivably useless that instead of bottling the title they were bottling fourth place. And to Spurs of all teams.
Arsenal had begun the season with three straight defeats, the third of them a 5-0 pasting at Man City. The idea then of them as title rivals for the following few years would have been absurd.
But by spring, Arsenal had become really very good indeed. Another run of three defeats in April upset the rhythm, but four straight wins – including notable successes against Chelsea and Man United – had put them back in full control of the top-four battle and with it a long-awaited return to the Champions League.
Avoid defeat at Spurs, and the job would be all but done. Instead, Arsenal capitulated to a 3-0 defeat against their local rivals.
It was still salvageable if they won their last two games, but instead they lost again at Newcastle. That left Arsenal needing a favour from already-relegated Norwich on the final day, but Spurs were a different beast back then. They ran out 5-0 winners to make Arsenal’s own thumping win over Everton irrelevant.
Arsenal had to console themselves with the fact they had at least been in the battle at all after successive eighth-place finishes. However painful the banter, it really was all progress.
Chelsea 2022/23
There was just so very much going on here in Chelsea’s first full season under BlueCo’s watch. There were two permanent managers, an interim and a caretaker. A truly miserable second half of the season that saw Chelsea muster just four wins and ‘achieve’ their lowest league finish since 1993/94, which was after football had been invented, sure, but long before the Big Four or Big Six or banter.
You sensed Chelsea might be up to something special from as early as August, thanks to a genuinely absurd 2-2 draw at Stamford Bridge with fellow banter powerhouses Spurs.
The game would go down in legend for the handshake antics between Thomas Tuchel and Antonio Conte after the final whistle, but the aggro leading to that point was tip-top, including a heavily disputed Spurs equaliser and a hair-pulling incident involving Cristian Romero and Marc Cucurella that has now once again cycled back round to topical relevance.
Chelsea would lose two of their next three games after that, at Leeds and Southampton, and before you could say ‘less than 18 months after winning the Champions League’ Tuchel was gone.
In came Graham Potter and a cruelly deceptive new-manager bounce. He won his first three Premier League games as Chelsea manager and was unbeaten in his first five. But then he took his shiny new team to his little old one, and got served a 4-1 hammering by Brighton from which it still feels like he’s recovering now even as he prepares to take Sweden to the World Cup.
That defeat came in October, and Chelsea would win only five more Premier League games across the rest of the season.
Potter would limp on as far as April before being removed in something approaching an act of mercy. Bruno Saltor stepped in briefly before, in a move so genuinely absurd we all thought the stories were unconvincing jokes, giving the manager’s job back to Frank Lampard for the rest of the season.
Lampard’s Chelsea lost six and won just one of the nine remaining games in a season whose commitment to banter also saw Chelsea drawn away at Manchester City at the earliest possible stage of both domestic cups, with inevitable consequences.
Tottenham 2024/25
Let’s be real, almost any Spurs season is by definition a banter season. So powerful is the sheer banter energy coming off the club that whatever they do is in fact banter purely through the circular but powerful logic of the fact it is Spurs, the banter club’s banter club that has done it.
The clearest indication of this is the fact that even in an era when they muscled into a Big Six they had no right to, during a 15-year spell where they were always somewhere between very good and quite good, you could still put forward almost every Spurs season as a banter one in some way or another. Long before we got to their current stratospheric ridiculousness and disregard for logic and sanity.
You can run through them all, giving them names like episodes of milk-aged sitcom Friends.
The One With The Dodgy Lasagne. The One With The Half-Time Sacking. The One With Two Points From Eight Games. The One Where They Finish Third In A Two-Horse Race. The One Where They Put The Pressure On. The One With A Champions League Final For No Good Reason. The One Where They Sacked Mourinho Before A Cup Final. The One With Conte’s Rant. The One With A Trophy Despite Themselves. And then whatever this one ends up being, which could now be even more absurd for featuring months of gradual growing if despairing acceptance of relegation but which is now full of cruel bastard hope that, if it too turns out in the end to be false as it absolutely still could, might just break this fragile and vulnerable fanbase for good.
We can’t include them all, much as we’d like, but rest assured this will not be their final entry in the list.
Absolutely any and all of them could be in, but we do find the charms of the season that should have ended the king of the Premier League banters for good somehow managed to instead double down.
There has been no more potent banter source over the last decade-and-a-half of English football than Tottenham’s inability to win a trophy. So it takes a special kind of team and a special kind of manager to finally kill that off but in doing so create, if anything, an even bigger banter monster.
Spurs won, but at what cost? It could yet be genuine relegation. Their Europa League success, a long-awaited trophy infamously foretold to widespread guffaws by Ange Postecoglou after another defeat in a ropey start to the season, was achieved in large part due to having been so crushingly mediocre in the Premier League that they could abandon that season altogether halfway through.
What that did, though, was normalise the previously unthinkable for a Big Six club of just losing pretty much every weekend. Spurs tried to solve it by removing Postecoglou, but made the fatal error – one that, admittedly, few spotted at the time – of replacing him with a very small man in Thomas Frank.
While Postecoglou’s failure was in thinking big, Frank took that and run entirely the other way with it. Postecoglou took a huge risk to try and make Spurs big again, but now they had a manager who wanted to make them as small as him Spurs were still losing every week, but now under a manager who could point to how 2024/25 panned out in the league to insist that was normal.
And it worked. He hoodwinked enough Spurs executives and media water-carriers to somehow remain in position long enough that even now a much-improved Spurs may have left it too late to appoint a proper manager to save them from themselves.
It is a banter in so many parts. Winning a major European trophy while finishing actual 17th in the league is a simply unthinkable piece of work, a nonsense so extraordinary that nobody could have imagined it actually coming off. Throw in the fact that, because it’s Spurs, the trophy actually did feel more head-spinning than the 17th-place finish and you’ve got something special even before you get to the repercussions this season.
If Spurs go down it will of course be the ultimate and surely unstoppable Premier League banter season. And it will be as a direct result of choices made to end the trophy drought. The thing Spurs thought was the biggest banter of all might turn out to have been protecting them all this time.
Arsenal 2015/16
Obviously a season that ends with Leicester, having narrowly avoided relegation the previous season, waltzing off with the league title is a collective banter season for the entirety of the Big Six.
Three of them make it into this list individually. One for having a startlingly bad season, two for missing the most glorious of chances.
We’ll get, inevitably, to Spurs finishing third in a two-horse race. But Arsenal’s enjoyment of that bit of business has always sat awkwardly with us. They must know, deep down, that laughing at Spurs’ misfortune that season is really nothing more than a mask for their own failure.
Sure, Spurs finished third in a two-horse race. But the very fact that was a two-horse race between Spurs and Leicester shames everyone else. And none more than Arsenal, who really should have been the only horse. To stretch this way, way past its elastic limit: Arsenal finished second in a one-horse race.
It’s impossible to claim it was a bigger banter season than Spurs’ effort that year because the rules of banter are different. But we would argue it was the bigger f*ck-up. Arsenal pride themselves on being a proper club. It shouldn’t be enough for them to slightly outperform Spurs across a season they have bollocksed up. They are quite simply not supposed to be as confused as Spurs.
But bollocks it up they did. It was not Spurs, for instance, who sat top of the table at the halfway point of a season in which other traditional title contenders were nowhere to be seen.
Yet just at the point Arsenal seemed poised to take full control and end their wait for a league title, they Arsenaled it directly into the sun. A run of five wins in six games across December and into the new year had put the Gunners in a formidable position.
Two points clear of Leicester after 20 games, three clear of Man City and seven clear of Spurs. Arsenal would take just three points from their next four games, a rejuvenating win in a six-pointer against Leicester instantly p*ssed away with successive defeats to Man United and Swansea.
A battling 2-2 draw at Spurs with 10 men was no disgrace, but not enough. By now Arsenal had, in the space of two months, turned a two-point lead into an eight-point deficit.
Arsenal have turned second-place disappointment into an artform in recent years, and bantering themselves out of title contention much later in the piece does always have broader appeal. But at least Arsenal have been bantering themselves into a rage at the hands of your Manchester Citys and Liverpools rather than Leicester, who are now in League One.
As is so often the case, Spurs’ banter light burned far brighter than that of their local rival. But Arsenal’s burned bright even in that long shadow.
Manchester United 2013/14
There were banter seasons before, sure, but it does feel like 2013/14 was the year that officially marked the start of the Premier League’s Banter Era as a whole. It was a season that redefined what was possible for even the competition’s most successful clubs.
We’re deep into that era now, with absolutely no sign it’s about to end, and from the vantage point of 2026 it’s easy to overlook or not comprehend just how thoroughly, batsh*t mental the idea of Manchester United finishing seventh truly was.
It’s widely accepted now that Sir Alex Ferguson really stitched the ‘Chosen One’ David Moyes right up. In typically Fergie fashion, he’d managed to go out by winning the 2012/13 title with a squad that really shouldn’t have been able to do such a thing.
Any manager was going to struggle with the combination of following perhaps the greatest manager of them all, but Fergie’s constant presence and the squad with which Moyes was left made an already impossible task even more, well, impossible.
None of that means Moyes was the right choice, and the bungled recruitment efforts of his first season made matters worse. They tried and failed to sign Leighton Baines from Moyes’ former club, and did in the end manage to sign Marouane Fellaini but only right at the very end of the transfer window in a dignity-sapping fashion and one that denied player and manager the chance to integrate him into the squad during pre-season.
Attempts to bring in Ander Herrera and Cesc Fabregas came to nought, leaving Fellaini as the only major summer addition to a squad that needed rather more attention than that.
By the end of September it was clear we could be witnessing something an entire generation of football fans had never known: a bang-average, utterly ordinary Man United. It was undeniably intoxicating.
You have to remember that in those first 20 years of the Premier League era under Ferguson, an unthinkably bad United season meant one of the few times they finished a lowly, shameful third. And in one of those seasons they did win the FA Cup.
By the end of September, United had lost three of their six league games – including big early tests of Moyes’ mettle at Liverpool and Man City – to sit 12th.
There were already signs he wasn’t coping with it all in his dark musings about the machinations of the fixture computer and whether forces unknown had deliberately given United harder games.
On closer inspection it turned out that, no, like everyone else they had indeed been given 19 home games and 19 away games against everyone else in the league. Perhaps it felt unfair because, for the first time in Premier League history, not having to play two games against Man United like everyone else did was no longer an advantage.
United did briefly find some form for a while after that, and with some old Fergie-era muscle memory scraped a win over old foes Arsenal to drag themselves into the top five in November.
It was a false dawn. As 2013 gave way to 2014, the reality of what United had been reduced to became clear. Between January and March they played all five of their Big Six rivals and managed only a point in a goalless draw against Arsenal.
It was clear Moyes was not up to the task at the pointy end of the league. In April, after a second mortifying defeat against his former club, Moyes was gone. With him went an aura the club have never truly regained.
They gave it Giggsy ‘til end of the season. He took them from seventh to seventh.
There have been far worse seasons since – for United themselves and most of the other Big Sixers. But this one stands tall simply for showing what was possible.
Liverpool 2010/11
Again, the mysteries of banter to the fore here, with the fact this was actually in some ways Liverpool’s least bad season in a miserable run of seasons only serving to aggravate rather than mitigate the overall banter levels.
Starting the season in what looked like it might become a genuine relegation battle under the wholly unsuitable Roy Hodgson, Liverpool would recover to finish sixth under emergency Knows The Club hire Kenny Dalglish.
Given they had finished seventh in 2010, and would go on to finish eighth in 2012 and seventh in 2013, the 2011 finishing position was something of a high point. But 58 points was a miserable total to secure sixth – significantly fewer than Liverpool amassed in their two seventh-placed seasons during that time.
There was another eighth-place finish around the corner for Liverpool, of course: in 2016 when the Premier League really did experience an astonishing banter overload.
Chelsea 2015/16
An astonishing banter season in its own right, made more striking still by where it sits in a wider narrative. First of all, of course, the fact Chelsea could finish 10th while not even managing the campaign’s largest or most notorious banter season is itself magnificent.
But really Chelsea’s 2015/16 earns its banter stripes by not even needing the involvement of any other clubs. Chelsea performed their own banter triptych by sandwiching this ludicrous season between two title wins.
The second coming of Jose Mourinho had delivered title glory in 2015. Antonio Conte would kick enough arses and introduce an enormously effective back three in 2017.
And in between would come this ungodly mess.
With Mourinho in his full third-season destroy-and-exit pomp, there was even a time where a relegation battle looked on the cards. By November, a ropey defeat to Stoke left Chelsea down in 16th and just three points clear of the bottom three.
Scrooge Mourinho was eventually put out of everyone’s misery a week before Christmas after defeat to Leicester made it nine defeats from their first 16 league games.
Under the caretaker charge of Steve Holland, Chelsea actually won their next game against Sunderland but against a backdrop of pro-Mourinho protests from fans who still – entirely wrongly but still quite understandably at the time – believed he could have changed the course of Chelsea’s season.
The man who would do so was Guus Hiddink, the latest in a fine tradition of elite Chelsea interims.
The Holland-led win over Sunderland would prove to be the start of a 15-match unbeaten run that put the very darkest ideas to bed but still never lifted Chelsea beyond mid-table.
A limp end to the season – three draws and a defeat at Sunderland in their final four games of the season – would see Chelsea stumble home in 10th place, reimagining at that time just what it could actually mean for a Big Four – never mind a Big Six – team to have a bad season. Most had previously assumed Man United’s post-Fergie seventh-place finish or Liverpool sometimes coming eighth was as bad as it could ever get.
Obviously, we all know better now. But at the time, Chelsea’s 2015/16 effort was revolutionary in the scope and mid-season potential of its misery and banter.
Man United 2024/25
Imagine having a season where you copy absolutely everything Tottenham are doing, up to and including binning off your Premier League season altogether to condemn yourself to a finish just above the relegation stragglers in order to place all your eggs in the Europa League basket.
Then imagine it being you rather than Spurs – Spurs! – who come horribly unstuck at the last.
United have recovered spectacularly well on the back of a summer of atypical rock-solid transfer activity, and that has dimmed the power of their 24/25 exploits and does see this season take a small drop in the rankings.
But it still remains arguably the single most humiliating banter outcome of a single season any team has ever suffered: leaving the entire season resting on being able to beat infamously trophy-dodging Spurs in a final and managing to balls it up.
United didn’t just lose a Europa League final to the most ridiculous possible club. They lost the worst ever Europa League final to the most ridiculous possible club.
Tottenham 2015/16
We’ve gone into the reasons why Arsenal’s failure in 2015/16 was logically the more damning, but banter doesn’t rely on logic. If it relied purely on logic then Chelsea’s miserable season would be more banterous than either. And it wasn’t.
Spurs were the banter force that season, and there’s little use pretending otherwise. Worra trophy etc.
There’s something excruciatingly Spurs about bottling the title race in a season where you never actually go top of the league at any point. But that’s Spurs. They do things differently. They are the last Premier League team to finish fourth and miss out on the Champions League. They are the last Premier League team to finish fifth and miss out on the Champions League.
The first was because someone else from England did too well. The second because others didn’t do well enough.
Spurs can create epic quantities of chaos for themselves, sure, but always with a unique ability to harness the chaos around them to maximise the banter impact.
Even this season they’re at it. There is still a high chance they get relegated and complete the banter season to end all banter seasons. Yet the 37 points they’ve already amassed with three games to go – while obviously and crushingly inadequate for a club of their means – is a total that would have secured safety in any of the last 10 seasons.
Spurs performed their element of the banter just as effectively last year; this year has just seen a return of the banter-multipliers from outside.
And so it was in 2015/16 when all the other big clubs fell away one by one to leave Spurs as the unlikely last remaining challenger to an even less likely pacesetter in Leicester City.
Spurs chased and chased but never actually closed the gap despite making a huge amount of noise about doing so.
“Leicester City, we’re coming for you” was the cry, but it never quite seemed to happen. When a run of six straight wins gave Spurs the chance to take charge of the title race, they promptly lost meekly at West Ham.
They actually went on an eight-match unbeaten run after that, but four of those games were draws and it was enough to put them out of contention. The infamous Battle of Stamford Bridge officially ended their hopes as a 2-0 half-time lead was squandered in a generational display of headloss and hacking.
But really it was the previous week’s failure to beat West Brom at home that ended their hopes, leaving them needing a flawless end to the season and for Leicester to suddenly collapse altogether.
Title hopes duly pissed away, Spurs had one final and damning banter trick up their sleeve: a pair of season-ending defeats, including a 5-1 drubbing on the final day at already-relegated Newcastle to ensure they couldn’t even take the consolation prize of finishing above Arsenal and securing the infamous “third in a two-horse race” label that follows them to this day.
Liverpool 2013/14
The ultimate banter season and the clearest example of all that being good for almost the whole season and then collapsing in a heap will almost always actually be funnier and feel worse than just being mediocre or even quite bad throughout.
Liverpool in 2013/14 were very, very good indeed. Right up until they weren’t.
Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge were a menace to defences everywhere and there was a growing sense of inevitability about them ending Liverpool’s long, long wait for a 19th English league title and first of the Premier League era.
Liverpool weren’t just beating teams, they were crushing them. From the start of 2014 until the fateful last weekend of April and perhaps the most infamous Premier League game of the lot, Liverpool won 14 and drew two of their 16 games, scoring 52 goals in the process.
They scored six at Cardiff, put five past Stoke and Arsenal, and four against Everton, Swansea and Spurs.
This surely would not slip. SPOILER: It slipped. Steven Gerrard stumbled, Demba Ba pounced, and Chelsea secured a 2-0 win at Anfield that turned the title race on its head.
Not a new observation but one we firmly believe is that the Chelsea game is so firmly ingrained in the collective football conscience that a non-zero number of neutral fans believe it was Chelsea themselves who won the title that year.
They’d actually bantered themselves out of contention and would finish third, with Man City the team to profit from Liverpool’s late collapse, which would be rubber-stamped a week later when, in a wild and desperate bid to overturn an improbable goal-difference disadvantage, Liverpool went gung-ho while 3-0 up at Crystal Palace and conceded three times in the closing 11 minutes.
A 2-1 win over Newcastle on the final day took Liverpool beyond 100 goals scored for the season but still two points behind City and with a goal-difference deficit of 14.
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