Worst Premier League starts ever made by the Big Six: Lads, it’s Tottenham

Shocking starts for the Big Six are rare but not unheard of, with each having had a stinker in the 34 years since the Premier League began.

Tottenham are in the midst of their own abysmal start to the season as they have failed to win any of their first five, but where does that rank in history?

Here’s the worst Premier League starts of each of the Big Six after five games.

6) Manchester City – 2025/26* (seven points) Statistically, Manchester City’s worst was in the 1995/96 campaign when they managed just one point, but judging City pre-2008 feels like judging how good Peter Parker was at climbing before he got bit by a spider.

Since the Abu Dhabi takeover, City’s worst season was actually last year when they managed just seven points from their opening five games.

Back-to-back defeats to Tottenham and then Brighton gave Pep Guardiola just three points from the opening trio of games and it took a 3-0 win against Manchester United and a 1-1 draw with Arsenal to steady the ship.

City finished the year second, seven points off Arsenal, in Pep Guardiola’s last season.

5) Manchester United – 2014/15 and 2026/27 (five points) You will not be surprised that United’s two joint worst attempts have both come in the post-Ferguson era.

The first was the 2014/15 season in what was Louis van Gaal’s first year in charge. The Dutchman began his tenure with no wins in his first three games; QPR at home was United’s only victory in their first five.

United then got thumped 5-3 by Leicester in what was the first time the club lost a Premier League game after having a two-goal lead.

That left them on five points – which is exactly the tally they find themselves on now.

Michael Carrick, who was a part of the 2014/15 squad, has masterminded his own stuttering start. United’s sole win came against newly-promoted Ipswich but a full month has passed since then.

This season is technically the worst with United’s eight goals scored and eight conceded one worse than the 2014/15 team’s nine goals for and eight against.

4) Arsenal – 2011/12 (four points) Arsenal lost Cesc Fabregas, Samir Nasri and Gael Clichy in the summer of 2011 and understandably, the team had an awful start to the following campaign.

They drew 0-0 away at Newcastle before a 2-0 loss to Liverpool preceded the most embarrassing result in Arsenal’s history, an 8-2 thrashing by Manchester United.

Any other manager would have been sacked there and then but Arsene Wenger held on, registering his first win with a 1-0 victory over Swansea.

A 4-3 defeat away at Blackburn then left the Gunners on five points with a goal difference of -8, the worst in the division.

3) Chelsea – 2015/16 (four points) Even before you started reading this, you could probably have guessed that Chelsea’s worst start came in one of Jose Mourinho’s many blow-ups.

Having won the league in his second season back at the club, the third-season curse came crashing down as Chelsea failed to win any of their first five games.

They were not particularly difficult fixtures either. A trip to the Etihad was the only Big Six game Chelsea faced and they lost to both Palace and Everton, which was the same number of defeats they had in their first 19 games the season before.

The implosion was underway. Mourinho started blaming even the club doctors and by December, he was sacked.

2) Liverpool – 2011/12 (two points) It’s quite easy for fans to turn on a manager when he guides them to zero wins in five games, but it is quite difficult when that man is a club legend.

After Roy Hodgson’s disastrous spell, Kenny Dalglish had stepped in and was given the job for the following year, which proved to be a mistake.

To be fair to the Liverpool legend, he had a particularly hard start as they faced Manchester City, Arsenal and Manchester United – but all three were at home and he managed only one point.

Defeat at Stoke and a draw away to Sunderland meant Liverpool had secured just two points from their opening five games, putting them 17th in the league and ahead of only QPR and Reading.

They did recover somewhat but only to eighth and Dalglish was replaced by Brendan Rodgers.

1) Tottenham – 2008/09 and 2026/27 (two points) It has been a historically bad season for Tottenham.

Their current run of two points from five games puts them 45th in the all-time worst Premier League starts to a campaign. Had it not been for the two late goals against Aston Villa, they would have been 39th.

If we remove pre-takeover City, it is the worst start by a Big Six Premier League club in history, equalling the two points of Liverpool but with fewer goals scored.

And there is no obvious way out of it. Failure to win the next game would move them up potentially as high as 26th in the all-time worst and with that match being a trip to Old Trafford, there is every chance that happens.

The good news for Spurs fans is that the other poor starts by Big Six teams did not lead to relegation. But then again, none of them had finished 17th for back-to-back seasons before then.

And don’t worry Spurs fans, you’ve been through all this (and worse) before.

Back in the 2008/09 season, Spurs managed to go the first five games failing to pick up more than two points. They somehow drew with Chelsea and later Wigan but lost to the likes of Middlesbrough, Portsmouth and Hull.

Masterminding that start was Juande Ramos, who had cashed in all the credit of his League Cup win the previous season.

Juande Ramos was sacked on October 25 and Spurs got their first win of the season the very next day with Harry Redknapp in charge.

That kick-started a turn of form that saw them pick up seven points from games against Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham. Spurs finished that season in eighth.