I don't want Aston Villa to join the Big Six. I want them to kill it.

The Premier League's so-called Big Six has always been a fallacy. Villa are proving it, not joining in.

Tottenham Hotspur have finished in seventeenth place in each of the last two Premier League seasons. Even with the excuse of prioritising their Europa League run in 2024/25, that’s a significant black mark against their credentials.

Aston Villa have qualified for Europe by virtue of their Premier League position for four seasons on the bounce, reaching the Champions League twice and winning the Europa League in an extraordinary finale to the 2025/26 season.

Only one of these clubs deserves contemporaneous recognition as part of an elite group. In England, the only label applied to such a group these days is the ‘Big Six’.

Taken in the context of the Unai Emery era as a whole, Villa’s last three matches of the season put them in a position in which their ‘Big Six’ claim can’t be ignored.

Villa beat Liverpool and Manchester City either side of a successful European final, finishing fourth in the league. They were truly excellent against the Reds and Freiburg.

The idea that the Premier League has a ‘Big Six’ that includes Spurs and not Villa became laughable in the space of nine days.