Come On You Spurs

In 2014, I attended my first football (soccer) match in England ever. Yes, despite living the first 11 years of my life in England and being really pretty into football as a kid as a Liverpool and then Manchester City fan, the first time I set foot in a football stadium was late summer of 2014 in London. We went to see Tottenham Hotspur play Liverpool at the old White Hart Lane stadium. Tottenham lost 3-0, but the seed of my Spurs fandom was planted that day. We had to go back.

It took us 12 years. And it was about under the worst circumstances that we could have possibly imagined. Well...almost the worst. I blogged about that day 12 years ago. I'm blogging about this one too. This does not mean I will blog about every Tottenham match I ever attend.

I have a long and tortured history of supporting underperforming sports teams. Baseball-wise, I'm a Baltimore Orioles fan (last championship 1983). My hockey team is the Hartford Whalers who haven't existed since 1997. I abandoned the New York Knicks in the NBA for the Washington Wizards in 2000 (the Knicks just won the NBA title this year). And after moving to the United States and finding we had moved to a spot pretty much equidistant between the New England Patriots, New York Giants and New York Jets football teams, I picked the Jets. Since then, the Patriots have won six Super Bowls, the Giants have won four and the Jets have yet to make it to one.

On the surface of things, Tottenham Hotspur does not appear to be an underperforming club. They are only one of six teams never to have been relegated from the Premier League which is England's top football league and since that day we watched them lose to Liverpool in 2014, they have finished as runners-up in the Premier League once; have made two Carabao Cup (sometimes called the League Cup) finals and one Champions League Final; and have hoisted the Europa League Cup in 2025. Along the way they have regularly appeared in European competitions which generally means they are finishing towards the top of the league each year.

For the American sports fan maybe not that familiar with English or European football, maybe a few quick explanations about the landscape of English football is in order. 

Promotion and relegation is a system whereby the top bottom few teams in any league swap places with the top few teams in the league below them every year. It punishes underperformance and rewards winning unlike American sports leagues which just keep the same teams in the top league year after year. So in theory, if your team performs poorly enough, it will play in an inferior league the next year. 

The Premier League is the top league in England and it was founded in 1992. Before that the top league was the First Division. Tottenham has never been relegated from the Premier League but it has been relegated in its history which stretches back to 1882.

As opposed to American sports, which generally has one winner of the league per year, there is more than one trophy in play each year for all English Premier League teams. Sure, winning the League is the ultimate goal, but there are two additional domestic cups (the Carabao Cup and the F.A. Cup) and the top teams from the prior season can compete in one of three European cups if they qualify. So the top teams compete for up to four trophies in a single season.

The appoach to the almost brand new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Let's get back to that performance issue, shall we?

Tottenham competed in the top-of-the-top UEFA Champions League this past season but they didn't qualify based on their league position the prior season. They got there by winning the Europa League. Don't get me wrong, winning the Europa League is good but their league position during that same campaign was 17th, one spot above relegation, which is alarming for a team whose finances are among the top ten in the world. They were well clear of 18th place but still...17th is not where the team expected to be. Despite adding a trophy to the trophy cabinet the prior season, changes had to be made.

So this past season they took steps to fix the underperformance. They hired longtime Brentford manager Thomas Frank to lead the team (thanks for the trophy, Ange!) and made a couple of key summer signings. After match week 11 (of 38) the team was in fifth place with a couple of key wins, particularly away at Manchester City, to make the fans feel good. They had also not lost through four Champions League matches.

Amongst all that sort of optimism, we decided we'd make it a point to attend the last Tottenham home match of the season which happened to also be the last match day of the Premier League season. What would be on the line for Spurs? A shot at the Premier League title? Or would it be simply competing for a top spot to play in Europe the following year?

As it turned out...neither of those things were in play. The club sat in 17th place again but this time if they lost and West Ham United won on the last match day, Tottenham would be relegated out of the Premier League. That was the backdrop to our second ever Tottenham Hotspur match.

Pre-match warmups.

There were some obvious differences between our first home Tottenham game 12 years ago and this year's relegation-or-stay-up match. First, ticketing is all electronic and all via the phone. It required us each to buy a club membership for the season but it was still way easier than 2014 when we purchased tickets available at will call that involved standing in a giant line to pick up, killing significant minutes of our vacation by queueing. 

Second, in the last 12 years, the City of London has constructed new overground rail lines and one of them stops right outside Tottenham's home park, which saved the very lengthy walk to and from White Hart Lane the last time we were at a home fixture. 

Third, we are now Tottenham Hotspur fans and know the roster top to bottom from watching them compete (or maybe not so much competing this last year) every week in the Premier League. I came to the match in my brand spanking new Micky Van De Ven kit rather than just wearing a plain, un-numbered and un-named jersey like I did on my first visit. 

But the biggest difference was the stadium. Gone is the 100 plus year old White Hart Lane that we visited last time we were in North London. In it's place (slightly to the north but overlapping the old WLH footprint) is the massive and super impressive custom built Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. No more tight corridors and ramps to get you to the right part of the stadium. Instead, we found ample concourses with food and beverage options in a slightly less roomy version of an American NFL stadium. The Stadium truly is magnficent. It's a testament to the wealth of this club, although it really should be a testament to the success of the club but, well...that whole underperforming thing.

We filed out of the concourse and found our front row, top deck seats just a bit forward on the pitch of the goal at the south end of the stadium in front of the magnificent, towering south stand.

Kickoff!!!

There was one other significant difference. This was a not an early season matchup that in the overall scheme of things may or may not be that meaningful to the club's position in the end of season table. Oh no...this was for a place in the Premier League next year or a spot in the second tier Championship. The place was tense and nervous. You could feel the resolve of the fans and togetherness of purpose for this totally unexpected scenario.

And that togetherness brought forth singing. Lots of singing. 

If there was something we missed in our first Spurs experience, it was the singing. And I believe it was directly related to Liverpool scoring seven minutes into the match and Spurs not really competing much after that, especially after a soft penalty was given (and I do mean GIVEN) to the visitors shortly after halftime.

"Come On Your Spurs". "Glory, Glory, Tottenham Hotspur". "When the Spurs Go Marching In". A chant about Micky Van De Ven set to the tune of "Give It Up" by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. And a well-intentioned often-repeated defense of the neighborhood's Jewish background that the Football Association is trying to get fans to stop chanting because their statement of affirmation happens to contain a racial slur. All of all five of those. Lots of all five of those. Last time at White Hart Lane, we heard far too many Liverpool songs. This time was different.

We sang along. With the first four at least. I read after the match that some of the Everton (our opponent for the day) players put that crowd-generated environment as one of the top three stadium environments in the League. This is what I wanted.

Me and other middle-aged white dudes belting out some Spurs songs.

This whole relegation situation thing had become a significant source of stress as Tottenham have slowly descended in the standings. Gone was new manager Thomas Frank, as was his seven game replacement Igor Tudor before the team finally got serious and hired a third manager of the season (Roberto De Zerbi) who few seemed to really be crazy about the idea, including maybe the team itself.

If the stress of that situation wasn't bad enough, us folks in the east side of the upper deck were frontally assaulted by the setting sun on the hottest May day on record in the United Kingdom ever (it beat the record set the prior day). Bad enough that the day might end up with the team getting relegated for the first time in about 50 years. Now we have to deal with 87 degree weather that feels like 91? Did the singing help this one? Not really. Maybe the tension about relegation but not the heat.

So is Tottenham Hotspur Football Club playing in the Championship next year? No. No they are not. A dominant first half of possession yielded a scrappy goal just before the halftime break and it ended up being good enough to stand up a 1-0 win, securing Premier League status for 2026-27 while sending West Ham United down to the second division. Maybe the last 10 or 15 minutes were a little stressful as Everton made a play for a last minute draw, but even a draw would have secured top flight status for Tottenham next season.

The players applauding the fans.

We survived. Barely. 

Then we saw something we'd never seen in person: the home team players applauding the supporters after the win. This was actually our third English football game (we went to a Crystal Palace home match in 2016) and in both of the prior two occasions the home team had not only lost, but they had failed to even score a goal. This whole experience was gratifying, but this last piece put our day over the top to set us back on our long train ride back to central London and our hotel.

Is this whole 17th place two years in a row thing fixed for Tottenham Hotspur? No clue. They have certainly invested more cash into the team this summer than I can remember the team ever doing, but results (and their ability to hold onto / be patient with a new manager or head coach) are the things that are going to matter, not money laid out during the season break. 

At the end of the match some fans unfurled a large banner that read "Love Tottenham Hate ENIC", a reference to the current ownership of the team which has allowed the club to languish into the situation it is in right now through a combination (more than anything else) of poor leadership, bad decision making and spotty player scouting. Something needs to change soon. The season starts in less than a month so the first results will start pouring in sometime in mid to late August.

For a day in May of 2026, all that didn't matter. We are staying up. Mission accomplished. We'll be back sometime. And I likely won't blog about that one.

Last time we watched Spurs play, I posted a picture of the away stand (in countries outside of the United States fans are not mixed together but are instead allocated home and away sections) with the Liverpool fans still there after the final whistle and most of the stands around them empty of home support. Today, I'm doing the same thing. Can you guess where the Everton fans were sitting? 

The cover photograph of this post is a 1953 painting by L.S. Lowry called Going To The Match. We found it at The Lowry in Salford just outside of Manchester. I thought it would make an apt cover photo to pull in a little bit of our England and Wales trip that I haven't talked about in other blog posts. Lowry was a part of this trip. I'm glad to have included his work here.

Footy

If you know anything about spectator sport on this planet we live on, you likely understand that football or association football (to distinguish it from rugby football) or soccer (in America) is far and away the most popular sport on the planet. It is played by over 250 million people in more than 200 countries and the every four years World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world each year it is held.

If you know a little more than anything about spectator sport, you will also likely understand that the game of football as it exists today is mostly English. I say mostly English because people the world over have been playing games similar to football for centuries. But the modern game is mostly English for two reasons. First, a game pretty similar to today's game can be traced back more than 1,000 years on the island of Britain. And secondly, and more importantly, the modern rules of football which established the modern game were codified in English public schools in the middle of the 19th century. Today, England's Barclay's Premier League is the most popular football league in the world where, generally speaking, the best football players in the world ply their trade. Now if England could only stand a chance every so often of competing in the World Cup…but that's a different story.

Despite the game's origins in the country where I was born and halfway raised, I had never to the best of my knowledge and memory in my first forty six years on this planet attended a professional football match in England. I say to the best of my knowledge and memory because my dad swears he took me to some matches in the 1970s but I cannot for the life of me remember anything to do with that. He's likely right, but I still don't remember. So one of my goals for my recent trip to England was to correct that situation and take in my first professional football match in the best league in the world.

Queuing. The tickets said get there 90 minutes ahead of time to avoid a queue. We did and we couldn't.

Vacations for me involve careful and a whole lot of planning and I knew I wouldn't have the luxury of waiting until the Barclay's Premier League schedule was released to buy a plane ticket at a reasonable cost. But I knew I would be spending most of my time during this vacation in London where there are six Premier League teams. So I picked a span of days covering two weekends and booked a flight. I figured there had to be at least one game on at least one weekend that worked for me and I could figure the rest out later.

I was almost wrong. The second weekend I picked for my trip (last weekend as it turns out) was reserved for qualifying games for the 2016 European Championship so there were no Premier League games at all that weekend. That left me with a choice between three London home teams on the Saturday of my arrival to choose from: Queen's Park Rangers, West Ham United or Tottenham Hotspur. Fortunately, the Premier League stepped in and made my choice easy; they moved Saturday's Tottenham v. Liverpool game to Sunday, giving me a little breathing room in my schedule and not requiring me to rush directly from the airport to a match. An early morning rise for a 9:30 am ticket sale (4:30 am here in Arlington, VA) about a month before my vacation and I was on my way to the game for my first English football experience.

From a  matchup perspective, the Tottenham / Liverpool meeting was about the best I could have hoped for. It looked like it would be a close, competitive affair between two really good teams. Liverpool finished second in the Premier League the previous season and Tottenham ended up four spots further down the table, a respectable sixth overall. Both teams have had recent success but also have impressive histories. Liverpool boasts 18 First Division Championships (the precursor to the current Premier League) and seven F.A. Cups. Tottenham has only two First Division Championships but bests Liverpool with eight F.A. Cups. Both teams are expected to challenge for the Premier League title this year and Tottenham came into the contest as one of only three undefeated teams in the League and fresh off a 4-0 thrashing of cross-town rivals Queen's Park Rangers (or QPR for short).

In addition to the past accomplishments of both teams, the actual history of both clubs stretches back into the 1800s. Their success started shortly after each club was founded. Liverpool won its first First Division championship in 1901, just seven years after it was founded. That same year, Tottenham won its first F.A. Cup, 19 years after it first took to the pitch in 1882. Compare that history to two of the major U.S. sports leagues and there's a real sense of respect due these two franchises: the NFL began play in 1920; the NBA was founded in 1946. Both these clubs pre-date two of our most popular leagues.

Ethnic diversity: Latin American, African and Turkish businesses side by side by side.

In addition to the history represented by both clubs that Sunday afternoon, the game was being played at Tottenham's home ground, White Hart Lane, which is itself an historic place to watch sport. Tottenham has been playing at the ground since 1899, although it looked significantly different back then than it does now. When White Hart Lane was founded, the seating consisted of some temporary stands relocated from their prior playing ground. The place started being built up from there which is different than what we see in the United States, where stadiums or arenas are built from the ground up in one construction project. The initial phase of construction at White Hart Lane took about six years with the construction of main stands that held about 60,000 people, mostly standing. Since 1905, construction has continued seemingly without stopping. Pieces of the stadium have been filled in, demolished and rebuilt in the 1920s, 1930s, 1980s and 1990s.

At its peak capacity, White Hart Lane held about 80,000 fans. Today, with the implementation of fixed seating everywhere, it holds a little more than 36,000. The team is in the process of building a brand new super-deluxe stadium directly to the north of the current ground but for me, the prospect of seeing a match in a place as historic as the current home was thrilling. I've seen a lot of sporting events in the United States, but I don't think I've ever watched an event in a stadium started in the 1800s. Fenway Park, Wrigley Field and the Yale Bowl all come pretty close but they are all at least 13 years younger than White Hart Lane.

The stadium today sits in a tightly packed neighborhood, which I love as an immediate distinction from stadiums I have visited in the United States, which mostly tend to be in suburban locations surrounded by seas of parking. It didn't always used to be that way in America; before the 1960s there were a number of downtown stadiums for football and baseball but despite a recent trend of baseball parks and smaller arenas for basketball and hockey moving back into urban neighborhoods, the truly large stadiums (typically for American Football) in the United States remain isolated automobile access only fields.

Automobile access at White Hart Lane just doesn't work. Most fans going to a match travel by the London Underground (or Tube) and our journey there was no exception. After a stroll through Hyde Park and a bacon bap breakfast sitting beside the Serpentine, we made our way to the Victoria line to the Seven Sisters station and began our slightly less than half hour uphill walk along High Road to the ground. Being a tourist in London often isolates you from some of the more colorful neighborhoods in the city so a trip out to Tottenham definitely got us into a part of London that I likely never would have seen if I hadn't been going to the game.

The stores and businesses lining High Road are varied and unique but almost all of them cater to different nationalities. It is obvious that the neighborhood is a mixture of immigrants from different backgrounds which is a great change of pace from the London city center. On the way to the stadium we passed Polish, African, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Eastern European restaurants and stores with unique service offerings. The oddest might have been the place that specialized in sending goods back and forth to Ghana (no where else - just Ghana) and the overall makeup of the street was summed up nicely by a sign hanging outside the Solictors.com storefront advertising free immigration advice.

Built over time - White Hart Lane packed into the neighborhood looking decidedly un-homogeneous.

As you approach the stadium on match day, the sidewalks and roads become more and more packed and you see more fans in Tottenham kits. If you are not careful and if you are completely ignoring the throngs of fans everywhere, you could almost walk right past the ground. White Hart Lane is set back a little off High Road, almost hidden behind the shops lining the street on the east side of the road. The main vehicular access to the small stadium parking lot is down tiny Bill Nicholson Way, named after the famous manager who guided the team to 11 championships in his tenure with the club. The parking lot provides a little separation for the west side of the ground back off High Road but the other three sides are packed tight to the surrounding neighborhood.

Entrance to the stadium is via a series of small doors on the perimeter of the ground which lead to stairs which carry you up efficiently to your assigned seating area. There are no grand interior concourses; the streets outside the stadium serve that purpose. Once you pass the small cages with a ticket scanner locked inside (likely a holdover from more dangerous times at English football grounds), there is no wasted space at all inside the park. The stairs and tunnels push you directly to where you need to be to watch the match. The spaces are tight and controlled until you finally emerge from the tunnels and find the expansive manicured green pitch laid out before you, surrounded on all four sides by two tiered stands with blue seats.

Our seats were located in the southeast corner of the upper tier which gave us a great view of the entire pitch. Although it was admittedly difficult to see clearly what was happening at the goal mouth at the opposite end of the stadium, the view at our end was perfect. Despite its size, the place is really pretty intimate. We were seated about six rows from the top of the stadium but we were really close. Just like the interior tunnels of the stands, the space around the pitch was used super efficiently. The two tiers of stands are built right on top of each other; the seats are tight at either side and in front and in back of you; and the distance between the touchlines and the stands is as small as it can be while still functioning as a stadium. It promised to be a great atmosphere to watch a sporting event.

One of the things I was looking forward to the most about this match was the atmosphere created by the crowd, and in particular the singing that English football fans are famous for. Unlike in the United States, where fans buy the best available ticket in any section to go watch a game, English football fans are segregated into home and away sections. It's a decades old tradition that I imagine started due to the close proximity of cities in England and was preserved through the practical necessity to keep rival fans away from each other when football matches served as excuses for hooligans to get drunk and fight the other team's supporters.

Those hooliganism days are long since past but the tradition remains. At White Hart Lane, the home supporters occupy a little more than 95% of the stands that circle the pitch and the away supporters are confined to a small area in the southwest corner of the park, easily identifiable by the slightly futuristic prison looking police watch tower hanging from the stadium roof right above their seats. That section filled up first on the day of our match and sure enough, the Liverpool fans broke into song first, likely buoyed by their being packed in tight in enemy territory.

Before kickoff though, the Spurs fans filled in the remaining empty seats in the home stands and started singing their own songs, which are really adaptations of traditional or public domain songs into football themed anthems. Tottenham's traditional anthems are "Glory, Glory, Tottenham Hotspur" set to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "When the Spurs Go Marching In" set to "When the Saints Go Marching In". Their fans also have a sort of slow dirge where they chant "Come On You Spurs" several times over. Those words, in addition to other phrases that reference the history of the club and particularly legendary manager Bill Nicholson, are posted around the stadium perimeter. I attend a lot of sporting events in the United States each year and the tradition and support hits you in the face at White Hart Lane and it's absolutely wonderful. Electronically encouraged chants of "Let's Go Wizards!" don't come close to what happens at Tottenham's ground every week. We have a lot to learn.

After all that buildup, unfortunately the game happened. The hoped for close contest between two contenders ended up being nothing of the sort. Liverpool turned out to be the better team by far on that Sunday afternoon. They were more aggressive, faster, controlled the ball better and were way more surgical in their attacks. Whenever Liverpool controlled the ball they moved quickly; the Spurs looked at least one step slower each time they were being attacked and when they finally got control of the ball, their runs were one on one or one on many affairs. There was no passing, no runs down the sidelines and no real chance to score (no scoring by the home team is exactly what happened). I can't tell you how many times a Tottenham player started a run in the midfield, only to find his opponent getting back faster and making him pull up, stop the ball and try to dribble around his defender. It didn't work.

Seven minutes into the first half, Liverpool scored and the crowd became noticeably deflated (well, except for the southwest corner of the ground). The chanting and singing stopped and despite hanging on that 0-1 deficit until half time, the prospect of the home team scoring looked bleak. I hoped maybe the second half would be better but a score came even quicker in that half on a ridiculous penalty call just two minutes in; the Liverpool player was touched gently on the arm and fell down instantly and unfortunately the referee fell for it. 2-0. The rest of the game was an exercise in futility and Liverpool's third goal, a beautiful run from midfield that left Spurs defenders looking far more than a step slow, sealed the home team's fate for the day. About five minutes before time, the home faithful started heading for the exits. And in the southwest corner of the stadium, that remained noticeably red (Liverpool's color), you could hear the crowd singing Liverpool's anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone".

I wore my brand new Spurs kit to the game (see the first photo above) but I can't say I'm a die hard Tottenham fan by any stretch of the imagination. My expectations were high for this game and I can't say I was totally satisfied with the experience. It's just too bad that the visiting team took the home crowd out of the game so early. But I have to tell you being a fan of the New York Jets and Washington Wizards, I often leave games disappointed. So I'm glad I went and I feel like I have now experienced something quintessentially English that I had missed in my youth. As we exited the stadium we heard one fan say "You can't play bloody QPR every week!" Nope, you can't. Maybe the next time I go I should pick a weaker opponent. Come on you Spurs!

The end of the match - the blue you see is empty seats; the red is Liverpool supporters.