Spurs fans: why we do it

“We are more fulfilled when we are involved in something bigger than ourselves.” 

Astronaut and Senator John Glenn

In 1975, my tenth birthday present came in the form of a small, neatly wrapped package, about 5cm wide by 8cm long and 1cm deep. (Decimalisation was new to my parents, but it was all I knew.) Unwrapping the package, I turned it over to reveal the wording on the front of a small booklet: ‘1975-6 Season Ticket Block H Tottenham Hotspur Football and Athletic Co Ltd West Stand’.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was my favourite book when I was a kid, but this was better even than a golden ticket. From that moment on, my allegiance to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club was locked in. For life. For better or worse. Through thick and thin. Thin, mainly.

Whilst the genesis of my love of sport and alignment with the blue and white side of North London is easy to identify, motivations for sports fandom are surprisingly wide. Studies have identified a range of motives. The authors of these works wrap their findings up in all sorts of smart words and statistical analyses to justify their academic credentials, but they’re really not all that complicated:

Group affiliation - people like to come together to socialise;

Aesthetics - the beauty and grace of sport is an enjoyable thing to watch;

Self-esteem - when your club wins a trophy and you get to bask in the glory of the victory (Obviously, this one doesn’t apply so much to Spurs fans);

Eustress - a combination of euphoria and stress; 

Escape - the opportunity to forget about everyday life.

Roughly three-quarters of the global population self-identify as sports fans. In the majority of countries, the most popular sport to follow is football, of the ‘soccer’ variety, although Americans and Australians prefer their own versions. Indonesians love badminton. Curiously, the people of Poland are most drawn to watching people on skis hurling themselves from a great height at tremendous speeds. Poles’ love of ski jumping is mainly down to the efforts of one man, Adam Małysz, whose World Cup domination between 2000 and 2003 turned a niche sport into prime-time TV. He gave Poland a unifying, feel-good story at a moment in its history when the country needed something positive to cling to. Eddie the Eagle’s attempts to do something similar in the UK were less successful.

Intriguing as it is to see men and women attempt to fly unaided, for most of us it’s football that grabs our attention. Indeed, it’s estimated there are 3.5 billion soccer fans globally - not far short of half of the people on the planet. Reports suggest that 3 billion people watched the FIFA World Cup, so either half a billion soccer fans didn’t watch it or the numbers are very approximate; I suspect the latter. Either way, it’s a lot of people.

Academics talk about supporters in terms of ‘team identification’ and the word they use for the highest level of engagement is ‘allegiance’. The more I’ve listened to Spurs podcasts and followed fan groups on Facebook, the more the definition has rung true: “an attitude that is resistant to change, stable across context and time, influences cognitive processing of information, and is predictive of behaviour”. For those of us who share this allegiance, we’re lifelong fans whether we like it or not, and there’s not much we can do about it. Our fandom becomes an extension of ourselves, touching our lives in ways that are both moving and profound. It is difficult to change how we think or feel about the team because our role as a supporter has become a central and valued part of our place in the world.

The Godfather of fandom research is one Daniel Wann, Ph.D. This is a man whose online CV, listing books, publications and conference papers about sports fandom, runs to 62 pages. In possibly the most intriguing of his studies, Wann and his colleagues in 2011 asked Major League Baseball fans to complete a form gauging their willingness to consider a series of unusual behaviours if the act would guarantee their team a World Series title. 51% said they would give up sex for a month, whilst 47% would donate an organ and 10% said they’d be happy to cut off one of their fingers.

The willingness of fans to consider such hypothetical sacrifices is influenced by the likelihood of their team winning the title in question. No Manchester City fan would need to countenance losing a digit, or their matrimonial rights, given the inevitability of the desired outcome occurring in the near future. Spurs fans, on the other hand, would likely donate limbs in droves for the privilege of seeing their team lift the Premier League title.

The impact of sustained success and the reduced level of fan engagement that results from it is a well-known phenomenon. Manchester City fans often don’t take up their allocation of tickets to high-profile matches, and the atmosphere at the Etihad is notoriously dull.

On the contrary, the heightened engagement of fans of a club that rarely succeeds shows the opposite effect when they experience an infrequent triumph. This effect was clearly demonstrated by the 225,000 Spurs fans who packed the streets of North London in May 2025 to celebrate the club’s first trophy in seventeen years. If you thought that was impressive, it was nothing compared to what happened in Chicago in 2016 when the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series in baseball after a century of trying. Five million people - the seventh largest gathering in human history - attended that parade. If you are interested, the top five were all religious gatherings; 6th was the 1995 World Youth Day in the Philippines; and 9th, remarkably, was a Rod Stewart concert on New Year’s Eve 1994, Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro. I guess they really did think he was sexy.

Sitting on my parents’ bed in my pyjamas on that summer morning in 1975, I didn’t realise that the small booklet in my hands was not only about football. It was a golden ticket to something far more important: belonging, identity, and being woven, for better or worse, into something far bigger than me.

Andrew Pettifer is the author of "When the Final Whistle Blows: Glory, Grief and Tottenham Hotspur". All proceeds are being donated to cancer research, please click the link to check it out.