Our Unique Culture

There’s a school of thought about sport fandom known as the ‘conflict critique’. Shaped by the needs of capitalist systems, sports fandom serves vested interests as a type of opiate that diverts, distracts and deflects attention from the pressing social problems and issues of the day. 

One commentator suggested that Karl Marx, had he been alive today, might have revised his famous comment “Religion is the opiate of the people” to “Sport is the opiate of the people.” 

You might think it glib to compare religion and sport - a deeply held belief system and men kicking a ball around a field. But for me, that’s not the right framing. The match is like the ritual of a ceremony, the commonality comes in a more important form. Community: human connection and shared beliefs that bring comfort and meaning to all of us, whatever our individual circumstances. In this way, sports fandom plays an important part in providing social cohesion in the modern world. Just listen to people chatting around the water cooler at the office on a Monday morning. 

When it comes to Spurs, there is something particularly interesting about the supporter community, and paradoxically it comes not from the club’s success but from its failures. Tottenham Hotspur has a loyal, passionate and globally dispersed fan base even though the club rarely wins anything. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t attract fair-weather supporters, or those looking to boost their self-esteem through association. Supporting Tottenham Hotspur seems to cultivate a resilience that inevitably shapes the culture of its supporters. I’ve witnessed loyalty that does not waver in the face of adversity, fostering a type of bunker mentality that holds us close and binds us together. It is a form of cultural alignment that is more often seen in smaller clubs, those that languish in the lower levels of the league hierarchy, never likely to experience anything different. For them, community is really all they have. It is tightly held and deeply cherished.

To see that same culture play out on a global scale is remarkable.

This point of difference can be seen clearly in my home country. OzSpurs, the Australian Spurs supporters club, is unique. It is the only English team supporters club in Australia that is organised nationally, all the others are city-based clubs with a loose affiliation with one another. OzSpurs is constituted as a national club with a committee made up of members from across the country and chapters in 13 different cities. Once a season, members come together for what is known as the ‘National’ - a weekend of social gatherings culminating in a live viewing of the last match of the season. In a bar, kicking off at 1am. 

It is not entirely clear why Spurs supporters in Australia organised themselves in this way when no others did. I see it as being a consequence of this unique culture. 

I’m biased, of course. After 60 years and counting, you wouldn’t expect anything else. Fans of other clubs will point to their own trophy-laden histories and claim they are better. In a way they’d be right, if that’s your measure of success. 

In truth, I don’t care about how supporters of other clubs define their culture, at times I can even value it. Who can listen to Anfield singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and not feel moved? Good for them.

For me though, supporting Tottenham Hotspur is my happy place. Being part of a community in which football has brought us together and friendship has kept us coming back.

This article is an extract from Andrew Pettifer's forthcoming book "Two Tribes: Discovering Community in a Platform World", the sequel to his first Spurs book "When the Final Whistle Blows; Glory, Grief and Tottenham Hotspur"