The Wednesday Spurs: why you'll prise the name Tottenham from my cold, dead hands

There are two separate strands to the story of Tottenham demanding that we don't call them by that name any more, and both of them are in equal parts amusing and a little depressing.

The recent news that Tottenham Hotspur Football Club don’t want the media to use the word ‘Tottenham’ when describing them was, in some respects, not a surprise. It felt like another step en route towards the full Americanisation of the club, a slap in the face to the place that it has called home for more than 140 years, and also to those among us who strongly identify with that part of the world.

The edict read as follows:

When referring to the team or the brand, please use ‘Tottenham Hotspur’, ‘Tottenham Hotspur Football Club’ or ‘THFC’. Never refer to our Club as ‘Tottenham’, ‘Tottenham Hotspur FC’ or ‘TH’.

There are elements of this which just don’t even really make any sense. Does anyone ever call them ‘TH’? Is that a thing that has ever happened in any circumstances that haven’t involved a requirement for two letters and two letters only? What’s the difference between ‘Tottenham Hotspur Football Club’ and ‘Tottenham Hotspur FC’?

There is some form of method behind this extremely idiosyncratic form of madness. The club argue ‘Tottenham’ is the name of the area and not the name of the club, and that this has been their policy for a very long time. Well okay, fine. You do you, boo. But why this insistence to the media—and therefore by extension, it could be argued, to fans themselves—that we all follow their diktat on the matter too?

There has been an argument about copyright which would make sense if it in any way made sense. It is true to say that there was a period during the 1960s and 1970s when clubs changed their badges to make them their own in order to capitalise on the growth of commercial opportunities that could come from doing so. You couldn’t, for example, copyright a coat of arms, so many were dropped as badges in favour of something more easily-copyrightable. But that was decades ago. Tottenham already hold all the trademarks they need.

But regardless of the reasons, for this supporter at least it’s felt like a bit of a kick in the teeth. I’ll try to explain. I’ve led a fairly rootless life, roughly equal thirds spent in London, Hertfordshire and Sussex. In some respects, I’ve moved to where I needed to when I needed to do it, though I have regrets about a couple of the decisions, in particular their timing.

And that has left me without much of a sense of ‘home’. Indeed, one of the great unspoken truths of the nature of football support is that it was forged during an era when people moved around far less than they do nowadays. This is intended as an observation rather than criticism. I don’t expect the world of football to bend around me now living nowhere near North London.

But for me, that sense of identity is important. I lived the first five years of my life in that very neck of the woods, just behind the Angel Edmonton. One of my earliest vivid memories is looking down at my fingers gripping onto a white painted window shelf and then peeking out over this green-yellow 1970s leaded-petrol murk but being able to see this fuzzy—I was, although I didn’t know it at the time, extremely short-sighted—white light in the background, like an alien spacecraft had landed.

We moved in 1977, but only a couple of stops up the train line, to the corner of Enfield that borders right onto the top of Edmonton. There was not a single person in my class at Bush Hill Park junior school who didn’t support Tottenham, although some had second clubs. It was only when we moved to Hertfordshire in 1982 that I really got to experience people who supported other—sometimes better—teams in their full, gory detail.

I haven’t lived in Edmonton for coming up to 48 years now and Enfield for 43, but I have been back to both and it is strange, the extent to which I immediately feel at home in either. They’re very different places. Upper Edmonton and Tottenham feel like London in a way that Enfield Town just doesn’t. It’s easy to forget that Enfield was a market town in Middlesex until it was absorbed into the capital just seven years before I was born.

Spurs is inside me. I’m not sure that I’d usually go for a phrase like “in my blood”—to say this makes them feel uncomfortably like Hepatitis C or something—but that is what it feels like. I’m stuck with them, and they’re stuck with me, and I just have to put up with their inevitable Tottenham Hotspurring in the same way as I have to put up with cleaning my glasses lenses because I’m short-sighted.

I also acknowledge that I put little of value (money) into the club. I have one of these because, well, just look at it, but I’m not a season ticket holder, I haven’t been to a home men’s game there in enough years for me to not be able to remember when it was (though I’ve been there for a women’s game this season), and I can’t remember whether I renewed my membership of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust or not. (Not that I can afford to now anyway.)

So to a great extent, it doesn’t matter what I feel about it, because that’s the nature of football in the 21st century. They don’t care about my fee-fees. And why should they? But this story is wholly indicative of two separate strands of the modern game. Firstly, it’s another tiny little chip away at the football’s soul. It’s nothing in the overall scheme of things, just another reminder of this death by a thousand cuts, that the game that we know will be replaced with something more beneficial to big capital over time, and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

And secondly, it’s an almost ironic reminder of the Tottenhamesque nature of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. The self-own here is obvious. They could have just… not sent this diktat. I mean, what is the punishment for not observing it, anyway? “You’ll make Daniel Levy sad”? Will media outlets who don’t conform be banned from post-match pressers?

Perhaps if Spurs want more positive coverage in the media in the future, they should focus a little more on addressing the structural issues which have been affecting the men’s team for decades and now seem to have spread to the women’s team as well, and a little less on demonstrating that, as ever, they’re more interested in the business than the football. Try being a little less, shall we say, Tottenhamy. That part of that name is part of who I am, and they’ll have to prise it from my cold, dead hands.