This Week in Fandom: Salvation, & Other Stories.
Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the Knicks, Yanks, 49ers Raiders, and Tottenham Hotspur – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.
It has been, as you might imagine, a rather complicated season for me. I have visited not one but two cathedrals of London football, and the 6th Horseman of the Apocalypse (his name is Relegation) has loomed large and menacing over both the London and Tottenham Hotspur Stadia.
The Premier League is the wealthiest it’s ever been – even Everton can afford the occasional Ferrari now – and that usually trickles down to its cultural epicenter in London. There are so many human beings in the capital at any one moment, be they residents or visitors, that you imagine two in every five could be talked into (even) Brentford season tickets. It’s barely been a year since Crystal Palace won their first FA Cup by felling the big blue giant that is Manchester City.
The problem with the Premier League, and with this season in particular, is it has a sustainability issue – where the competition is capable of brutally punishing both prudence and negligence. That sustainability issue gives rise to various narrative problems, which can’t be resolved (in the long run) by open play.
Even if Palace, or more recently Aston Villa, attempt to convert domestic or continental glory into (just for argument’s sake) a title push, either market forces or too-little-too-late fair play rules will strike them right down to their place. The doors shut just in time for billionaire boys’ clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City, and olden powers like Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United, to keep out upstarts like Brighton and Tottenham Hotspur – who have futilely plotted mutiny for years. (Both clubs are lauded by football people for being solidly run businesses; no matter that this doesn’t translate into the main reason sports fans sacrifice their souls for teams.)
There is no real cost, existential or competitive, to Liverpool blowing just under half a billion on a wasted season that won’t even carry them into Europe. The two Manchesters will simply scour the league again for more of its top performers. Between its feeder network, hedge fund manoeuvres, and pop-the-weasel approach to profit and loss reports, Chelsea might be the most dubiously run operation in the game. When the league begins anew in August, these four clubs (plus the Arsenal) will shop on football’s high street without having to factor anyone else, not really, into their competitive strategy. Even the lacklustre Tottenham Hotspur, a big fat London club, will be summarily expected to spend the 2025/26 season away – like it was a nightmare that never happened.
Meanwhile a team like Bournemouth, that’s come up steadily and done things “the right way”, will be rewarded with European competition but also multiple threats to its current stature: the threat of losing its best players, and having to re-tool a starting lineup; and then there’s supplementing a squad that will now have to play an extra game a week. Ticket sales will increase at the gate, and the shareholders will enjoy that sort of take surely. But it’s not like Bournemouth FC, the entity its fans actually interact with, will suddenly gain a few million more followers worldwide. (The manna from heaven larger brands, who’ve bought success in order to claim overseas reach, use to leverage the costs of on-pitch failure.)
The football media machine, whose liquidity now owes plenty to clicks from that same global audience, will lean into the benefit of visualising the Cherries’ best players on ‘bigger’ sides. Days, weeks-on-end of transfer speculation, carried out on social media comment threads, on YouTube vlogs, and (once more) in serious newsrooms. In this way football resembles global business, and the way in which we (the workforce) interact with employers: the money determines everything, including the actual product.
I outrightly (no one does this sort of nonsense in public) became a Tottenham Hotspur supporter presuming either the league or its subscribers genuinely wondered about competitive integrity … Are Fulham FC fans just supposed to wafer around at mid-table, because they have butlers who dip their wafer biscuits for them in fresh tea? Are Hull City supposed to earn promotion purely for the vibes, just come up and essentially battle for their lives if not this upcoming season then surely the next?
Cue Tottenham Hotspur, and West Ham, because the uncomfortable Schadenfreude of the 2026/27 season is it exhibited a rare art-piece: not absolutely anyone can compete for silverware with the right commercial and athletic tactics – but absolutely anyone can go down with a steady habit of mismanagement, and some exquisitely timed malfeasance.
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I understand why clubs 10 to 20 on the Premier League table would want to see Tottenham Hotspur go down, and the reasoning might even apply to supporters of “Big 4” sides. People want to see some representative of the system fail. 95% of the football clubs in England (in football!) don’t get to sell their best players to Real Madrid, consequently begin a shopping spree that then attracts everyone else’s best talent to a city like London, and in time green-light stadium expansions for seats they can actually sell out. The idea of Tottenham Hotspur going down possessed the meritocratic potential of Leicester City winning the league, and it could have proved that fans aren’t entirely beholden to the whims of all this money.
I think I’ve done an astute job so far of leaving my politics out of this, but in some ways Spurs deserved this hell and in some ways they didn’t. They made real-life attempts to sign some serious ballers last summer, but stood pat during a full-blown injury crisis in January. They got rid of a long-standing chairman, and effectively the face of the franchise, in what appeared to be a matter of meetings – with no long-term foresight guiding a Disney-esque ‘new beginning’. In ongoing aspirations towards big club status (canny startups like Brighton and Brentford are almost bored by all the bureaucracy) Tottenham continue to eschew the integration of academy talent … whilst conglomerates like City and United make the likes of Nico O’Reilly and Kobbie Mainoo important pieces.
Many times this season I’d written you at my wit’s end, ready to quit the peculiar strain of mental torture that is supporting Spurs. Not because my pride can’t handle a bit of abuse (a tad extra turns me into the Commonwealth Hulk), and not necessarily (though there were moments) for all this lower-table suffering. I’d just started to wonder what the point is, attaching oneself to a wagon that’s categorically never expected or destined to reach the Promised Land. I thought about this a lot, my week as an Iron. How Hammers fans – West Ham itself a ‘big club’, bigger picture, don’t get me wrong – must every season simply take pride in the little things. Jared Bowen down the wing. Crysencio Summerville sending man shops.The occasional derby upset. Innocuous European glories.
If the Premier League were a person, and it kind of is, what would it say in response to me asking: am I some sort of idiot? Whose job is it to keep this ship from becoming the Bundesliga or La Liga, where the unheard of now never happens – the Football Association, with financial fair play measures that purport to speak to parity? The players, with just a touch more loyalty to the football projects that sponsor their meteoric rises? Surely not all the global fans, who quite rightly have zero interest in having to say prayers, on their knees, at home to Everton in Matchweek 38.
It’s astounding to me that more people don’t consume American football. All the teams as a collective had to do was each publish their nifty schedule videos, and all of last-year’s bridesmaids are dreaming again. All the Giants did was hire a seasoned head coach and draft an edge rusher at number 5. All the Saints have done is stumble upon a bit of a quarterback in the attic, and now they’re like, Here: why don’t you take the car out for a spin, take a couple elite-ish wide receivers with you, and just be back here by 8. All the Raiders have done is tantalise the notion of a competent offense, led by a quarterback who knows his way around a spreadsheet, and I’m literally wearing my Raider hat everywhere I go.
The snap breaks in September, and then my foolish heart tends to ride that autumn wind wherever the highlights tell it to. But if I can do this Tottenham Hotspur season, if I can suffer, then sheeeeeit. I can do any damn thing, my boy.
