Spurs must move with the times to join giants

11 April 2012

And so it was Stratford Hotspur 0 – 0 Salford United. That was the gag limping around Twitter last night. Not exactly one from Bob Monkhouse's lost joke book but it told you something about the subplot to yesterday's game: a small but lively protest among the Tottenham fans, in which banners and chants were raised against the club's proposed move to the site of the Olympic stadium in east London.

Spurs fans don't seem to fancy the move, even if it does mean they'll get a swanky 60,000-seater ground with decent transport links, while the board will avoid all the tedious hassle they're getting from Haringey Council. Outside White Hart Lane, protestors waved bedsheets bearing slogans that included Levy No To [the Olympic rings]: WHL N17' daubed on them. On Twitter, the hashtags #saynotostratford and #wearen17 were used by supporters discussing the team's performance.

Admittedly, the Stratford campaign didn't trend as hard as another subject matter pertaining to yesterday's televised matches: Sky Sports pundit Dwight Yorke's risible shirt. But this is the fatuous old internet we're talking about here.

Taking Spurs from N17 to E15 — from White Hart Lane to Marshgate Lane — strikes quite a lot of Spurs fans as a betrayal. In moving, the club seem to be abandoning territory from which they came and on which they have dug out a rich, shared history.

For them, the value of the dilapidated, atmospheric tin shed that Spurs currently occupy is not to be found in the building itself but on the memories captured in the soil beneath it and crystallised in the chipped Tarmac and chicken boxes and dog eggs that lie all around it.

Spurs fans believe that this, their physical club, is the beating heart of norf London. To move the heart would kill the patient. As the protest song goes: "Say no to Stratford/north London is ours."

In an age where football clubs are less and less about geographical communities, and more about brand-building without borders, it would be easy to dismiss the protestors' attitudes as archaic and irrelevant. (After all, Spurs had David Beckham, the progenitor of football's international marketing explosion, sitting in the stands yesterday.)

In fact, if you don't get the mentality of the patch war, and the importance of a club owning' a particular bit of London, then a few cross blokes in baseball caps bellowing complaints about a move seven miles across town seems a bit, well, sad. You might feel it has all the dignity of the bit at the end of the last series of InBetweeners, in which the petulant Simon has a teenage tantrum about his family moving to Swansea. ("I'm not going! How does that sit in your f***ing plans?")

But that ignores the fact that big clubs still, even in 2011, have meaning to local people, no matter how big their international fan base and no matter how many shirts they sell in Guangzhou.

For the Spurs protestors, moving to Stratford is more than a seven-mile shift. It may as well be, if not the moon, then certainly Milton Keynes.

Still, for Spurs, both the match and the protests about the Stratford move threw up the sort of uncomfortable questions they must now answer as they make their move from reliable mid-table team to bona fide big boys.

Harry Redknapp has created a robust, exciting, attacking side who have proved this season to be the equal or better of Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Inter Milan and now Manchester United.

But for Spurs to entrench themselves in the English elite — be that the Big Four, High Five, Super Six, or whatever you want to call them — they will have to do the things that big clubs do. That might mean being ruthless with strikers who don't quite cut it (Peter Crouch, beware) and putting teams like United away when they're down to 10 men.

If Spurs want to grow into a genuine 21st century Big Club, they will have to countenance unpleasant moves, such as the one to Stratford.

Fans will have to work out whether they can afford to care very much about the location of the ground; or whether they are prepared to be ruthless in transforming their club into a serious global franchise, fit for competition in the world's biggest leagues and most lucrative developing markets.

A new stadium is crucial to all that and it seems Spurs really are serious about the move. There are plenty who would rather lose some of the battles than lose their soul, but that was ever thus in every field of human activity. And nothing profitable ever comes of it. The last drops of romance are rapidly draining out of football. In case you hadn't noticed.

Follow me on Twitter @dgjones

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in