On the particular masochism of North London football, the neighbourhood identity it produces, and why I will not be switching

From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat: Lowri Griffiths on North London football loyalty.

People ask me, occasionally, whether I have considered switching. Whether the weight of sustained disappointment has accumulated to the point where a rational person would look at the evidence and decide that another club, perhaps one with a better recent record, might be a more sensible emotional investment. I tell them that this question misunderstands the nature of the relationship, which is not transactional and never was. I am Lowri Griffiths, and I support Tottenham Hotspur, and this is not a position that responds to evidence in the way they seem to think it does.

The club was built into my understanding of North London before I was old enough to evaluate the decision. The White Hart Lane of my childhood is gone now, replaced by a stadium so enormous and so magnificent that it feels, when you are inside it, slightly incongruous with the surrounding streets, like a space station that landed in N17 and simply stayed. I find I miss the old ground even though the new one is objectively better in every measurable way, which is also not a position that responds well to rational argument.

The North London Rivalry

I am not going to spend a significant portion of this piece on the other club because that would give them a significance in my emotional life that they do not actually have. I will merely note that the rivalry is part of the particular texture of North London, that it gives structure to the year in a way that other aspects of life rarely do, and that the feeling in this part of the city on derby day is unlike anything I have experienced in any other context. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have written about London football as a cultural phenomenon, and they are right that it functions as a form of neighbourhood identity that cuts across almost every other division: the long-term resident and the recent arrival, the homeowner and the renter, the old and the young, all sorted by allegiance into something that feels, on match days, almost tribal.

The Masochism Question

There is a long-standing joke about the particular suffering of the Spurs supporter, which I will not reproduce here because it is told by people who do not understand what they are describing. The joy and the suffering are not separate things; they are the same thing experienced from different sides of the same moment. The ecstasy of a last-minute winner is the exact shape of the agony that preceded it. You cannot have one without the other having been a possibility, and the possibility of the agony is what gives the joy its specific texture. I am aware this sounds like rationalisation. I accept that it is partly rationalisation. I also believe it is partly true.

The rational account of football fandom misses something important, which is that the irrationality is the point. The willingness to care about something you cannot control, to invest in outcomes that have no direct bearing on your life, to feel genuine emotion about grown adults kicking a ball in a direction you prefer — this is one of the few legitimately absurd things that most adults allow themselves, and I think the absurdity is worth protecting. It connects you to your neighbourhood, to your history, to the people who stood where you stand before you. It is irrational and it is valuable and I will not be switching.

The Neighbourhood Identity

What I actually care about, if I am honest, is not winning so much as the ongoing fact of Tottenham Hotspur in North London, the anchor it provides to a neighbourhood that has otherwise changed so much that I sometimes barely recognise it. The club is one of the few things that has remained consistently itself, however much everything around it has transformed. That consistency is worth something in a city that prizes disruption and rewards the new. Some things are worth being consistent about. This is one of them. I am keeping my scarf.

The neighbourhood identity that football provides in North London is one of the things I would miss most if I ever left, which I do not plan to do but consider occasionally in the way that you consider large hypotheticals: academically, without serious intent. The city is different when you belong to a part of it through something as specific and irrational as a football club. It gives you a frame for the year, a community of shared suffering and occasional celebration, a way of feeling at home that does not depend on property ownership or how long you have lived there. You support the club; the club belongs to the neighbourhood; the neighbourhood belongs to you in some attenuated but real sense. This is worth a lot in a city that can be anonymous in the way that only very large cities can be.

For more from Lowri Griffiths on North London, visit The London Prat. Football and culture at The Guardian’s football desk.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/