Tottenham Hotspur fandom from across the pond

A newsletter for American fans, new fans, and everyone in between

Welcome to Spurs Across The Pond by me, Caroline Stefko. Let’s kick things off with a joyous moment:

(I had never been so happy to be right! Also, this was clearly before I learned about official match hashtags.)

It’s been a fun, dramatic couple of seasons since I adopted Tottenham Hotspur as my Premier League club. One of the things I’ve enjoyed most is getting to know fans from far and wide who share the same passion for Spurs.

I’ve discovered a lot of great Tottenham fan blogs, newsletters, and podcasts from local fans in England, but haven’t been able to find any yet from a US fan perspective that isn’t run by one of the big sports media groups. While I appreciate an insightful analysis of stats and enjoy transfer news as much as any fan, I’ve found myself wishing for something a little more personal and yes, unashamedly biased. As someone who has a lot of feelings about this mercurial football club, I asked myself—why not me? So here I am. And here you are. Let’s yell about soccer together.

You might be wondering how I, a humble American from suburban Texas, came to support an English football club that is decidedly not one of the more popular Premier League teams here in the US. We have to go a ways back to get to the origin of my Tottenham fandom.

I first started watching the Premier League when I was in middle school (mid-2000s), after the classic soccer film Bend It Like Beckham piqued my interest. Back then, I didn’t follow any particular team, preferring to just watch as many games as I could (TV coverage for the league wasn’t that great at the time in the US, so I took what I could get), keeping up with my favorite players and watching more for the enjoyment of the sport than with any real stakes in the scorelines. One of the teams I watched most often was Tottenham, with Robbie Keane being my favorite player for Spurs.

In high school, I stopped playing soccer myself to focus on academics and didn’t have as much time to tune in to the PL. And as more and more of my favorite players started to retire or transfer to other leagues, I felt less motivated to get back into it.

That changed with the 2018 World Cup. I’ve long rooted for my ancestral homeland of Germany in the World Cup because let’s face it, the USMNT has not given Americans much to be proud of in recent campaigns (the USWNT is obviously a completely different story). I was crushed when Germany exited in the group stage, but the tournament was really fun overall that year, and it’s not like I was going to stop watching, so I had to pick another team to root for. I got caught up in the “it’s coming home” fervor and grew to love the England team. I’m not sure why it was this World Cup in particular that made it happen, but I felt compelled to start watching the PL again so I could keep up with the players from the England squad that I’d become familiar with.

So then there was the matter of choosing a team. It was fun in the past to watch without any stakes, but I wanted to be a proper fan this time around. I told myself I would watch as many of the games as I could for the first few matchdays and then make a decision, but by the end of Matchday 1, I already felt myself gravitating towards a certain lilywhite & blue jerseyed team.

I ended up adopting Tottenham Hotspur FC as my PL club for a few reasons:

• the Tottenham starting XI was chock full of players from the national team, including Harry Kane, Dele Alli, and Kieran Trippier (*cue sad violin music*)
• I enjoyed their style of play and the overall feeling of being underdogs with a lot of heart
• as a lifelong San Antonio Spurs fan, how could I not pick the team with Spurs in the name?? I also got a serious Popovich vibe from Tottenham’s manager, Mauricio Pochettino. He didn’t have the longevity of Pop but seemed to inspire the same sort of cultish devotion from the fans and players—in a good way. Their names even sort of sounded the same… Pop, Poch…
• like many before me, my heart was captured in an instant by Son Heung-Min

Those seemed like good enough reasons as any to pick Tottenham, seeing as how I didn’t have any sort of family history tying me to a local club. I look forward to the day I can make the trip across the pond and see a game in-person at the new stadium! Not looking good right now with the pandemic, but I can dream.

My goal for this newsletter is to share matchday recaps, squad commentary, and much more in an approachable way. I also would like to push back a little against the straight maleness of it all in soccer media.

Even though I’ll be discussing Tottenham most often, I guarantee there will be some tangents about other PL clubs, and as an American fan, I find it hard to take the London rivalries too seriously (except for Arsenal of course). This is a safe space for good-natured banter!

You can find me tweeting @cgstefko, where I also talk about the Bundesliga and the NBA, if that’s your jam.

Note: I will be using ‘soccer’ and ‘football’ interchangeably because my brain refuses to make a distinction or settle on just one term. Same with things like ‘team’ vs ‘club', ‘match’ vs ‘game’.