Five: Contingency, Irony, and Tottenham Hotspur

7/29/2015 

Written right after the MLS All-Stars hosted Tottenham Hotspur. 

What? You don't remember this match? 

In my soccer universe, I support Tottenham Hotspur. This was a deliberate decision. After a World Cup, I realized I wanted more and I surveyed leagues (for TV accessibility mainly) and then teams. 

I thought about the Bundesliga because I enjoy reading and hearing German but it was hard to find then. Internet streaming has improved and I was excited to hear that Fox's cable channels are now going to show their matches. The English league won and Tottenham won the second round after a brief period. Some silly reasons were in play, like the name of the club and the name of the stadium, White Hart Lane. There were some more serious reasons. None of those have held up over the years. 

Spurs had just come in fifth after quite a bit time at mid-table and it would be interesting to see a team move up or down. I loved watching Robbie Keane's crazy moves and expressive face when he plays for Ireland. The name of the team represented a low-income area of London that deserves some solidarity and refers to Harry Hotspur, a comedy-relief character in Shakespeare. 

Statue of Harry Hotspur at Alnwick Castle (Not at White Hart Lane) 

I enjoyed what I caught of the fan culture, which seemed to revel in the agonies of fan life in a league with four bigger clubs in it. In the end Tottenham seemed to outweigh the other choices. I felt I should pick a team because I would learn more about the league and game if I followed one team closely. I also hoped it would constrain me so I didn't lose too much time. 

Every reason I have given here no longer seems as conclusive or as "heavy". I still like the name and would bet, if I had to, on Tottenham for fifth place again this season. But the club doesn't do much for the Tottenham neighborhood. The name "White Hart Lane" evokes something grander than the stadium itself. The new stadium as planned will be more like a spaceship hovering over the area than a project that develops it. I have found fans of other clubs with a very rich sense of irony and have met Tottenham fans whose suffering is too, too, real. But now that I am in, I am in. What I know about the club instills in me a desire to know what happens next to the club. I also want to see it improve. 

Computer Rendition of the planned new stadium.
Hard to see here but other angles make the words "Naming Rights" clear on the side. 

I still wonder what to think after seeing Robbie Keane manhandle Jake Livermore at an exhibition. Keane was my first favorite player. I think he should have been arrested. 

My loyalty is not unbreakable. I would have left a club if its chairman had laid out a series of racist and anti-semitic statements like Dave Whelan did. Whelan's downright nutty claims included the charge that the word "Chink" is not racist and that Jews are as good as "English People". This was made harder to take given that Whelan was defending his hiring of Malky Mackay, whose very many and very blunt racist, sexist, and anti-semitic e-mails and texts had been made public by his former employer. They are both gone from Wigan but it took some work. 

While less serious, if the Tottenham chairman had signed Mourinho as a manager, as some journalists said he tried to do, I would have taken a vacation from my fandom. He bullshits so much. He poked another teams' assistant manager, Tito Villanova of Barcelona, in the eye and then smiled. I just couldn't watch him decry his victimization any more. He complains about leagues and referees who defer to him over and over. Soccer is meant to be entertaining. If Mourinho were a pretend wrestling villain, a heel who is pile-driven by the babyfaced good guy in the end, I could be entertained by that. But, no, he just keeps winning. 

When Sheffield United sought to sign a convicted rapist as a player, I could see that there are limits I have when it comes to players. Ched Evans maintains a website that names his accuser and blames her for how she dressed and for being drunk. 

I also could leave if fan culture got too rough to handle. Some Sheffield United fans were chanting "Ched Evans, Ched Evans, he does what he wants." The club, and all others, eventually did not take Evans on as a player. But this case helps lay out some limits for a fan and some of the reasons behind those limits. 

Soccer is an entertainment medium. I just don't want to see a rapist play the game. Some say he has done his time. That means he is not in prison anymore. I would not want to see an ex-convict banned from every sort of job. Some commentators were expressing concerns about the social exclusion of ex-convicts. They have a point but this is an drama staged before a crowd using very powerful means of presentation. Take the likelihood of more chants like the ones we heard before Evans played and it goes beyond. Clubs seemed to agree with me here. 

While nothing has been bad enough to drive me away yet, I am quite sure that there are instances where Tottenham is blameworthy. Fans chant awful things to Arsene Wenger and to Sol Campbell, who left Spurs to play for Arsenal, and to win Arsenal a championship. I am tired of Spurs fans shouting "Yiddo" because I am tired of all the speech act analysis that follows. It is a question of degree and of scale. As I weigh it all, I still come down on affection and continue to build a story of the team. 

Highly Recommended

I have also enjoyed the women's game so much that I am going to have to figure out how to follow it and Tottenham and still fulfill obligations I have to philosophy, politics, and family. I was impressed by the research cited in Kuper and Szymanski's book Soccernomics that showed a very large number of fans change clubs in search of different experiences. If I had considered that a live option when I looked for clubs, I might have had fun watching dodgy feeds in obscure leagues. 


I have an ironic love for Spurs. I know that it is the product of accidents. I am not obligated by this love to demean other clubs, league, or the women's game. I hate it when people don't just say "I got wrapped up with Club X. Now that I follow it, I don't have time to add another league." Can't argue with that. However, you often have to listen to someone complain about the height of women goalkeepers and speculations about which teams could beat which teams. They seek to ground their loyalty in something other than this accidental story, they end up contradicting themselves or bashing whole clubs, leagues, or women as a whole. To call all of women's soccer "unwatchable" is misogyny. A sense of irony prevents that. You don't need to justify your decision to watch Real Madrid. You just do. 

Search "Soccer Hipster" on Google Images and this is what you get.
There is simply nothing wrong here. How ironic can an axe be?

The word "irony" is currently under suspicion. We are often over-scrutinizing features of youth culture. Irony is one of the details that may get you branded a "hipster". There was some concern when the New York Times talked about the rise of soccer fandom within the New York "Creative Circles". They didn't actual use the word "hipster" but somehow other clues were cited by internet sorts as implying this. I am too old to figure this sort of thing out. It seems like the word "hipster" is used if anyone does anything that other youth are doing and you don't like that person. Irony here seems to be linked with insincerity. A word ("irony" or "hipster") lacks meaning if it includes passionate fans of mass sport and people too cool to care about whatever is popular.  I plan to write about irony, good and bad, in a later post. I will argue that it is unhealthy to approach a sport as a fan without any sense of irony. 

Carl Lloyd punting Sepp Blatter's head. Gorgeous. 

The NYT mentioned Howler Magazine in that article. Howler works very hard to produce good articles and beautiful design.If Howler is hipster, I only hope I can be a hipster one day. 







I have been able to stick with Tottenham because its seasons have worked the way I think the world works. Tottenham is the club for ironists. Let's look at Richard Rorty's definition of Irony: 

"...I use "ironist" to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own beliefs and desires - someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance." Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; 1989. 

 I do not think irony is an appropriate attitude towards all convictions, as Rorty later shows he does. (That is a whole other topic.) I think irony is absolutely the right stance for the fan towards beliefs and emotions that surround the game. My devotion to Spurs is contingent. If I had stumbled on someone else's funny blog or if the Bundesliga had been easier to watch, I could have become a Sankt Pauli fan. They seem more like my kind of people truth be told. 

"Saint Pauli Fans against the Right!"

Banners at Sankt Pauli match supporting Refugee and calling out racist harassment

As for nominalism-- what do we even mean when we refer to "Tottenham Hotspur". The squad changes often. The management changes more often. Owners change and we don't watch them anyway. The crowd in the stands is the strongest link to the whole history of the club. Can a TV fan like me really point to the crowd and say, "That's us?" 

Rorty elsewhere also describes the ironist as story-telling but aware that narratives are tricky. They have to leave much out and focus on particulars that don't star in later stories. The world is not organized like an author organizes a story. So many details make no sense. To tell a story, even a true one, we have to leave much out or the story will not work. 

Spurs' seasons also do not build up the way an author would build up a narrative. They are not redemptive. Ferguson and Mourinho are not pile-driven. The big clubs get to steer the story with money and they steer the story-telling later as they talk about talent and virtue. I don't want to take anything away from the players on these clubs. But lessons learned from the stories they tell are just not going to translate. 

Unlike in a "good story", Tottenham's virtues are often trumped by money and wacky fate. There has been poison lasagna and there have been players lost to Real Madrid and (worse) Manchester United. A player stated that he was hexed by his mother. We often lose or win 3 to 2. We always win a couple of matches we should have lost and we always lose one more match we should have won. 

This image is called the "Cleaning of the Cockerel".
It is featured often in Spurs literature.
If this doesn't provoke some irony
(and some Freudian speculation),
I don't know what can.

For all that, I loved it when Spurs won the League Cup in 2008. (The manager that day, Juande Ramos, went on to lose match after match. Fans believe that he talked very little because he did not want to admit he needed a lot of translation. When I looked for a club, I hoped for a little bit of crazy storytelling.) I would also love that season in which we win the Premier League and the Champions League. But... 

But if victory became constant, if Tottenham left the pull of gravity itself, it would become alien to me and I could lose that unearned vicarious connection I have. This means, ironically, my team's enemies play a role for me. Each season a billionaire's train set passes by the players I know, I am assured they are earthlings. (Arsenal pass by Spurs season while spending less money. I suppose I should write them a thank-you-note of some kind. Now my sporting world is just as counter-narrative as my lived world.) 

I want Spurs to win while they still represent me and all those who can barely explain the world they must live in. I want to see them win while still seeing them subject to the crazy train of contingency and weird luck. This may be a bit of projection on my part, but I can't imagine Tottenham winning without the earth being moved with it-- moved somewhere I would gladly see it go.