A People's History of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club

How Spurs Fans Shaped the Identity of One of the World's Most Famous Clubs

Alan Fisher, Martin Cloake, Alan Fisher

• Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785312465
• Year: 2016

Drawing on social history, contemporary press reports and first-hand interviews with the fans themselves, authors Martin Cloake and Alan Fisher trace the club's development from being the team of the suburbs and the rising south, through the glory years and the arrival of mass, popular culture, and into the modern era of the game. It is not a tale of trophies won and lost, of players bought and sold. Instead, it is the story of how one of the game's oldest and most famous teams was formed and established by its fans and how its identity was created by them. It evaluates how the fans' relationship with the club has evolved, as the game has changed: from those bygone days, when a club was at the heart of a local community, to the modern era, where the world's leading football clubs have to compete as multinational "brands," appealing to fans on a global scale, stretching much further and wider than the north London footprint than the club's founders would have ever imagined.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• A crowd walked across the muddy fields to watch the Hotspur play
• Enclosure changed the game forever
• Tottenham Hotspur have done more for the shilling man than any other club in England
• They played a different type of football
• Can I look after your car, mister?
• I go for the football but I don’t mind if the fighting’s there
• A tiny part of Tottenham Hotspur plc
• “We would sell a few thousand copies. We would publish pretty much anything!”
• Protest in the boardroom
• Does your rabbi know you’re here?
• More than customers
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Photographs