For the first time ever, Arsenal will play Spurs overseas in a pre-season friendly - but is that a bad thing?
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For the first time in the modern history of the game, fierce local rivals Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur will meet in what is typically a less-than-ferocious environment – a pre-season friendly in Hong Kong before the start of the 2025/26 season. It will be the first North London Derby ever played abroad, and it’s a fixture which is generating a steady amount of backlash.
For some fans, it’s a frustrating breach of tradition, one of the most important matches in the calendar for either side relegated to the status of a warm-up match. For others, the concerns are more pragmatic, with supporters picturing crunching tackles flying in. Given how badly both teams’ seasons have been impacted by injuries, it’s perhaps an understandable concern.
But while a money-spinning friendly in East Asia may rankle with some supporters who dislike the trajectory of modern football, the concerns are probably – probably – unfounded. This may be new territory for Arsenal and Spurs, but this is familiar territory for the sport as a whole.
Why Arsenal & Spurs playing in pre-season isn’t such a bad thing
In August, Barcelona and Real Madrid faced off in the first Clásico of the season. The Spanish league, however, was still two weeks away from starting, and the match took place in New York.
It was the fourth time that arguably football’s biggest rivalry had taken place in the United States and, as it happened, the fourth time that Barcelona had won. The match was competitive, with relatively strong teams and plenty of action in a game that finished 2-1. But it was not, by any means, ill-tempered.
The North London Derby and El Clásico share much of the same DNA, and tempers boiling over is par for the course in either fixture. When Barcelona thrashed Real 4-0 in La Liga a few months later, there were seven yellow cards, but that’s the low end. In the Spanish Super Cup final in January, there were ten cards, one red. When they meet again in May, the chances are that sparks will fly in one direction or another, and it’s the same story for many north London derbies.
But the match in New York, while contested at pace and with plenty of effort put in, was a level-headed affair. Four bookings had to be handed out, but there were no scything, swinging tackles, no mass brawls, no real rancour. Over the course of the match, 26 fouls were committed – high for a friendly, perhaps, but only one more than happened when Barcelona played AC Milan a few days later.
Players, ultimately, don’t like getting injured in meaningless matches and for the most part have the common courtesy and fundamental professionalism not to needlessly risk injuries to the opposition, even when they’re the hated enemy. It probably helps that the crowd isn’t the same baying, seething mass that it might be in a normal game between such sides.
It probably doesn’t hurt matters that while players often attune themselves to the needs and desires of the fans, the majority of players involved in north London derbies aren’t dyed-in-the-wool Gooners or Spuds themselves. For the most part, players know that a friendly derby isn’t a “real” one. It’s unlikely that Arsenal or Tottenham go at it all hammers and tongs, although nobody truly knows until it’s actually happened.
In any case, this is only really new territory for these two teams, and plenty of sides have faced rivals on foreign soil in the name of making a quick buck, usually without dire consequences.
Injuries happen, of course, even in games that aren’t being played at full tilt. Manchester United fans know that well enough, given that Rasmus Højlund and Leny Yoro both picked up bad injuries playing Arsenal on tour last summer, while Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Victor Lindelöf took knocks playing Liverpool shortly thereafter. That wasn’t a testament to the spirit in which the games were played, however, as was hinted at when they separately saw Marcus Rashford and Antony come off with injuries against Real Betis, scarcely United’s greatest rivals.
The precedent set by other sides playing grudge matches in such environments suggests that it’s unlikely to be an especially vitriolic affair, and the odds of injury are likely no greater than they are in similar matches against less local opposition. Still, perhaps that itself is a frustration for some.
Why the dreams of supporters overseas should count for something
Does it cheapen the sense of occasion that surrounds the north London serby if a low-stakes edition of the game is played in Hong Kong? Perhaps a little, for a few fans, but it’s hard not to empathise with the position of the Premier League’s many global fans who simply don’t have the opportunity to watch these matches in the flesh under other circumstances.
Sure, the teams play these games to make money, not out of any sense of generosity towards their overseas supporters, but those supporters are often far more fervent in their fandom than they are given credit for.
American football hasn’t suffered for having regular season matches played abroad, and indeed the NFL’s global audience is soaring, in part because of those very matches played at Wembley or indeed the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. An extra fixture was added to the NFL schedule to ensure that local fans didn’t ‘lose’ anything on the occasions that their teams played overseas, and a lot of people in the UK and elsewhere have been thrilled at the annual chance to watch a sport that otherwise happens an ocean and several time zones away.
There are plenty of Arsenal and Spurs fans who are “true fans”, every inch, in Hong Kong and the United States and elsewhere. Given the Premier League’s immense global audience, why wouldn’t there be? And why shouldn’t those fans have the occasional chance to experience a north London derby (or at least a replica of it) in their own country?
If football has become too commercialised, if it has swayed too far in the direction of making money at the expense of tradition and spectacle, then it hasn’t yet dampened enthusiasm among English fans for the product. This is a by-product of the game’s rampant globalisation, for good and for ill, and that horse has long since bolted in the direction of money-making markets outside of Europe.
But those markets exist because people in them are passionate about the teams and players and are often excited by the games they get to watch. In playing slightly more competitive, ‘serious’ games in pre-season we don’t yet seem to have encouraged additional injuries – the vast burden of the fixture schedule is a better target for anger there – but have perhaps gone back to an era when friendlies had a little more heft.
Back in the Fifties and Sixties, the best teams from South America would come to Europe and tour for weeks on end. The games weren’t just knock-abouts, either, but often both a chance for the best players to showcase their talents in front of wealthier European sides. They were mostly taken very seriously.
There’s sometimes a little bit of scoffing when, say, Péle’s goals in friendlies are counted as part of his career tally, but that’s viewing the past through a modern lens in which friendlies have become largely irrelevant beyond their capacity to aid conditioning.
There are a lot of ways in which the sport as a whole is much better now than it was in an age of grainy black-and-white footage and barely anything that resembled modern professionalism, but perhaps friendlies that people wanted to watch counted for something. When Santos or Botafogo or another team toured Europe, people watched. This is, perhaps, a similar sort of experience being extended to new footballing frontiers.
Only Arsenal and Spurs fans can know how they feel about the occasion, and it may rankle on an instinctive level in a way that can’t be rationalised – but there is good that can come from this beyond the pounds and pence that the clubs will earn. This is giving fans in other parts of the world a chance to experience something they previously never could, with fans in London itself losing very little. At least, so long as the players are as well-behaved as they usually are when Barcelona play Real Madrid.