Tottenham Hotspur host West Ham United on Saturday and before kick-off, apparently, all attending are to be offered counselling.
Some say it is no time for jokes.
Here are two clubs with huge histories and a modern malaise; two clubs with unhappy fans, owner issues, governance questions, unpopular managers, recruitment failings; two clubs who appear to have lost their ‘Way’. Often declared irrelevant, it is that sense of identity and self-perception formed in the 20th century that somehow resonates well into the 21st century. It can be heard primarily in the complaints about the style of football, as well as in all the above.
Here are two clubs who have won European trophies recently — West Ham in the Conference League in 2023, Tottenham in last season’s Europa League. Yet the style of West Ham’s then manager, David Moyes, was considered negative and a mutual separation followed one year after that final, while Spurs’ Ange Postecoglou was unconvincing enough inside the club and their stadium to be dismissed a fortnight after the 1-0 victory against Manchester United that brought Tottenham’s first silverware since 2008.
That latter final, played in the Spanish city of Bilbao, was so poor it was labelled ‘El Cr*pico’.
On Saturday, we have what might be termed ‘El Disconnectico’.
Although there have been underwhelming and acrimonious times before at both clubs, this looks and sounds like the winter of their disconnect.
At Hotspur Way, Tottenham’s spectacular training ground, they are contemplating a season with a new head coach in Thomas Frank, a rejigged hierarchy and a Champions League campaign. Already, it is one laden with drama, individually and organizationally; paradoxically, the chant aimed at Frank on New Year’s Day, as Spurs drew 0-0 at his previous employers Brentford, was “Boring, boring Tottenham”.
On Saturday evening, they exited the FA Cup at home against an Aston Villa side playing the incisive push-and-run football Spurs were once famous for. It was 2-0 to the visitors at half-time, and Frank was being taunted by Villa fans about his future. Some of their Tottenham counterparts joined in. Had the second half deteriorated, Frank’s job might have been in jeopardy. Greater urgency, a goal from Wilson Odobert and some tenacity from Joao Palhinha appeased the home supporters, and Frank stays on in north London. The crowd’s desire to get behind a spirited team was clear.
Around 24 hours later, a few miles down the road in east London, more home voices joined in a chant by visiting fans, this time the 9,000 from Queens Park Rangers. West Ham had been taken to extra time in the FA Cup by a team with the 14th-best away form among the 24 sides in the second-tier Championship.
“You sold your soul for this s**thole,” QPR supporters sang. It might have spread further through the London Stadium stands had West Ham’s new striker Taty Castellanos not immediately headed in what proved to be the winner.
“Feels really nice,” said Nuno Espirito Santo, who was appointed West Ham head coach just over 100 days ago. “Happy, happy, happy. It’s going to change our week.”
It was a different tone from his programme notes, which included the line: “For several weeks now, things have been happening that are difficult to explain.”
West Ham had lost at home five days before to Nottingham Forest, a little unluckily, but they have the second-worst home record in the Premier League — seven points from a possible 33. With nine from 30, Spurs have the fourth-worst home record.
And now they meet.
Nuno, of course, had those four months as Tottenham coach in 2021. He connects both clubs, albeit in a manner which neither celebrate.
Protests also connect: supporter group Change For Tottenham will gather outside the Corner Pin pub adjacent to the stadium on Saturday to express frustration and anger at how the club are being run and, in the ongoing winter transfer window, to maintain pressure that “promises are kept” about investment into the team.
West Ham fans raised red cards in the direction of their owners during the 1-0 home defeat against Fulham on December 27 and then stayed away in their tens of thousands for the Forest match, even though it was a crucial relegation fixture. There are plans for Sunderland’s visit on January 24. Listen to the fanbases of both clubs and what you hear is that matchdays have become a chore.
This angst is not specific to January 2026 (nor does it belong solely to Spurs and West Ham). Provocations from earlier this season, and previous ones, are not hard to find. Tottenham have been in one of the three European competitions in 18 of the last 20 seasons — achievement; but have won only one trophy during that time (that Europa League final eight months ago) — under-achievement. Understandably, fans paying exorbitant ticket prices ask about that.
At West Ham, 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of them leaving Upton Park for the London Stadium, a decision that still feels to so many like a cutting of the cord.
And hovering in the background is a lingering sense of something larger. If there is no cabinet gleaming with silverware, no locality, how else do a club define themselves? In 2026, what are Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United all about?
Another connection between the two: Spurs and West Ham were the first two English clubs to win European trophies. Spurs lifted the now-scrapped European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1963 and West Ham repeated the feat in 1965.
This was the era when the clubs’ modern reputations were established and both centred on, in today’s football language, methodology. Spurs had push-and-run and ‘Glory’. Across the capital, they had the ‘West Ham Way’ and the ‘Academy’. Consciously, sub-consciously, these ideas seeped under the skin.
It worked.
In 1960-61, Tottenham became the first English team in the 20th century to ‘do the double’ — win the league title and FA Cup in the same season. They won the FA Cup again a year later and in 1967, then back-to-back in 1981 and 1982. They lifted the League Cup in 1971 and 1973, the UEFA Cup (today’s Europa League) in 1972 and 1984.
Across 25 years, the equivalent of this century, Tottenham won 11 major trophies.
But they were not simply winners.
Spurs were stylish performers and had an ethos shaped by their double-winning captain, Danny Blanchflower. His most famous quotation is: “The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory.”
Hence, ‘Glory, glory, Tottenham Hotspur.’
Some observers dismiss references to this as empty nostalgia, meaningless today. Actually, in football, it is tradition and heritage. There is a difference — nostalgia is sentimental reimagining; tradition is historic reality.
Spurs do tradition well — their stadium tour is loaded with history and black-and-white photographs line the corridors. At Saturday night’s tie with Villa, half an hour before a match where the team wore retro kit saluting Spurs’ 1901 FA Cup winners, they beamed ‘Together to Glory’ in neon lights onto the front of their stadium.
Few West Ham fans think their club does tradition well.
They view the move from Upton Park to the repurposed main arena for the 2012 Olympics as a rupture, not a relocation. Apartment buildings now sit where Upton Park was for 112 years. Some are named after former West Ham players, such as Noel Cantwell and Jimmy Ruffell — though the latter’s surname is misspelt as Ruffle. A plaque in between those two blocks marks the location of the pitch’s centre circle, beneath which is buried a ‘time capsule’ dedicated to legendary captain Bobby Moore. It’s called a ‘memorial garden’; it’s a small circle of grass.
There is also an ‘Academy House’. West Ham were the first club in England to have ‘Academy’ attached as a description — official and unofficial — to their work and framework. This was towards the end of the 1950s, when West Ham reached two Youth Cup finals and had future manager John Lyall in one of those teams and England World Cup 1966 winners Moore and Geoff Hurst in the other.
Moore and Hurst were central to the team who won the FA Cup in 1964 and that Cup Winners’ Cup against 1860 Munich a year later. Thinker-coach Ron Greenwood was so thorough he sent his entire squad to watch 1860’s semi-final against Torino in person.
In 1966, West Ham reached the League Cup final. During that decade, there were three top-10 finishes in the old First Division (what is now the Premier League) and six in the top 12. Under Lyall, they won the FA Cup again in 1975 and 1980. In 1986, they finished third in the league.
West Ham got to another Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1976, losing to Anderlecht. Even in defeat, some diehards consider this one of the club’s great performances.
Eight of West Ham’s starting XI were born in east London or surrounding areas. The club reflected a sense of place. They did not win every week, of course not, and as with Spurs, there was a relegation in the 1970s. But by the middle of that decade, the club possessed a reputation, a ‘West Ham Way’, qualities of grit and guile personified by Billy Bonds and Trevor Brooking.
“He (Greenwood) believed that football was a game of beauty and intelligence,” Brooking wrote in his autobiography.
Brooking described West Ham as “a real community club. We had our own patch of east London and for many locals, the club was the focal point of their lives”.
But the patch of east London has vanished — there has been one domestic cup final this century (the 2006 FA Cup) and that Conference League win. Other suffering fanbases might think their run of 14 consecutive seasons in the Premier League is nothing to gripe about, but Tim Crane, author of several West Ham books, explains today’s anxiety in historical context.
“In a nutshell, it means ‘entertaining football’,” Crane says, when defining the ‘West Ham Way’. “It’s overlapping wingers, pretty triangles, football on the ground, not in the sky, creative, entertaining football. It’s scoring goals, and if that means leaking goals, so be it. If you had to put it in one word, it would be ‘entertaining’.
“If you look at the history of West Ham – OK, we’ve won a few trophies – but we’ve always entertained. That’s the bit missing these days, and that’s why there’s a hankering for what some people call the West Ham Way. If you look at the team in recent years, and probably for the entirety of this century, we’ve had far too many midfielders and defenders with zero goals, zero assists, zero shots. That is in total opposition to the West Ham Way.”
“At Upton Park, we watched all manner of rubbish — we did — but we knew we were looking at a pitch where Bobby Moore played, where Hurst, Bonds, Brooking played, a ground where families grew together. We threw away something very significant — threw it away.
“And we have replaced it with something that doesn’t produce those feelings.”
When Crane is asked if, almost 10 years on, the stadium change still matters, he replies with a philosophical answer: “Well, what is football?
“It’s entertainment, it’s a social outlet, it’s going somewhere you feel comfortable, it’s a place where you create memories, a place with soul. And none of these words can be applied to the London Stadium. Fifty years from now, maybe it will be different. But at the moment, the atmosphere is toxic, and there’s a big disconnect between the old fanbase and much of the new; the players and the people who run the club.
“So, I’d say it does matter. If you want something meaningful, it’s very difficult to get excited about the modern West Ham.”
Comparing West Ham’s anguish to Tottenham’s difficulties, Crane adds: “We’ve both won European trophies in recent years, but it’s interesting that both those managers got sacked and both sets of fans continue to complain.
“It’s because we don’t fit this modern world, we haven’t quite found our footing — unlike a Brighton or Brentford. They have got one thing right that both Tottenham and ourselves haven’t: recruitment.”
In the cold air round the back of the Corner Pin before the Spurs-Villa cup tie, Adam Nathan and Adam Manson reach for similar phrases when discussing Tottenham’s despondency. Despite the apparent erasure of the Tottenham Way and West Ham Way, and frequent mockery, Nathan says: “I do find it odd that you would criticise West Ham and Spurs for having a way of playing.”
Nathan is 38 and is too young to have seen Glenn Hoddle in action, never mind Blanchflower. He contributes to a Spurs podcast called An Echo of Glory. Like Crane, his club-specific grumbles soon morph into broader state-of-the-game concerns.
“It’s football,” he says. “We’ve been here for more than 100 years. It’s about the community, fans, culture… everything. In a sport that’s becoming so franchised, isn’t it great that fans and clubs have a set way of being what they are?
“There is a way I expect Tottenham to play. Perhaps it’s ingrained in me via osmosis from parents and grandparents. Football needs to be careful not to force these ‘Ways’ out of the game, because you will end up with a soulless sport.
“It’s been focused as much about individuals as the team — Jurgen Klinsmann, David Ginola, Robbie Keane, Dimitar Berbatov, Gareth Bale, Harry Kane, Son Heung-min. That’s the lineage, that’s what the Tottenham Way means to me — exceptional individuals. The reason Spurs are depressing now is there’s no one I’d be desperate to come to see.”
Yet Nathan and Manson downplay the notion of Spurs fans as ideological purists and both note how there was a point when every supporter got behind the football of head coaches Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte when they were in charge in recent years. Nathan says “pragmatism is the antithesis” of Tottenham, yet both gladly accepted the club’s Europa League triumph, despite the dreadful final.
That was, they say, about winning at last. Manson admits he wept in Bilbao.
“When I started to support in the mid-1990s,” he says, “it was that — the Spurs Way, the glamour, the stadium, the white kit, Klinsmann, Ginola. Remember, Spurs won a trophy (League Cup) in 1999 under George Graham. But it was not exciting.
“Spurs are about wide players — same as Manchester United. We had a couple of weeks in the 2003-04 season when we lost 4-3 at home to Manchester City in the FA Cup, beat Portsmouth 4-3 on Jermain Defoe’s debut and drew 4-4 at home to Leicester. That was… Spurs! It’s one of my favourite eras — we lost so many games, but it was good to watch. It’s the kind of front-foot, attacking football Frank said he wanted to bring, but so far hasn’t.”
In between those Portsmouth and Leicester games, there was also a 4-2 win at Charlton Athletic — 28 goals in four Spurs matches.
There is some sympathy for Frank — Tottenham’s vast injury toll is debilitating and he has no Defoe, the future England striker who joined them from West Ham in 2004. But there is no sympathy for the club’s present-day recruitment. Spurs have the Premier League’s sixth-highest wage bill, and given the correlation between wages and season finishes, sixth is seen by some as a ceiling. Of the traditional ‘Big Six’ clubs, plus Aston Villa and Newcastle United, they have had the lowest total playing wage increase in the past five years.
“Some people in football are too focused on their floor rather than their ceiling,” Nathan says. “We are one of the richest clubs in the world, so there’s no excuse to be bad for too long.”
Manson takes that and expands on it: “The futility of the whole endeavour is killing Spurs and West Ham. The hope you can break the monopoly of these big clubs. Manchester City have spent £500million on transfers in the last 12 months, and that doesn’t include wages. Arsenal have spent over a billion pounds under Mikel Arteta (in his six years as manager).”
And so they are disconnected. And so Spurs fans will demonstrate.
Saturday’s match is 14th versus 18th in the 20-team Premier League. Two clubs groping for meaning, playing percentage football. And as Nathan says, the losers will be ‘meme-ified’, an impatience helping nobody.
“The modern game is: ‘You cannot lose a match’,” Crane says. “In 1976, we lost 4-2 to Anderlecht (in the Cup Winners’ Cup final) and we have reunions, we celebrate it — because of the style, because we reached the final. We were playing scintillating, attacking football. The players (in that team) went to local schools (as children). It was like watching your brother.
“There’s that song by James — ‘If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor’. We’ve seen football played the correct way.”
Manson agrees: “The whole sport has changed. Winning matters too much, and the assembling of teams and coaches is based on data, percentages. Every team wastes time now, takes long throws. The West Ham Way? The Tottenham Way? Where?”
And glory?
“This club isn’t built to win trophies,” Manson says of Spurs’ wage bill. “And if you don’t have trophies or the Tottenham Way, then what do you have? The club pretend the Tottenham Way matters. They use it as a punchline.”
Some will disagree, others will agree.
In London’s N17 and E20 postal districts, they may not want to hear jokes about losing your way.