Tottenham Hotspur F.C. supporters
The fanbase of Tottenham was initially drawn primarily from North London and the nearby home counties, but the fanbase has expanded worldwide and there is now a great number of fans around the world. The club has one of the best attendance figures in the Premier League for its matches, and it holds the record attendances in the Premier League. There is a long-standing rivalry with Arsenal, and the North London derby is considered the most important of their matches by the fans.
Tottenham Hotspur has an active fanbase that forms organisations to support the team and interact with other members. They also engage with the club and had at times exerted their influence over the club on various issues in its history. They have published fanzines and established an online presence in fansites, forums and blogs dedicated to the club.
Demographics
The support for Tottenham Hotspur traditionally comes from the North London area and the nearby home counties such as Hertfordshire and parts of Essex. An analysis by the Oxford Internet Institute that maps the locations of football fans using tweets about Premier League clubs during the 2012–13 season showed Tottenham to be the most popular on Twitter in 11 London boroughs and around 60 postcodes, compared to 3 London boroughs and 25 postcodes for Arsenal. However, the club being local is of lesser importance in recent times, a 2008 survey indicates that only 27% of fans first attended the club's home matches because it is local. On average, fans who attended the club's matches lived from the club in surveys.Although football is traditionally considered a working class sport, around three-quarters of Tottenham supporters are broadly defined as middle class. In 2007, 30% of Spurs supporters earned more than £50,000, and the average wage of the supporters was £45,000, compared to the median average yearly salary for the country as a whole of around £20,000 at that time. The club is located in one of the most ethnically diverse and poorest parts of London, Northumberland Park in Haringey, but only 8–9% of people of non-White ethnic background attended their matches according to the 2007 and 2008 surveys, although that is higher than the national average of 6%. The fanbase is also predominantly male, with around 11–13% of its supporters female in the 2007/2008 surveys, which is below the average of 15% for Premier League clubs. The cost of attending football matches has affected the age of fans, with younger fans being increasingly priced out of the game. Tottenham has seen a sharp rise in ticket prices in the Premier League era, and it had the most expensive season tickets in the Premier League in the 2018–2020 seasons. The average age of Tottenham season ticket holders was estimated to be 43 in 2016 and rising.
Estimates of the size of the club's fanbase vary, the club claims to have three million fans in the UK, and over 180 million around the world who follow the team's progress. 80 million of them are said to be in Asia, with close to 45 million people in China, and Indonesia registered the most followers for the club on Facebook in 2014. Tottenham Hotspur has a combined global social media following of over 90 million as of 2023. They are the most popular Premier League club on TikTok with over 24 million followers, almost 4 million more than the second most-followed Premier League club. It is ranked sixth of the major Premier League clubs on selected social networks, but has grown rapidly, adding four times more followers in China's Weibo than Arsenal in 2018.
The growth of fans worldwide is driven to some extent by the ubiquity of Premier League matches broadcast around the world, but some overseas fans also travel to London to attend Tottenham matches, with 40,000 having visited White Hart Lane in 2014. Interest in the club in other countries may also be driven by the players, for example, it was claimed in 2022 that there were 12 million Spurs fans in South Korea as a result of South Korean winger Son Heung-min playing for the club. Support in Australia also increased following the appointment of Australian Ange Postecoglou as manager, the first Australian to become a Premier League manager, and Tottenham have become one of the most popular clubs Premier League clubs in Australia. Tottenham matches in Australia have drawn large crowds.
Historically, the club had a significant Jewish following from the Jewish communities in North and East London that sprung up in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was once claimed that all Jews who attended football matches in the 1920s were Spurs supporters, and it was also estimated that 10,000 Spurs supporters, around a third of those who attended a Tottenham match in 1935, were Jewish. The decision in 1935 to hold a friendly match between Nazi Germany and England at White Hart Lane therefore led to protests from the Jewish communities. Jewish involvement extends to the boardroom; former chairman Fred Bearman first joined the Tottenham board in 1909, and the three chairmen of the club since 1984 had all been Jewish businessmen with prior history of supporting the club. The club, however, no longer has a greater Jewish contingent among its fans than other major London clubs; for example Arsenal, whose Jewish support started in the 1930s, is believed to have similar level of Jewish supporters. Although around 10-11% of season ticket holders and other selected fans who responded to surveys on the Jewish-related issue of "Yid" in 2014 and 2019 identified themselves as Jewish, it is estimated that Jewish supporters form at most 5% of its regular fanbase.
Attendance
Tottenham Hotspur were formed by a group of schoolboys, and those who attended their matches in the early days were likely to be friends and families. Their matches soon attracted the attention of the locals in the growing suburbs of Tottenham, and the first competitive game by Tottenham in 1885 recorded a figure of 400 spectators. Within a few years the home matches of the club drew crowds of up to 4,000, although these were non-paying spectators as they played on public ground at that time. Tottenham moved to an enclosed ground at Northumberland Park where they can charge an entrance fee in 1888, and joined the Southern League in 1896. In their first few years in the league, the attendance averaged at around 2,000. A United League match against Arsenal in 1898 drew 14,000 spectators, and such high attendances necessitated a move to a larger ground.Tottenham relocated to White Hart Lane in 1899, and average attendance by then had surpassed 4,000. In the first few years of the 20th century, the home attendances for Southern League matches usually numbered 7,000 to 10,000, but may reach over 30,000 for some cup ties. Their 1901 FA Cup Final against Sheffield United played at Crystal Palace had 110,820 spectators, at that time a record for a football match. They joined the Football League in 1908, and home attendances steadily increased. After the First World War, the club had 20 years of high attendances. In the 1930s, even though the club was in Division Two most years, they had attendances of over 30,000 for many matches. In March 1938, 75,038 spectators attended a cup tie against Sunderland, the highest gate for the club not surpassed until 2016.
The attendance figures for Tottenham's home matches have fluctuated over the years. Five times between 1950 and 1962, Tottenham had the highest average attendance in England, with over 55,000 recorded in the 1950–51 season. However, average attendance fell below 21,000 in the 1985–86 season. Home attendances have since recovered, and average attendance numbers at Tottenham's former ground White Hart Lane in the 2000s were close to its all-seater capacity at between 35,000 and 36,000. In the 2017–18 season, when Tottenham used the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium as its home ground, it had the second highest average attendance in the Premier League at nearly 68,000. Their highest home attendance figure was recorded at the 2016–17 UEFA Champions League game against Bayer Leverkusen, when 85,512 attended, a record for any English club. The club also registered a series of record attendances for Premier League matches in the 2017–18 season, the highest being the North London derby on 10 February 2018 which was attended by 83,222 spectators.
The club moved to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in 2019, and attendance averaged between 59 and 60,000 in the first two seasons at the new stadium. The highest attendance so far is 62,027 recorded for the North London derby against Arsenal on 12 May 2022. The attendance number recorded in this stadium is the actual number of fans going through the gates rather than the number of tickets issued used for many other grounds where the attendance figures may include season ticket holders who did not turn up for matches and unused free tickets.
Supporters groups
An early fan club was the Spurs Supporters Club, formed independently by fans in 1948 but became officially recognised by Tottenham in the early 1960s. It was once the largest supporters club in the country; it had nearly 4,000 members in 1950, over 6,000 in the early 1970s and once reached 10,000 with members from around the world, such as Malta, South Africa, Australia, the United States and the Scandinavian countries. It had its offices in Warmington House in front of the West Stand of White Hart Lane from 1963 to 1989. It organised trips to away matches, and was the first in the country to organise large-scale away trips for fans, the biggest during the European Cup-Winners' Cup final in Amsterdam in 1963 for thousands of fans. It also organised social outings and published a magazine The Lilywhite. This supporters' club is now defunct, but many supporters clubs affiliated with Tottenham have since been set up, and there are over 440 official supporters' clubs in over 80 countries around the world. An early overseas supporters' club was formed in Malta in 1981 as a branch of the Spurs Supporters Club, and another was formed in Norway in 1982. The earliest Spurs supporters' club in the United States was LA Spurs formed in 2005. In Australia, OzSpurs is the official supporters' group of Tottenham Hotspur which has chapters in many cities.A number of independent supporters groups have been formed in the club's history, representing fans to challenge decisions made by the club. Some of them had significant influence on the club's history. Left on the Shelf was formed in 1988 to protest over a plan to remove The Shelf, a stretch of raised terrace on the East Stand of White Hart Lane favoured by fans, and replace it with executive boxes. LOTS failed to stop the redevelopment, but managed to keep a small part of The Shelf. LOTS inspired further fans' activism, and the following Tottenham Independent Supporters Association was formed at a time when Tottenham was facing a financial crisis. The early actions of TISA were to organise a successful fans' campaign against a possible takeover of Tottenham by Robert Maxwell, protests against Irving Scholar, and it organised small shareholders so they may have a voice in the boardroom. It later also supported Terry Venables after he was sacked by Alan Sugar. It was one of the first supporters groups in England to mobilise fans to focus on specific issues and generate media publicity, actions later emulated by fans of other clubs. Other groups formed to campaign on various issues include Tottenham Action Group, and Save Our Spurs formed to pressure Sugar to sell the club. Sugar blamed the actions by hostile fans when he decided to sell the club in 2000. In 2010, "We are N17" was formed to oppose a plan to relocate Tottenham's home stadium to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford.
In July 1997, the Labour government established the Football Task Force, which led to the formation of Supporters Direct in 2000 and initiated the Supporters' Trust movement. TISA was disbanded after the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters' Trust was formed in 2001, an organisation which is officially recognised by the club as representatives for Spurs supporters. THST protested and strongly criticised the club over a plan to form a European Super League in 2021. After the club withdrew from the Super League, club chairman Daniel Levy proposed plans for a Club Advisory Panel of supporters and their representation on the board.
In the 2011–12 season, The Fighting Cock set up an informal grouping, the 1882 Movement, to support the team and improve the atmosphere in the stadium. It initially supported the youth-team and under-21 fixtures, but later extended to the main senior matches. The movement did not have a formal membership but those involved were mostly younger fans, the gathering of these fans however led to the club banning them from certain section of the stadium, later allocating a block of seats to these fans.