Growing Pains

Can we please talk about mental health? It’s a serious topic that’s difficult to discuss, particularly for men. The biggest group of Premier League fans are aged between 25 to 45 years old and men are twice as likely to become fans as women, (although the demographics are constantly shifting). In tandem with this, suicide remains the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 years old in the UK. Nearly three quarters of all suicides are men. One in every 10,000 men will die from suicide each year. Just think about that for a moment when you’re next in a stadium of 60,000 people. It’s not cancer, it’s not cardiovascular issues, it’s not disease, it’s an epidemic of suicide. The mental health among your male peers is so damaged that they murder themselves in their thousands every year. You may feel OK, sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down, but you muddle through, right? Well, sometimes those men that you see around you don’t make it back up.

I think this is a subject worth bringing up at the moment and particularly in the context of football fandom, specifically as Spurs fans, as we helplessly observe our beloved team suffer badly and as we watch it crash from one disaster into another, sinking down the league, our mental health collectively sinks with it and it worries me.

Being a Spurs fan isn’t easy. It never has been. I’m in my mid-forties and you can count the sustained periods of joy and success at Tottenham on one hand during my lifetime. It’s a brutal roller coaster with more dips than rises. The ride started for many older fans way before me and they’ve even suffered relegations, yet as the ride continues to go round and round we watch huge numbers of younger fans continue to climb on board season after season. We even encourage them to get on board the madness, (both of my young sons have had Spurs thrust upon them), as we sit at the back of the rail cart desperate to share the burden around.

As a 45 year old Tottenham fan, I’ve witnessed absolutely dreadful times throughout my life, some truly fucking awful. My fandom hit its stride in my teens as we entered the 1990s. I witnessed our club start the decade as cup winners, knocking out Arsenal no less on route to a glorious FA Cup win, with Lineker, Gascoigne, Allen and Mabbutt forcing their way through the opposition round after round. The team had character, a distinct style, and was sprinkled with stars. The decade ended with yet another trophy, as Ferdinand, Anderton and Ginola lit up the club.

What I endured in between was honestly truly abysmal. A barren wasteland of obscurity, as we only finished in the top half of the league table on three occasions, regularly flirted with relegation some years and trophies were a fading dream. The fans were a lost cause, a banter club, resentful and angry. We turned on each other as much as we did the owners and the terraces were regularly nasty. It wasn’t for the faint hearted.

The 1990s were particularly dark and listless, as the Alan Sugar era seemed to take us backwards from the Irving Scholar years, only compounded by the relative success we had to witness going on at our rivals down the road. We were a depressed fan base, whilst they were next door partying. The fan resentment peaked as the decade came to a close. By 2001 Sugar was hugely unpopular, his race was run and he knew it, and as he sold the club to new owners, our hope was given a new opportunity, a new promise, a fresh start. It’s exactly what we needed. Let’s face it, we were desperate for it; something, anything. And although ENIC never over-promised, we knew we now had a bunch of billionaires in charge and they surely had to at least try and sort the mess out.

That was 22 years ago. And here we are. A banter club once again. Resentful and angry. Turning on each other as much as the owners. But this period feels worse. We’re all hanging out full time on social media, particularly on Twitter and in recent years it has gotten nastier than ever before. Some call it “a cesspit”, others “a hell hole” and rightly so, it’s utterly brutal and it does no good for your mental health. We’re all snapping at each other’s tweets, leaving comments and replying on threads with vitriolic aggression.

I recently tried a positive tweet, mentioning how the club was at rock bottom, so the only way is surely upwards from here. As expected, replies flooded in calling me “delusional” and attacking the positivity with tales of fans saying they’ve “given up”, “lost belief” and refuse to have their spirits lifted until our owners leave. The damage Daniel Levy has inflicted indirectly to the mental health of our fan base has hit its nadir. Banter online is dangerously abusive and fans are enraged more than ever before.

Journalism reflects this too. Once professional, tempered, edited, thought-out articles have become raging torrents of complaint, hunting for explanations and scapegoats. Following this weekend’s crucial game, an inexplicable 6-1 loss to Newcastle that finally crushed our season – a game so abhorrent, so disastrous and so damaging – the ever-passionate, yet usually mild-mannered Danny Kelly, from the award-winning View From The Lane podcast, finally snapped. He proclaimed, “I was livid, my soul was seething…Just because footballers earn lots of money, they’re not inured to the slings and arrows of normal every day life, but it is galling to watch people who earn £30,000 to £200,000 a week not giving a flying fuck about their own profession, about their own pride and to those people who support them through thick and thin and I thought they were a disgrace”.
 
These are not normal times. I’ve never heard Danny talk quite like this. I’ve never quite felt like this myself and judging from the chatter online, you’ve never quite felt like this either.

Football is about passion, it’s an emotive hobby. It’s not just transactional, we don’t just hand over our money, we don’t just follow the club around in a benign manner and discuss formations or analyse statistics, we feel our club to our core. It’s part of us, part of our identity, part of what makes us who we are. And this is why, when the club fucks it all up, as Daniel Levy undoubtedly has done over the last four years in particular, he’s actually fucking us up. Thousands of men, women and children are suffering in tandem with Spurs’ decline and there’s only so much our minds can take. Sunday’s 6-1 loss felt like a new low, a new black hole from which many fans will be struggling to re-emerge.

It’s one thing to turn on the owners, a bunch of multi-millionaires that mostly exist out of sight, as they’re no doubt built to shoulder large responsibilities; they knew what they were getting into when they bought our club. However, it’s another thing altogether to start turning on the players we are supposed to be supporting. Fans’ collective anger was recently viciously directed at Davinson Sanchez in a match against Bournemouth at home, as the fans fervently booed his every touch, before he was unceremoniously substituted off the pitch. He was booed onto the pitch and ironically applauded off it as Stellini hauled him off midway through the second half. This hit differently and observing the young Colombian sitting back upon that bench, occasionally staring into the middle distance, sometimes with his head in his hands, it made me think how we’d actually done more than complain with our boos, we’d damaged a young man’s mental health.

But it’s worse than this, we don’t just turn on the owners, we don’t just turn on the players, we now turn on each other, as aggressive encounters flood the online Spurs spaces following every dropped point. We rant, we argue, we attack, we vent. Even tiny snippets of positivity are quickly hacked down these days. Nothing is good. Nothing is working. Nothing is right. We are divided, particularly when it comes to the issue of who to blame. But we can’t carry on like this, fans are depressed and we need to help each other, not compound our problems. If there’s anyone that is ultimately to blame for Spurs’ current mess, it’s not me and it’s not you.

Let me just disclose something personal before we go any further; I have no divine right to lecture or preach on issues surrounding mental health, beyond my own meandering experiences. I have zero professional qualifications relative to the topic. I am not a counsellor, a psychologist, or psychiatrist. I am living a good life, I am safe, I am generally healthy, both physically and mentally and so I discuss this matter from a relative outsider’s position looking inwards. However, although I’m now a successful grown up, running my own business, married and with two children, life wasn’t always so buoyant for me.

I endured my one and only serious period of depression first hand in my late teens, following the splitting of my parents and the expulsion from secondary school in the same 12 month period. I was floored. Times were dark. Life was messy just as I entered adulthood. In tandem with this, I lost two close friends to horrific suicides. My times were difficult, theirs were clearly darker. During this bleak period my depression hit its zenith, but with it I uncovered a moment of salvaged clarity via a brutal encounter.

I clearly wasn’t the only one suffering at this time and aged just 17 years old I experienced the darkest single day of my life. 33 years have passed since this moment, yet it remains the hardest junction I’ve ever endured. I once returned home to catch my own mother in the middle of the act of attempting suicide. I’ll spare you the details, it’s a bit too difficult to type out to be honest, but suffice to say, I had to rush to save her, to stop her, to beg her to reconsider and talk her back to a place of sanity. She’d completely lost all sense. She wasn’t herself, her misery had become too much to bear. Sometimes a person’s light just goes out completely and until someone switches you back on you’re lost in the gloom. Well, fortunately, I switched my mum’s light back on that day and with it my own. What followed was a period of recovery for us both. She got counselling, I woke up from my own malaise and we both fully recovered. That’s the thing with depression, it’s always temporary. This year she turns 74 years old.

Ever since that period in my life I’ve developed coping mechanisms that get me through dips in mental health. I have become acutely aware of the suffering of others and overtly sensitive to the way online discourse can damage people’s mental health. I generally remain a mostly positive person. However, the state of our football club – a topic that seems somewhat trite and petty in the grand scheme of this subject and our complicated lives – is nonetheless difficult to navigate and I’m as guilty as anyone of losing it online, getting into lengthy debates that quickly descend into arguments and on occasion I’ll denigrate other fan’s viewpoints. I need to do better. Perhaps we all do.

It’s impossible to deny that we are all collectively hyper-stressed, battered and scarred by the manoeuvres and failings of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and most recently it’s been getting to us all. It seems as though absolutely nothing ruins my weekends more than watching Spurs play badly and/or drop points. Times have been steadily getting worse since 2019 and this season seems to be culminating in one final cataclysmic disaster. Our side has played badly for months, coaching staff have died, our manager ended up in hospital for a period, before going nuclear at the club and getting sacked, our Director Of Football has hit legal trouble, been banned from doing his job and resigned, and even our interim manager has now been sacked. The 6-1 loss to Newcastle was like watching a bully mercilessly deliver one final kick to the head of the lifeless, unconscious kid on the playground floor. We are broken.

What have you done to our club, Daniel? What has our club done to our mental state? How can we possibly cope? Well, just as with mental health and depression, nothing stays fixed in one state forever. It’s an evolving picture. It grows, it recedes. It rises, it falls. Tottenham, just like depression, won’t stay down for long.

Where I once watched my team languish in a repetitive cycle of mid-table obscurity in the 1990s, I now find us as an established top 6 team. Looking at the club’s league positions over the last 22 years, we’ve averaged between 5th and 6th in that time. We’ve finished an average of 4th to 5th over the last decade alone. That’s a huge improvement from the 10th to 11th that we averaged in the 1990s. As horrific as it seems right now, as much as we think that we are a sinking ship, things are steadily getting better if you look at the bigger picture.

As was pointed out on a recent lovely Twitter thread by Raj Bains (@BainsXIII), “this club is consistently upwardly mobile and improving”. Fans of decades gone by may well talk of trophies, which is a fair thing to point out, but we reach the latter stages of competitions more regularly than ever before, including the Champions League final itself, which was unthinkable to those watching us for certain periods in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.

As abominable as this season has been, we’ve been fighting around the top four the entire campaign, as we now do almost every season. The club is on a superb financial footing, with its world class stadium and training facilities, a factor that’s both useful and attractive for professionals, as well as us. Our budget is fattening year on year and we can genuinely be considered one of the top 10 clubs in world football through a variety of apertures. Thousands and thousands of clubs that exist all around the world are not in as good a shape as Spurs currently are.

Both on and off the pitch we’ve been ascending for years. If anything, our progress as a club has occurred faster than expected and with it our expectations have accelerated accordingly. As Raj goes on to point out, the progress over the last couple of decades has been palpable and fan sentiment was a net positive because we could see the steady growth. During this period there was room for the improvements. However, now that we’ve reached the establishment, the distance to the top is much smaller, so every move Levy makes is more crucial than what preceded it and every failure more forestalling.

Then 2019 happened.

You see, fans quickly get used to expecting a win, so every dropped point sparks an outpouring of frustrations. Levy and Pochettino had rapidly cooked up this new pressure, but in 2019, when they eventually hit our first rocky ground in years, the decision-making both on and off the field began to collapse. Pochettino was soon gone, players were sold or retired, and the football decisions, left to Levy, became chaotic and problematic. He suddenly lurched into acting like a big club, employing managers like Mourinho and Conte, whilst buying several disastrous players for £40m-£60m a piece, but Levy’s never been that great at the football side of things. Levy’s neither wealthy enough to afford cock ups on this scale, nor is he astute enough to work miracles on the cheap. He’s broken this club’s trajectory and the dissatisfaction has melted fans’ minds.

But here’s the thing. As lightless, foggy, damaging and desolate as depression can get, it is always temporary. You are sad…for now. You are angry…at the moment. It does pass. Listen to me, it. will. pass. And so will the form of our club. We’ve navigated through the difficult transitional period from mid-table malaise to top table fighters. As much as we’ve slipped up over the last four years, we will get back to our stride soon.

This summer is huge for Levy, but he knows it as well as we do. He’s made us jittery, he’s wound us up, but I assure you, he knows it, and he looks like he’s trying to fix it. Scott Munn’s been brought in to control the football side of the operation as Chief Football Officer, a new Director of Football will arrive this summer too, as will the club’s new Manager. A full refresh is happening and with it a new era is inevitable.

The pain has been real this season. The thick mist has us all lost and bumping into each other, but the lights will be switched on once again come this summer. Just. Hold. On. We need the old ‘You’ back, the club needs the old ‘You’ back. We’ve all been dragged through this mangle together. I’m crushed and broken, you’re crushed and broken, but try to remember, particularly when you’re involved on social media, we are all Spurs, we are all suffering. That’s the thing about football, it should scoop us all up together as a unifying force, a coagulant agent for our community, not a discordant breaker of friendships and fandom. It is Spurs that synchronises us, it has done for centuries, as a family, as a united clan. It’s time for us all to take a deep lung-clearing breath, sit yourself up, look up and see that you’re not on your own. That’s the great thing about football fandom, you never were and you never will be alone.

We will get through this.

Together.