Is booing your own team ever justified?

There has been widespread media chatter about the unfortunate booing of Spurs defender Davinson Sanchez during the 3-2 defeat to Bournemouth last weekend. The out of favour Spurs defender was subbed off twenty minutes after coming on as a substitute following some poor touches that contributed to two Bournemouth goals and which eventually saw us give up a home lead to lose the match.

It’s always interesting to see what people outside of the Spurs fan bubble think of the goings on at Spurs when something that garners enough media interest spills out into the mainstream discussion.

“If booing your own team is so stupid, why would such a large group of fans boo their own team? How did we get here?”

Pundits like Charlie Eccleshare of the Athletic have underlined how booing achieves “nothing.” ‘Pundits’ like Mark Goldbridge of Talksport have also expressed their disbelief at why Spurs fans would boo their own players. Even the team Captain, Hugo Lloris, seemed miffed at the situation, and, while he spoke diplomatically in his post-match interview addressing the matter, he was clearly upset. By all accounts, Davinson Sanchez is a decent bloke. While he may not be able to perform the role that he is being asked to do by the current management, that’s not necessarily his fault. He’s still in the top 99.9% of football players in the world, and would run rings around everyone in the crowd, let alone those booing him.

Spurs fans and pundits alike often lampshade their opinions on fans booing their own team with an, “I would never tell a supporter how to support their team, but…”

B***ocks. I’m coming off the fence. Eccleshare is right. Booing your own team does achieve next to nothing. We all want the team to win and the players to play well, so booing a player already low on confidence while they are literally playing the game is counter-productive, to put it mildly. It’s dehumanising and it disproportionately happens to black players which is something that we ought to be aware of as a fanbase.

Not only that, but if you boo your own player in the stadium, you look like a mug. You also make the club look like mugs in the wider realm of public discourse, where other fans don’t care enough about Spurs to understand the wider context of why this might happen. If you’re doing it, take a deep breath. In the kindest possible way, it’s not a good look.

With that said…if booing your own players is so counter-productive, why would such a large number of fans do it? On the whole, Spurs fans are a decent and friendly community, so how did we get here?

The fans have no voice

In reflection, many Spurs fans have said that while the boos were aimed at Davinson Sanchez, in the moment, they were actually the product of general frustration over wider issues. There are a number of things at play here that are even bigger than Spurs itself; like the toxic role of social media, for example, but this article can’t address all of those here. Instead, let’s focus on one issue and talk about the importance of something that is so obvious and fundamentally human, it’s amazing ENIC has managed to neglect it for so long. That thing is, simply, the importance of having a voice and to feel like you are being listened to.

If we assume that the booing at Spurs is a form of protest against ENIC and the manager, then we should treat it as such. People will protest if they feel that they have a justified grievance that is being ignored or unheard via the regular channels for those voices to be expressed. Under ENIC’s chairmanship, the Spurs fans have quite an extensive wrap sheet of contentious issues built up over the years that ENIC have, to put it politely, ignored or failed to address. Here are but a few:

• Trying to move the club away from its local area and into Stratford, the neighbourhood of our London rivals West Ham. (Ironically, Spurs hate Woolwich for doing a similar thing to us, a hatred that has lasted, hmm, only around 100 years…)
• Sacking a popular manager and appointing managers that played football counter to the footballing traditions of the club that have existed for around 80 years
• Trying to avoid paying furlough for staff during Covid-19
• The StubHub ticketing scandal
• Attempting to bring the club into the European Super League

All of these decisions were deeply unpopular and have pecked away at the fragile trust between the fans and ENIC. In all likelihood, ENIC is aware of fans’ grievances. The Tottenham Supporters Trust, who do great work in representing the fans, are often treated like an annoyance by ENIC, rather than a fundamental building block of the fabric of the club. While ENIC have done some brilliant things (objectively) on the business side, we have over-achieved in points per season given the resources they’ve had at their disposal. ENIC have failed to manage the social and cultural aspects of the football club to anywhere near an adequate degree. The fruits of this failure have festered into a fermenting self-loathing sewage that is now leaking out of the Spurs waterways and crashing like waves of faeces over the face of ENIC’s most recent human meat shield, Davinson Sanchez.

Spurs is a Football Club… duh

Tottenham is a Football Club and ‘Club’ is the operative word.

While ENIC may actually see it as a business in strict terms, and the punters as customers that pay for a service, the reality is that a football club, as Daniel Levy often pays lip service to in his end of season statement, is more like a public entity, of which ENIC are merely “custodians.” Spurs, therefore, is not just a business; it’s in the abstract if not on paper. It’s owned partially by the fans who expect to have some say in things that happen at the club, wanting and needing to feel included.

While most fans wouldn’t profess to be experts at running the financial aspects of a football club, they do expect to be able to have some form of input on key decisions that may alter the trajectory of the football club, run counter to its culture, and have a long-term impact on the health of the club. Spurs is not a democracy, but the abstract public status of Spurs imbues it with significant democratic elements that ENIC has often outright failed to acknowledge. Sometimes it seems as if ENIC haven’t even grasped the fact that the fans are actually part of the club and that it is their responsibility to address the fans; include them, listen to them and dare I say it – manage their expectations.

Instead, ENIC does nothing. It says nothing. We, as fans, have no real idea what’s going on behind the scenes, nor can we exert influence or express concerns to the board who appear further and further isolated despite a rising tide of unprecedented problems at the club. Example being having no men’s or women’s team manager and a director of football who is currently banned from directing any football.

As is the case with any form of protest, if you combine a fan base with strong, deeply rooted expectations about their role and participation in a football club they care deeply about, with an ownership that appears to be excluding them and shutting down avenues for fans to voice their concerns, the anger and sentiment behind that voice will start to leak out elsewhere. You can try and plug the gaps but if the overall structure isn’t sound you won’t keep that sewage in for long!

It’s clear that the Spurs fans don’t really hate Davinson Sanchez, despite the boos. One hopes that the majority of Spurs fans understand that Davinson Sanchez is not particularly at fault for the predicament the club is in. This is not really Davinson Sanchez’s problem at all. He’s just a football player in the firing line between the fans of a club and its ownership.

So what’s the solution?

Aside from the obvious substantive solutions that ENIC need to carry out on the pitch, like appoint a manager that understands the traditions of the club, win more games, etc. Some of the causes behind ‘boogate’ appear to be non-footballing and could easily be solved by ENIC with a change in approach to their management of the cultural and social aspects of the club.

These causes stem from what one can only assume is a misunderstanding on behalf of ENIC of the role of football fans in the running and progression of a football club. This lack of understanding leads to other problems like the implausible lack of communications and the lack of any real structure to facilitate such communication, between the fans and ENIC.

Spurs fans know that the club isn’t a democracy; they don’t want ENIC to install voting booths in the ground or to have a say on matters that they know they aren’t experts in, they just want to see some sort of evidence from ENIC that they are actually being listened to. The fans need to know that their voices are heard by someone, somewhere within the ivory tower that has come to be known as Hotspur Way.

This lack of communication and apparent lack of respect from ENIC to the fans over a number of years, has led to a lack of trust. This communication breakdown, this inability for fans to express their voice and feel recognised is leading to outbursts like we see at the ground now and things are only going to get worse if ENIC continues to shrink and shirk away from its cultural and social duties in the management of Spurs.

ENIC will certainly be keeping an eye on the outcome from the recent fan led review on the role of supporters in football, but if they had any sense, they wouldn’t need to wait for the recommendations from that review. They’d get on with putting in place structures that enabled positive fan-inclusive contributions to the club of their own volition.

Perhaps, just maybe, ENIC might learn from this situation and realise that incorporating a wider set of perspectives into their decision making, could even improve said decision-making.

In the end, one has to feel extremely sorry for Davinson Sanchez. If anything, the bloke deserves a pay rise as it’s highly unlikely that taking a bullet for Stellini, Levy, ENIC and co. was in his contract, although you never know with ENIC.