Fragile Fan Base

[Freddie]

Personally I think its a culmination of a number of things:

1 - We had a taste of the good life. Riding high in the league being contenders, playing CL football every year & getting to the final with a great team of players and a manager who promoted good, aggressive football.
2 - The stadium fiasco of having to move to Wembley and then it being delayed yet again.
3 - The 2 years without signing a player, even though all of us as fans could see that the players were on the decline through age & form etc.
4 - The failed Mourinho experiment & the toxicity that he brought with him.
5 - The Harry Kane saga & all of us knowing why he wanted to leave but being absolute gutted about it.
6 - The lack of a cohesive transfer policy that actively targeted players in the positions that were required, instead we signed players for the same position (GLC & Ndombele) and failed to really address the glaringly obvious problems.
7 - The management hunt this summer, what a joke from start to finish.
8 - The Super League & the embarrassment of it all.
9 - Seeing the likes of Man Utd & Chelsea get back to throwing insane amounts of money around & getting some of the worlds best players which has just increased the gap between the clubs by tenfold. I can't see anyone else breaking into that top4 for a long time.
10 - The Adama Traore / Levy interjection.
11 - Lastly, we have witnessed our club play dreadful football since about January 2019. The whole 24 points from 25 games that ended Poch's reign, to the negative & boring football of Mourinho to now a bunch of average players.

Unfortunately for Nuno, he is now taking a lot of criticism due to all the above & the fact that we as fans have just had enough of accepting mediocrity having been so close. It is going to take a good few years for us to challenge for top 4 again in my opinion & it's not going to be pretty.

Well summarised. It's all of those things but for me playing regularly in the Champions League is the least of them. Levy talked about our DNA, and then disregarded that with his actions. All I want is a club that acts in a decent manner, and instills a culture of playing great football from the very top. I'm not sure we have the right manager, and therefore possibly the right DOF for that. We certainly don't have the right Chairman for that.

 

[Trees]

What worries me as a season ticket holder is that the difference between Twitter and match-going fans is beginning to blur. The atmosphere after our return last season against Villa was as toxic as I've ever felt it, it really wasn't a nice place to be. I know there were mitigating circumstances with Jose, Mason, poor performance and no lap of honour etc but it was very very tense and I feel like we're only a bad result or two away from it turning again.

I dont disagree. Sad times.

 

[Hakkz]

I said in the match thread that it feels like our fanbase is constantly on a knife edge. It was a terrible performace but the reaction was OTT imo. Most seasons we'd be perfectly happy with 9 points from our first 4 games under a new coach, but it already feels like Nuno's card is marked and he is on borrowed time. I think it's waaaay too early to be able to fully judge. Play like that in November or December and I'll be joining the chorus though.

Let's hope it was a wake up call for everyone. Nuno can't be putting out a team of just workers again, Kane should be looking at himself instead of blaming his team mates. Tanguy and/or Gil need to start playing.

ONe thing is for sure, if we play anything like that at home vs Chelsea things will turn very ugly very quickly. That Levy wasn;t entirely convinced by Nuno in the first place also probably means that he won't be afforded the patience from him that say Jose was.

The difference now vs before is that no players are sacred anymore either. It's not about the manager, I can't stand seeing most of the players in this team out there. PEH is the exception for me.

 

[Gassin's finest]

Fragile? Christ we must be some of the most resilient fans in the league the amount of shit we have to endure from our piss poor management at the top level over the past 40 years.

FYP

 

[Gassin's finest]

Bah, Spurs fans don't know what they want... but we are getting mucked about by ENIC on that front. Its been pretty clearly demonstrated where their priorities lie in recent months.

I think we need to be honest about where the club is. We may have the big-ass stadium, but we're a shadow of what we were 3 years ago. We're back to being a slightly upper-mid table side, with a new "project" just getting started. The fragility possibly comes from thinking we're still CL finalist level, so we're getting upset at not performing like that anymore. Once it sinks in that we aren't getting back to that level, we might start being less upset.

In terms of match going support... what's the main reason you go to watch the football? Entertainment. Love of the game. If the game is boring, and you're not enjoying it, then people won't go.

 

[jurgen]

Bah, Spurs fans don't know what they want... but we are getting mucked about by ENIC on that front. Its been pretty clearly demonstrated where their priorities lie in recent months.

I think we need to be honest about where the club is. We may have the big-ass stadium, but we're a shadow of what we were 3 years ago. We're back to being a slightly upper-mid table side, with a new "project" just getting started. The fragility possibly comes from thinking we're still CL finalist level, so we're getting upset at not performing like that anymore. Once it sinks in that we aren't getting back to that level, we might start being less upset.

In terms of match going support... what's the main reason you go to watch the football? Entertainment. Love of the game. If the game is boring, and you're not enjoying it, then people won't go.

This is fair, I think one of the issues becomes the question of what is the project now? It's really unclear on a sporting level, and mainly such clarity has been reserved for the commercial/stadium side, which is a shame.

Clearly, signing some exciting younger players is baby steps - but are we providing them with the platform to succeed? Have they been bought to grow into a long-term idea of how we want to play? What on earth is our vision for how we want to play?

 

[GutBucket]

Fanbase is more ambitious than ENIC who are in endgame of paying off debts and selling the club to new owner/s. Also people got tired of negative football and Winks starting, that's all. Covid era is depressing enough alone, getting dominated by the likes of Vieira gets people toxic, not that unusual.

 

[tommo84]

I think at the moment the fan base is at that tipping point between apathy and despair, and we’ve been teetering around there since early 2020. The way in which the club has lost all direction in a short space of time, and the decisions that have contributed to that, have destroyed any trust fans have in the running of the club. We were so close to achieving something remarkable under Poch but we fucked it up. Not ‘we’ as in the fans, but the owners through lack of investment, others (maybe Poch included) through allowing the team to grow stale, and the players in not taking opportunities to win semi finals and finals. That it wasn’t long ago but already feels so far away hurts. Now we’re unrecognisable from what we were only 3 years ago.

Levy/ENIC have always had critics but a few years ago it felt like, whether you supported Levy or not, most fans understood what his plan was and had some confidence in him that he knew what he was trying to do even if they didn’t like it. Now I don’t think anyone has that confidence. I certainly don’t and I supported him for years.

Also, we’ve got a team of players who the fans don’t trust to perform. Saturday was especially bad but we’ve had similarly abject surrenders in plenty of games over the last 2 years. The players aren’t good enough and we all know it. And that’s happened because our recruitment has been terrible. Again, where is the direction or strategy? Even if we had sold Kane for £100m+, how many of us trust the powers that be to spend it well?

Add to all of this that there are so many reasons to dislike football as a whole these days and it’s understandable that those fans who still care feel pretty angry and frustrated at what they’re seeing. Me? I still care because I’m an addict but I don’t love the game like I used to - I enjoy the NFL, rugby and cricket far more these days - and so as Spurs get worse and worse I wonder why I’m still clinging on. At times under Mourinho I felt completely numb to it but now we’re at the start of another season I’d hoped we would at least see some improvement. I’m not seeing it though and I don’t see how it happens without significant change which, as fans, we’re depressingly powerless to effect. That leads to more anger.

 

[Bobbins]

This is fair, I think one of the issues becomes the question of what is the project now? It's really unclear on a sporting level, and mainly such clarity has been reserved for the commercial/stadium side, which is a shame.

Clearly, signing some exciting younger players is baby steps - but are we providing them with the platform to succeed? Have they been bought to grow into a long-term idea of how we want to play? What on earth is our vision for how we want to play?

It's a good point around what is the project - for the last few years it was abundantly clear that the training ground and then the stadium was the entire project for the club - the football side was about trying not to suffer too badly from the disruption caused by the move. Obviously we ended up massively over-achieving with Poch which meant we all (fans, players, owners) got a false impression of what we should be achieving.

What's telling is that after the crystal clarity of the stadium and other infrastructure projects - coming straight from Levy, who was absolutely explicit about what he wanted to achieve when it came to that work - now those are completed, the messaging from the club is back to being completely confused, non-committal and unambitious.

Ask Levy what the training ground and stadium were all about, and he'd wax lyrical with huge passion about what the club was trying to achieve - "world class", "best in the world" type references. Ask him about what the football side is trying to achieve, and it's like talking to a naughty kid at school, looking at his feet and mumbling non-answers in response.

DNA? Attacking football? Entertainment? Those aren't goals, they're not short and long term objectives for a football club. There's never any talk of winning anything, never any mention of actual specific targets. The chairman, the manager, even the players (with the possible exception of Kane as he's got fed up with being political) never talk about their desperation to get back in the top four, to win a domestic cup, hell none of them have even said we're determined to be the inaugural winners of the ECL.

I've moaned on here repeatedly over the last couple of years about the Loser Mentality which ENIC have bred throughout the club, root and branch. Now that we can't talk about progress on shiny infrastructure anymore, it's coming to the surface at last. There's not just no plan to win anything in the future - there's apparently no desire or need or drive to win anything either.

It's actually really strange to see a "top club" so utterly, publicly, openly unambitious.

 

[Mediocrates]

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me there was a window of time where we had a talented and harmonious squad, an inspirational manager getting more than the sum of the parts at his disposal, and a general great alignment at a club in an
ascendency.

Players were not rewarded for their overachievements, I’m thinking of Eriksen, Walker and Rose specifically but you could add in both Jan and Toby.
Then we didn’t sign a player for 18 months, which exacerbated an already overstretched and underpaid playing staff and dissent crept in. By the time we spent the money (poorly) the damage had long been done.

All of this grates more when Spurs is the most expensive club in the world to go and watch.

The remedy is new owners, or at the very least a new chairman.

 

[Aphex]

I feel most of it just comes from how poor the performances have been for such an extended period of time. The last period of Poch's tenure was dire, Jose's football was awful bar the Kane and Son partnership which glossed over it for a time, and now Nuno is here and it looks like we have more Jose ball but now with a demotivated Kane and without an injured Son. You can understand why the fans are fed up, we've put up with years of this already, and now it looks like we have another year of it or until Nuno goes.

It will never change until we get rid of a lot of pony players in the squad, they just aren't capaable of playing decent football, but it was all too much to do in one window.

The problem we all have is I don't believe ENIC have the desired ambition or will to get us back challenging. I have lost count the amount of times Levy's face has been shown post match the last 2 years and I've thought to myself 'is he really happy with what he has just seen? We were garbage'. But nothing ever changes, there ws minimal investment over the summer, we just aren't doing what needs to be done to turn it around.

It's depressing that other clubs seem to manage to play decent football, and we just constantly look so joyless and painful. We haven't replaced players like Toby, Rose, Walker, Jan, Dembele, Eriksen at their prime. We basically got lucky as a club where it all aligned, and now the club look clueless as they don't know or want to get us back there with what it needs, more investment and better management.

I actually feel as fans we have suffered so much compared to the rest of the top 6, so we aren't fragile we are hard as nails.

 

[topper]

Does anybody else feel that our fan base is as fragile as it ever has been in recent memory?

It isn't just one reason, there seems to be an accumulation of things that have left most of us with an underlying feeling of being a bit fed up with the club, the owners, the way we operate, the way we're playing, the way fans are treated and some individual players.

The three wins to start the season already feels like we were sticking a plaster over a gun shot wound and that's after just one loss.

The collective performances and style of play are obviously concerning and I think this is compounded by the lines Levy was spinning us before the manager search about returning to our attacking DNA etc.

I'm a season ticket holder and really enjoyed being back in the stadium, the atmosphere has been so good and like it was when the stadium first opened, I've absolutely loved going again and looked forward to it days before.

However, I'm already feeling like if we lose to Chelsea on Sunday the atmosphere is going to turn badly and we won't be able to get it back and part of me is dreading it.

It feels like such a long time ago how good we all felt that last season in the old stadium, I never felt closer to the Club during that time but it seems since that season and certainly since the CL final the relationship between Club and fans has been on a frightening decline.

How do we fix it? Is it as simple as getting a coach/style of play we actually enjoy watching? It would be a good start right!

We were so, so close to being a genuine top side challenging year in year out for the very biggest prizes - alas we never kicked on and have slipped back into the pack. Fans of course will be disappointed at this sudden fall and it is hard to accept, especially when you have no trophies to show for how good we were under Poch and the realisation that the 'big 6' has turned into a big 4 - and we're not part of that group.

 

[JCRD]

Does anybody else feel that our fan base is as fragile as it ever has been in recent memory?

It isn't just one reason, there seems to be an accumulation of things that have left most of us with an underlying feeling of being a bit fed up with the club, the owners, the way we operate, the way we're playing, the way fans are treated and some individual players.

The three wins to start the season already feels like we were sticking a plaster over a gun shot wound and that's after just one loss.

The collective performances and style of play are obviously concerning and I think this is compounded by the lines Levy was spinning us before the manager search about returning to our attacking DNA etc.

I'm a season ticket holder and really enjoyed being back in the stadium, the atmosphere has been so good and like it was when the stadium first opened, I've absolutely loved going again and looked forward to it days before.

However, I'm already feeling like if we lose to Chelsea on Sunday the atmosphere is going to turn badly and we won't be able to get it back and part of me is dreading it.

It feels like such a long time ago how good we all felt that last season in the old stadium, I never felt closer to the Club during that time but it seems since that season and certainly since the CL final the relationship between Club and fans has been on a frightening decline.

How do we fix it? Is it as simple as getting a coach/style of play we actually enjoy watching? It would be a good start right!

For the first time in a while I do feel fragile and by that I mean i genuinely cant be fucked to go to spurs anymore, even if im paying £1,500 for the privilege but more importantly we are fucking stale. We are so so stale. The football is stale. The squad is meh. The management are dull but nice and basically there is absolutely no To Dare is To Do in anything we are doing.

This was on twitter today - that was good... good times. We played we knew how to attack. This was against Dortmund. Now look how we approach Palace.

 

[Lighty64]

Yeah I should have mentioned that word, the fan base has never been this toxic and that's what worries me about the atmosphere turning at the Lane. It will kill any excitement about going to games.

we all want success, but I honestly think our fan base think we should be bigger than where we really are.

we have rumours in the ITK and people just don't even add a pinch of salt, so get angry that we don't back the manager. all I've seen this weekend is "we didn't replace Eriksen again", well we tried and purchased Ndombele, and Lo Celso but neither have worked out. "we never replaced Bale or Vinicius" even though Vinicius did anything in the PL, and replacing Bale? is there many Bales out there that we could actual attract let alone sign. we tried to sign Vlahovic or Martinez yet every time we had an update their prices rised. the thing is if we had actually got Martinez in, he still wouldn't have helped us Saturday as he would have been in Croatia with the other players in quarantine.

then you get we should do better we are in the top 10 rich list, yet people forget 4-5 of those richer than us are in the same league, which means those above us can usually offer that extra money to buy a player, and offer them a bigger wage.

a lot of us have grown up with exciting attacking football, with either flair or pace players that as @Archibald&Crooks said got bums off seats. we have had them with ENIC too, but with teams in a stronger financial position which has made winning trophies a lot harder. before the City take over numerous teams would win the League Cup, because all the big teams put their eggs in qualifying for CL, and trying to win it. even the FA Cup was high on their agenda Now City have such depth they can field a strong team in every single competition.

you have people angry because Levy promised to go back to our DNA. the thing is when Nuno was at Wolves I don't remember them being a defensive team, they just never had the fire power up front and struggled with injuries big time last season. would Traore all of a sudden started scoring 10-15 goals a season. he has played 144 games and has only scored 7 goals, and had only 14 assist. yes he would have been playing with better players, but he would have also faced a lot more defensive teams something that Wolves didn't face to often unless playing against a Mourinho team.

we have had so many near misses, and we all want that final step. Levy doesn't get the blame for us getting so close, that's all down to the player and managers doing their jobs, yet we lose any game and 1 person gets more blame than the players that don't put the effort in. I honestly think Nuno on a Friday afternoon should replay the Man C game and tell the players that that's the passion and fight he wants to see every single game

 

[yankspurs]

The fan base is a toxic mess because that is what the club decided. Its not that we cant handle losing. Of course we can. It’s the way we lose. Not even attempting to play football. Even winning isnt that fun anymore(something we’ve done sparingly over the lasf 2 years). We havent played football for 24 months. We have played as many key passes this season as Norwich. We used to play as many key passes in a single game almost!

We have a chairman who talks about clubs dna constantly & doesnt follow up on it. A chairman that doesnt give a flying fuck about winning a single thing. The thinking is, if the chairman doesnt care, why should we? So we get fans who simply cant be bothered anymore, coupled with people pissed off at it all. And this group gets a ton of shit by people who cant handle bad words being said about the team or the ownership so everything turns argumentative & toxic.

 

[Gassin's finest]

This is fair, I think one of the issues becomes the question of what is the project now? It's really unclear on a sporting level, and mainly such clarity has been reserved for the commercial/stadium side, which is a shame.

Clearly, signing some exciting younger players is baby steps - but are we providing them with the platform to succeed? Have they been bought to grow into a long-term idea of how we want to play? What on earth is our vision for how we want to play?

Same as it was for Poch. Take a limited, disinterested squad, get it to CL. Same as Poch, Nuno will work out sooner rather than later who the waste of times are, and will start promoting the younger players who buy into his game.

Poch had the benefit of a good few youngsters though.

 

[Wheeler Dealer]

Poch raised expectations and now we are on decline/beginning of painful rebuild

He didn't raise expectations but massively smashed them. He had us punching way above our weight and the club was never set up to build upon it. He over delivered..

 

[guiltyparty]

Well summarised by others, but I think it's a wider thing too outside Spurs, as I've touched on before.

Being a supporter or a fan or whatever you want to call it is constantly changing, more quickly than ever. Football is becoming unrecognisable, certainly at the top end. Everyone at the high end of football has worked to make it a 'product' and the problem with that is buyers of products always expect a return on their money, to actually be entertained for their hard-earned. You can see this all over the game, the lack of patience, the expectation etc. Football clubs and leagues reap what they sow, and in may ways they've totally fucked the game.

On the Spurs end of it, I think there are a couple of things to add to the @Danny1 summary. Namely on point 1, that we won nothing while having all of that – I wouldn't underestimate the psychological effect of that we'd never had it so good, genuinely the most together the club has felt for decades, and it didn't really amount to any win of note, or a title to refer to, or video of us touring a cup round the streets. It's hard to look on that period now and not realise what a huge missed opportunity it was, and that we're unlikely to be anywhere near that level for a while. When that kind of consistent team is such a rarity for a club like ours, it's a huge comedown I think many are still in.

Also after years of it feeling very together and lots of obvious progress - youthful British spine, very good scouting unearthing cheap quality, training ground and stadium upgrades, excellent positive management to perform above our level, etc - we've now hit a bit of a progress wall. The impetus and momentum of the club has undoubtedly stalled, and there have been some very odd decisions that don't suggest the club, at its many levels, are quite in simpatico anymore, which no doubt impacts the fans.

 

[theShiznit]

I think social media doesn't help especially when, despite being around the top for years, seeing some of the best football we have seen in (most of) our lives and having some of our best ever players/coach that we still find ourselves the butt of the joke.
Even from the shittest of teams' fans...

 

[cliff jones]

Bah, Spurs fans don't know what they want... but we are getting mucked about by ENIC on that front. Its been pretty clearly demonstrated where their priorities lie in recent months.

I think we need to be honest about where the club is. We may have the big-ass stadium, but we're a shadow of what we were 3 years ago. We're back to being a slightly upper-mid table side, with a new "project" just getting started. The fragility possibly comes from thinking we're still CL finalist level, so we're getting upset at not performing like that anymore. Once it sinks in that we aren't getting back to that level, we might start being less upset.

In terms of match going support... what's the main reason you go to watch the football? Entertainment. Love of the game. If the game is boring, and you're not enjoying it, then people won't go.

Same as it was for Poch. Take a limited, disinterested squad, get it to CL. Same as Poch, Nuno will work out sooner rather than later who the waste of times are, and will start promoting the younger players who buy into his game.

Poch had the benefit of a good few youngsters though.

you must be joking mate. CL finalist level?

I don’t know any Spurs fans who have expectations that high?

Attacking football, best of the rest would be lovely. And possibly worth the ticket prices.