Staff and players at Tottenham have recently given voice to hurt feelings about the boos that have been coming their way from their own fans, and we could get into a debate here about whether or not the booers were, and always will be, perfectly within their rights to do so. But wherever you stand on the paying customer’s relationship with critical dissent in the sporting context, you would have to say that in the broader scheme of things, Tottenham have been getting off pretty lightly. At Ajax the other day, disgruntled supporters almost burned the place down.
Alarming scenes. Indeed, if you have seen the widely available footage then I would hazard you have not witnessed a fireworkrelated conflagration like it since that time in San Diego in 2012 when an accidental simultaneous ignition refashioned a 20-minute 4th of July display as a brief but startling eruption. In one version of the tale in Amsterdam, this was an incautious tribute to a deceased fan that got out of hand – kind of a minute’s appreciation, near the start of an Eredivisie game between Ajax and Groningen at the Johan Cruyff Arena, but with flares, and during a very disappointing season for the home team.
But that wouldn’t entirely explain why it all had to happen again some 45 minutes later, when the smoke cleared and the referee and players were attempting a resumption of the match. Either way, the official club statement in the wake of the eventual abandonment soberly insisted: “We emphatically distance ourselves from this conduct.” Which, of course, has always been in the standard code of best practice with fireworks. And never return to them once lit, either.
Clearly, though, it’s all going off over there – and all going off at once in the case of those fireworks. The BBC reported last week that Uefa currently has 116 active suspended stadium bans in operation across European clubs, of which 67 are firework-related. Meanwhile, 31 are for discrimination and 25 are for thrown objects. None seem to be for persistent drumming, but all sense tells us that must merely be an oversight in the accounting. The fact is, English stadiums in 2025 can’t hold a lit flare to these kinds of numbers. And perhaps it’s tempting to suggest that the story of football hooliganism interestingly parallels the history of the game itself, with England inventing it and then lazily wallowing in a sense of entitlement while the rest of the world got much better at it.
But isn’t there another version of this story in which the English turn out to be (somewhat surprisingly in this context, one admits)… the good guys? Certainly, as we go into another Champions League week, with Tottenham due to receive Slavia Prague – themselves, as plentiful YouTube footage will attest, no stranger to the freelance pyro show – we will once again have the opportunity to observe how supporting your team on the continent can have extra dimensions, undreamed of in the English leagues, and not automatically to be encouraged.
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I’m referring to those smuggled-in flares, of course, which, even if they don’t reach Ajax levels (and let’s pray they don’t), will at some point most likely coat at least a quarter of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium’s playing area in unhelpful smog this coming Tuesday. But I’m also referring to chant orchestrators with megaphones. They’re a bit of a pain, aren’t they? Over the course of an hour and a half? And, obviously, the drums, which clearly should be as carefully frisked-for at all points of entry as any other offensive weapon.
And then there’s the constant singing, throughout the game. It’s impressive, at the level of stamina, obviously. Great volume, too, more often than not.
But what about the ebb and flow of the match? I’ve been at some European games where fans have sung all the way through half-time as well. It must be exhausting. Why can’t they just eat a KitKat and stare vacantly into space for those precious 15 minutes, in the accepted English way, as laid down by the game’s founders? Having just booed their own team off, in the case of Spurs. Less dangerous than fireworks. And, dare one say it, more civilised?
Photograph by Getty Images