Back at the Courtfield, it’s getting close to game time and all the Spurs fans are now gathered on the street outside of the pub, surrounded by police officers. This isn’t a mass arrest, just another fairly regular feature of match days in Britain: the escorted march to the stadium. I walk alongside Harry, the fan I’d met inside, and roughly 300 others as we — by now a fairly boozy and boisterous bunch, yet largely well-behaved — are marshaled down Earl’s Court Road, through some quite lovely neighborhoods in southwest London. The chants of “Yid Army!” and “Who let the Yids out!” are in full voice, and seem particularly apropos — perhaps as a warning — as this heaving swell of humanity walks and claps and drinks and shouts its way toward Stamford Bridge. A few dozen yellow-vested police officers and a string of large white police paddy wagons form a line of demarcation between the group and the rest of society, and serve as a caution.



Harry tells me that the “Yid” chanting had grown a little muted over the last few months as people fretted about getting arrested, but today, they seem unshackled. I ask a policeman walking near me if they’ve gotten any specific instructions regarding the “Yid” chants today and he tells me his only real job is to get everyone to the stadium without incident.

As we near Stamford Bridge, the sides of the road are lined with Chelsea supporters. A few fire back their own chants, but nothing anti-Semitic. Most just gawk or hold up cell phones to capture the advancing march for posterity. The Tottenham supporters are all funneled to a gate reserved just for them, and then shepherded into the “away section” in the corner behind one of the goals. This is de rigueur for most football grounds here, a legacy of the hooligan violence that has mostly been eradicated from the sport. The section is surrounded on all sides by lines of police officers and club stewards.

The Tottenham fans sing for almost the entire match. When the first Spurs player gets off the bench to start warming up with a jog down the sideline toward our section, he’s greeted with chants of “Yiddo! Yiddo! Yiddo!” The player, Nacer Chadli — who is, incidentally, a Muslim — smiles and claps toward the crowd in appreciation. Good plays on the field are often similarly hailed with choruses of “Yiddo!” In the second half, a group of a dozen or so Spurs fans have to be physically restrained by stewards and police from climbing over a barrier to get at Chelsea fans in the next section. It’s unclear what precipitated the outburst, but it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, once the Spurs' faithful notice the fracas, there are immediate cries of “Yid Army! Yid Army!”

Beyond the “Yid” chants and the expected barrage of Chelsea insults, there is one other chant that has become a particular favorite this season: “We’re Tottenham Hotspur / We’ll sing what we want.” As Cloake, the author of those Spurs-related books, tells me, this chant, as well as the entire effort to hang onto this “Yids” identity is rooted, at least somewhat, in “typical English bloody-mindedness.” “There’s that resentment of being told how to behave,” he says. “A perceived sense that there’s a sort of middle classification of the game that’s going on.” The largely working-class fans who have traditionally been the sport’s core audience feel like they’re being priced out of the game, or relegated to being inconsequential pawns in the Premier League’s quest to become a dominant global brand.

The irony is that a big part of what sells the Premier League in places like the U.S. is exactly the atmosphere that some feel is getting quashed. Last year, NBC paid $250 million for the American rights to televise Premier League games — and between their various channels, they generally televise them all — but surely NBC executives would be uncomfortable having to explain to their viewers and advertisers why a stadium full of people are chanting “Yids!” or, worse, singing about Auschwitz, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The TV commentators, rarely, if ever, take note of specific chants going around a stadium, and the sound is usually mixed in a way that unless you know what you’re listening for, you can’t much make out anything more than an amorphous sea of voices. Regardless of whether this is part of an actual concerted effort to sanitize the game for a global audience, the perception that it is has created a definite backlash.

“Since this campaign to stop the ‘Yids’ thing being used, it is probably sung more often than it ever was when I first started going to games,” says Cloake. As another Spurs fan explained to me: “A lot of people are holding on to this term because it’s one thing that can’t be commercialized, can’t be put on a mug or a T-shirt.”

Listening to fans chant it in the pub, the streets, and at Stamford Bridge certainly makes me question the practical plausibility of ever wresting this word from them. Some I spoke to told me they’d never stop saying it. That said, times and traditions do change: Twenty years ago, these same English football crowds were making monkey noises at black players. (Vestiges of the bad old days remain, though: In April, Chelsea fans reportedly shouted racist abuse and made Nazi salutes while clashing with fans of Paris Saint-Germain in the lead-up to the game between the two teams in Paris.)

Simonson, for one, doesn’t believe arresting Spurs supporters is the answer to this problem. He suggests trotting out famous former players before and during home games to urge the crowd to drop the “Yid” chants. But ultimately, he says, the goal shouldn’t simply be the elimination of the chants, but actually divorcing Tottenham from its long-running identity as a “Jewish” club.

“As much as I loved that as a teenager, it doesn’t bring anything positive to Jews,” he says. “My problem is that if you link Spurs with Jews, then hatred of Spurs will turn into hatred of Jews. When it becomes easy for someone, anywhere in the year 2014, in Britain, to shout chants like that, whatever the context, when it becomes unchallenged, we’ve got a problem." (Two weeks after the Chelsea game, a Southampton fan was arrested for shouting anti-Semitic abuse during the Southampton–Tottenham match at White Hart Lane.)

Wilson, who isn’t particularly thrilled with the chants, has come to accept them. “It’s a fait accompli,” he says. “In the best of all possible worlds, it would all fade away and everyone would be nice to Jews. But given that it’s not going to happen, I’m not sure it’s doing more harm than good. The word itself, simply through repetition and this chanting has lost the power to disturb.” If nothing else, the generation of Jewish fans for whom the word is forever associated with fascists and the horrors of the Holocaust are — to put it indelicately — dying off. That, as much as anything else, may eventually settle this debate.

Whatever the power of the chants might be, positive or negative, they do little to help the team itself against Chelsea. After a solid, scoreless first half, Spurs fall to pieces in the last 45 minutes, giving up four goals and failing to even threaten to score one of their own, in a lopsided and embarrassing defeat. Far from dampening the spirit of its supporters, the series of second-half calamities only seems to inspire louder, more fervent chants from our corner of the stadium. It’s as if their unfolding misfortune and sense that the cause is lost has actually strengthened their devotion to it.

Spurs' recent — and not-so-recent — history on the field is filled with similar disappointments. While they have constant aspirations to be — as well as a self-image as — an elite club, they haven’t topped the league since 1961. They did win five FA Cups between 1962 and 1991, but their performances in the league since then have been consistently underwhelming. Yet, they’re far from hapless. In most seasons, they’re competitive, usually finishing in the top half of the standings, often close enough to the frontrunners to inspire great expectations for the following season, expectations that almost always go unfulfilled.

The 2012–2013 season was no exception: After a wobbly start, the team — bolstered by the performance of the league’s most dominant player, Gareth Bale — finished strongly, going unbeaten in its last eight league games to finish fifth, exactly one point behind Arsenal and one point away from qualifying for the Champions League. (The Champions League, a tournament between the most successful teams across Europe, brings in dollops of extra money for a club and is considered a crown jewel of world football.)

Tottenham’s failure to qualify for the second straight year meant that in the offseason they were more or less forced to sell their best player, Bale, who wanted the opportunity to play against the world’s best. Still, after using the money from the Bale sale to pick up seven new players, hopes were high for this season. However, a dreadful first few months resulted in their manager getting fired, and even though they’ve improved since then, they once again look like a lock to finish somewhere between fifth and seventh in the league, trailing hated London rivals Arsenal and Chelsea, per usual. It kind of makes you understand why their fans are still singing vicious songs calling former Spurs star Sol Campbell a “Judas cunt” more than a decade after the player signed with rival Arsenal: This is a club clutching at what might’ve been.

Two days after the Chelsea game, I meet a guy named Matt Lyons in a grand old pub built in a former bank in Central London. Lyons is a Jewish Spurs fan who is proud to call himself a “Yid.”

“The Sol Campbell thing, Spurs fans know why he left,” he says. “We were shit, and Arsenal were better. He went and won the league with them. Deep down, all football fans want and hope and wish and pray that the players feel for the club the way they do. English football is built on that working-class ethos, and in a way we’re just moving over to that realization that it’s a business.”

As ticket prices rise, a team’s best players are sold off, stadium experiences are tailored to the moneyed classes, and global TV contracts and merchandising rights seem to be a club’s highest priority, fans quite naturally cast about, wondering what happened to the team and the game they loved.

“It’s almost like we’re clinging onto something, anything,” says Lyons. “If it means we have to hold on to a hate word, it’s the only thing we’ve got from the past that fuses everyone together. If we lose that, who are we?”