In the end, the only surprise was that the margin wasn’t greater. The Athletic went to the polls to ask who Chelsea fans regard as their biggest rivals and the answer was emphatic: Tottenham.
The north London club came top with 58.6 per cent of the vote — their nearest challengers were Arsenal with 26.7 per cent. Then came Liverpool (10.6 per cent) and finally Leeds (4.1 per cent).
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Limitations set by Twitter meant only four teams could be named on the ballot and as many comments below the message revealed, Manchester United would have picked up a lot of support had they been included, too. But it would have made no difference to the identity of the winner. The fact Tottenham emerged victorious wasn’t a shock. Some of those responding were mystified that the question was being asked in the first place.
What isn’t so clear is why they are the undisputed No 1. Granted both sides play in the same city, but so do 10 other clubs in the top four tiers of English football. Bar League Two Leyton Orient, all of their stadiums are closer to Stamford Bridge than Tottenham’s.
There is a disparity in the trophy cabinet, too. Thanks to Roman Abramovich’s arrival in 2003, Chelsea now boast a lead of 24 major trophies to 17. That includes six championships to Tottenham’s two — the last of which was claimed by them back in 1961 — as well as the bragging rights of winning the Champions League in 2012.
Indeed, since lifting the FA Cup in 1991, Spurs’ silverware has come in the form of two League Cup wins (1999, 2008), the least valuable competition of the trophies categorised as “major”. And yet the animosity is as great as ever.
“This is how silly it is,” Mark Worrall, author of several Chelsea books, begins to explain to The Athletic. “I took my daughter to her first game against Everton in March. The Liquidator (a tune that has been played at Stamford Bridge for over 50 years) came on and the fans sang, ‘We hate Tottenham, Chelsea!’ She turned to me and said, ‘Why are they chanting about Tottenham when we are playing Everton?’
“It’s like a conditioning thing. Anyone under 30 has no real reason to hate Spurs from a rivalry point of view. What have they done? They are the annoying kid brother that you always beat. It’s overplayed.
“There is a cartoon quality to it. They are not a rival, they’re someone to laugh at. They are the gift that keep on giving. The hatred aspect is a bit bizarre because they’re rubbish. I have liked the Liverpool rivalry over the last 20 years because it’s been a two-way street.”
So how did it all begin? Everyone to whom The Athletic spoke said that the first signs of real angst came in the 1960s. Having already seen academy graduate Bobby Smith win the Double with Spurs in 1961, two more prized assets, Jimmy Greaves (via AC Milan) and Terry Venables, also made the move to White Hart Lane. Greaves and Venables were part of the Tottenham side who defeated Chelsea in the 1967 FA Cup final, which was the first to be contested between two London clubs. The anger and disappointment felt by those connected to Stamford Bridge was overwhelming.
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What isn’t so well known is what happened at Wembley that day. Chelsea historian Rick Glanvill says: “There was a lot of violence outside the ground, pockets of people fighting.
“I’m in my late 50s and the majority of people I know around my age who hate Tottenham will say it started with the 1967 FA Cup final. You have to remember Spurs had Greaves and Venables in their side. Tottenham were winning trophies regularly. It made Chelsea fans ask the question, ‘Are they a bigger catch?’
“They’d won the title in 1951 and the Double in 1961. In between that, Chelsea had won the league in 1955 but it felt like Spurs were the bigger draw, more glamorous. There were big derbies leading up to 1967, which also led to animosity. That is the seeds of it.”
David Chidgey of the Chelsea FanCast adds: “Unlike now, when it is so much more of a mixed bag, if you went to school in London in the 1960s, a lot of kids supported either Chelsea or Tottenham. So if your side lost to the other at the weekend, there would be an awful lot of mocking going on and it would be something you wouldn’t forget. Those kids go on to have kids and pass those feelings on. It’s hereditary.”
That is a sequence of which season-ticket holder Darren Mantle is a classic example. His grandparents and parents were all Chelsea supporters and there was one rule in his household growing up.
“When my elder brother was young, he wanted Spurs to win the 1991 FA Cup final,” Mantle says. “They had players like Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker and played good football. But we were not allowed to support them, we never had a choice. We knew from an early age they were the enemy.”
Similarly, on joining the club, new players have always been given a quick instruction on the one team Chelsea simply have to beat. As more and more foreigners began to arrive in the 1990s, captain Dennis Wise made sure everyone knew what the situation was and his successors have done the same.
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A series of bitter duels in the 1960s and early 1970s with Leeds, whom Chelsea beat in the FA Cup Final three years later, threatened to eclipse it at the time, yet Spurs always remained in the picture. When both clubs were struggling to avoid relegation in the 1974-75 season, Chelsea lost a crucial match against them late on in the season and went down. Tottenham stayed up by just a point.
The spread of hooliganism in the English game took things to an even more unsavoury edge. Glanvill continues: “The old White Hart Lane was one of the last grounds where you’d get chased out down the street afterwards. People would randomly run out and punch people.
“Racism entered into it. Chelsea were infiltrated by racist groups like Combat 18 in the 1980s and that became a huge strand. It threw oil on the fire. There was a lot of anti-Semitism involved. For example, in the 1980s people were singing about the Tottenham striker Steve Archibald: ‘Chim chiminey, Chim chiminey, Chim chim cher-oo, you used to be Scottish and now you’re a Jew’. I remember thinking ‘this is horrific’.”
It took concerted efforts by Abramovich, who is Jewish, to make serious strides in stamping anti-Semitism out of Chelsea, through a combination of punishment and education. The battle remains ongoing.
Chidgey puts forwards another valid theory for Tottenham’s lack of popularity. “Chelsea suffer from a lack of a real direct local rivalry,” he says. “We have Fulham next door, but back in the day people would go to their games one weekend and ours the next. QPR hate us to pieces, but there is no competitive rivalry there.
“In contrast, Tottenham have Arsenal, Liverpool have Everton, Manchester United have Manchester City. So for Chelsea, it is a little bit fudged. The club’s fans inevitably had to look elsewhere.” Even more so during a drought of trophies between 1972-96, which also coincided with rarely challenging at the summit of England’s top division.
As Glanvill says: “We weren’t involved in title races so when the fixtures came out what was the first one everyone looked for, the game to make the season? It was Tottenham.” That sentiment remained, even though winning became a habit. Chelsea went 19 years without losing a league game at White Hart Lane (1987-2006), a run which was bettered at home (1990-2018).
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There have been a lot of high-profile fixtures to keep the bitter relationship going. Tottenham’s last trophy — the League Cup in 2008 — came at Chelsea’s expense in the final. A month later and Chelsea suffered a costly 4-4 draw against them to lose two crucial points in a close title race with Manchester United.
Of course, Chelsea have had the better of most of the exchanges: FA Cup semi-finals in 2012 and 2017, plus a League Cup final triumph in 2015 and semi-final penalty shootout victory after two legs last year.
One of the most celebrated games came in Chelsea’s worst campaign under Abramovich in 2015-16. The 2-2 draw was called the “Battle of the Bridge” due to 12 players being booked (Tottenham set a Premier League record with nine) and a big altercation by the dug-out at the final whistle. Chelsea fans reacted as if their side had won a trophy, when the home side had merely come from two goals down to earn a point which ensured Leicester would beat Tottenham to the Premier League title.
“In retrospect, a lot of people are embarrassed about it now,” Glanvill insists. “We had had so many bad results, it was a really weird season. A few weeks before I was at an away game and the performance was so poor, the fans were singing, ‘You better beat fucking Tottenham’.
“Basically there was a feeling of what could be salvaged. It was a case of desperate minds, desperate solutions. The only way it could be worse was if Tottenham ended their winless record at Stamford Bridge and went on to win the title. But looking back, it was embarrassing to celebrate a draw at home over our rivals, who we had dominated for years.”
As Chelsea have become more successful, so has their list of adversaries. Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United and even Barcelona have been the subject matter of some fierce contests.
But when football resumes again, most Chelsea fans will already begin looking forward to the next chance they get to enjoy a win over Tottenham.
(Photo: Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)