It’s Not a Rivalry, but We May as Well Treat It Like One
By David Rice
Outside of the Twittersphere, it’s hard to see this weekend’s opponents as an actual rival.
Tottenham Hotspur, for all their success in ascending the Premier League’s status table as an elite club, in giving this league a real top six that creates a hypothetical (though often unrealized) race for the title each year, has won precisely nothing since lifting the 2008 League Cup.
I know, believe me I am well-aware, that during that time Liverpool have managed just one trophy of their own, a League Cup in 2012. But it hasn’t quite felt the same as Spurs’ journey to this point, has it? In that time, we finished runner up twice in the league, we’ve been to four cup finals (two in Europe) and played some of the best football on the continent, doing so along some of the most dramatic story lines of recent years.
While we’ve been a rollercoaster ride of emotions and yes, disappointments, it’s not as if Spurs were the ones dominating the standings in that time. It has never once felt as though they were miles ahead of us. If anything, in recent seasons it has felt more as if we’re running parallel to one another, trying to get to the same place albeit at different speeds and in different ways.
This may in fact be part of what has created the confusion, as if these two clubs have been created equal in the eyes of the football gods rather than the Johnny come lately supporter base they have attracted through their recent commercial success. At least in this country, it’s mostly a fan base bereft of a coherent understanding of their own club’s history, nevermind the foundation on which Liverpool has built its reputation and culture, its successes and failures.
Spurs finding their seat at the Premier League elite table has been a slow slog up the hill of commercialization and revenue generation. And to be fair, they’ve done as well as anyone at it. While we were modernizing and figuring out how to compete with the oil elites on more than a historic name alone, they were building a brand out of relative obscurity.
Logging on to social media, you won’t be blamed for being fooled into thinking that those Lilywhites and Liverpool have some deep seeded, long standing rivalry. For whatever reason, their supporters seem desperate for that to be the case.
While it’s true that football success isn’t predicated solely on the marketing of nifty logos and bank balances, only a grotesquely romantic fool is blind to how it is influenced by what happens in boardrooms and on revenue reports.
In recent years, they’ve occupied themselves with building a new ground that will ensure their financial competitiveness for the long term, hiring a world class manager and signing some of England’s best talent to long term deals. As I said, running parallel, we renovated the Main Stand, signed some of the world’s best talent and hired a world class manager of our own. All the while, neither one of us have won a damn thing. So sure, you can be forgiven for being fooled into thinking that we live on the same plain. But know this. We don’t. Not yet.
Certainly, Tottenham is a reasonably big club, a powerful club, with its own history and days in the sun. But it does seem as though they’re suffering from a bit of a little guy complex, does it not?
No matter how relevant they are commercially, no matter how many England internationals they employ, Spurs have yet to enter the realm of relevance to Liverpool supporters the way City has with their titles, the way United and Arsenal always have or the way Chelsea has since the arrival of their Russian oligarch all those years ago. Those sides have steadily given us fits, finished above us and outdone us in the market. It may have gone our way when we played them, but it’s so often been the case that while we may take the battles, we’ve had to watch them win the wars.
Our matches against our most bitter rivals have a back and forth nature, a sense of giving and taking of each other’s shit and for good reason. Those fixtures boast an air of hatred, of history, the stench of mutual resentment. It’s simply something that Spurs just hasn’t earned.
There have been no glorious European ties and few unforgettable league matches between managerial masterminds that have sparked a level of bitterness between the two groups of supporters capable of living and breathing a life of its own.
Tottenham simply have not merited it.
Over the last 12 matches between our two sides in the Premier League, Tottenham have bested the Reds just twice, that being Dejan Lovren’s nightmare match at Wembley last October and a narrow victory at the Lane way back in 2012. Liverpool won the only cup tie the two have been drawn into, and have outscored them across those 13 matches by a score of 28–15. In general, the Reds have consistently been the better side since emerging from the post Hicks & Gillette pit of despair.
So why then, should we view this Saturday’s match as a big fixture?
If you’re like me, the events of last February were all you really need to develop a sense of loathing for Spurs, at least in the short term. If not for the diving shenanigans of Harry Kane and Erik Lamela to cancel out a worldy from Mo Salah that would have won the match for the Reds, I might have ended this a few paragraphs back.
Had Kane not gone on to become one of the more annoying personalities in world football last season, claiming every goal scored under the sun as his own and being treated like the golden boy time and again, maybe I’d just have a disdain for the referee that day, Jon Moss. As it stands, I am still annoyed when I think of those things and hope that because of it, karma rides to Wembley with us on Saturday.
But maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you keep your eye on the bigger picture and still struggle to see how Spurs are making their way toward being a real rival for us.
For lack of a better way of saying this, the reality is that it is a big fixture, on par with the other names in the top 6. It just is.
Tottenham has somewhat routinely finished above us over the last eight years, and has now become a fixture in the top 4. They are set up to be to 2018 what Chelsea was to 2005, except their money isn’t tied to an oil magnate and they’ve successfully upgraded their stadium to compete with the country’s biggest clubs, albeit behind schedule.
For the 2016–17 season, Spurs were only slightly behind Liverpool in terms of revenue generated. The expense of constructing their new building will play a factor going forward most likely, just as it did with Arsenal. The tight purse strings of the last transfer window may have already been a symptom of that and may in fact hamper them from winning any trophies in the next few years. But make no mistake, they aren’t going anywhere.
Upon opening the doors of their new stadium, Spurs will begin netting profit off of NFL games, concerts and a fixture list crowded with visits from Europe’s elites for at least part of this season, maybe more. That awkward glass toilet bowl may look funny, but it’s undoubtedly going to be a cash cow that allows them to continue adding to their roster as Mauricio Pochettino wishes.
So while it doesn’t feel natural or even deserved to view Spurs as a rival, we are left with little choice. In the race we are running toward glory, they are indeed one of the other horses we see when we look to the side. A decade ago, we had to look over our shoulders, but today, with big players, a great manager, a big budget and commercial success, they’re operating on a level that mirrors that of the ilk we want to live among.
It’s tempting to say they have to win something, it’s tempting to slag them off as Arsenal’s Everton, but there is more to them than that these days, and it’s only a matter of time before it starts to really feel like it.
