Tottenham Hotspur FC

Tottenham Hotspur FC, English men’s football (soccer) team that competes in the English Premier League, the country’s top-tier men’s football league. The club is based in the Tottenham area of North London’s Haringey borough. It is one of seven Premier League clubs based in London. Since 2019, the Spurs have played home games at the 62,850-seat Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which is nearly twice the capacity of White Hart Lane, their former stadium at the same location.

Tottenham Hotspur FC is one of the most popular clubs in English football, though it has not always been the most successful. In 2025 it won the UEFA Europa League, 17 years after its last major title win and more than four decades after its last European trophy. It is also one of the most valuable football clubs, with revenue of €615 million ($665 million) in the 2023–24 season, making it the ninth highest-earning club globally in that period. Tottenham’s Latin motto, “Audere est facere,” translates to “to dare is to do.”

Early history: 1882–1950

Tottenham was founded as Hotspur FC by boys from a local grammar school and the Hotspur cricket club in 1882. Football had become increasingly popular among young English men in the preceding decades, with dozens of clubs emerging throughout the country in the 25 years before the Spurs’ founding. While the name Northumberland Rovers was initially bandied about, the founding group settled on Hotspur as a nod to Sir Henry Percy, a 14th-century knight nicknamed Hotspur. In 1883 the team was officially organized under founding president John Ripsher, a local Bible class teacher, picked navy blue as the club color, and began to play matches against local clubs at the Tottenham marshes. The next year the name was changed to Tottenham Hotspur FC to avoid confusion with another club named Hotspur. In 1885 the Spurs won their first competitive match, 5–2, against St. Albans in the London Association Cup draw, and switched colors to white and light blue.

Having begun to attract real local support, Tottenham moved to a fenced-in ground at Northumberland Park in 1888 and began to charge for admission. In 1895 the team turned professional and the following year joined the burgeoning Southern League. After several color changes to their kit, the Spurs adopted their now-famous white shirts and navy blue shorts in 1898. The next year the Spurs began to play at White Hart Lane, which could hold 5,000 spectators but would be expanded to hold seven times that many within five years. They had their first major success in 1900 as they won the Southern League. The following year the Spurs won their first trophy, the Football Association (FA) Cup, England’s annual knockout tournament that has been played since 1871–72. In 1908 the club successfully applied to the second division of the English Football League and was promoted to the premier division a season later. Over the next four decades, the Spurs were relegated from and promoted back to the premier division three times, a period generally considered uneventful. The exception was an FA Cup trophy in 1921, after which Tottenham officially adopted its iconic logo, a stylized cockerel standing atop a football.

Glory years: 1951–72

In 1951, under manager Arthur Rowe, Tottenham won its first Football League title. In 1958 the Spurs hired Bill Nicholson, a former player and assistant coach, as manager. He led the club in its most successful stretch of top-flight football in its history. During Nicholson’s 16-year tenure, Tottenham won seven trophies—three FA Cups, two League Cups, one European Cup Winners’ Cup, and the first UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Cup—to go alongside a league title. This included a rare double of a league title and an FA Cup win in the 1960–61 season, a feat that hadn’t been achieved since Aston Villa FC in 1897. One of the key players in this period was Jimmy Greaves, who joined the Spurs in 1961 and scored 266 goals for them in 379 appearances until his retirement in 1971.

Later history: 1973–present

1 of 2

2 of 2

With Nicholson’s departure in 1974, the club’s performance spiraled, culminating in relegation to the second division in 1977. The Spurs returned to the top division the next year, and by the 1980s had resumed their winning ways. This was at least partly due to the contributions of Ricky Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles, two Argentine players who had been part of the winning 1978 FIFA World Cup squad. Their arrival at White Hart Lane broke the nearly 50-year ban on foreign footballers playing professionally in England. In 1981 and 1982 the Spurs claimed back-to-back FA Cups. A second UEFA Cup would follow in 1984. The next year the Spurs switched to a new kit with white shirts and white shorts, reverting back to white shirts and navy shorts two years later. They won another FA Cup in 1991.

In the two decades after the Premier League’s founding in 1992, the Spurs had somewhat middling results in league play, though they did win two League Cups, in 1999 and 2008. In 2014, after hiring Mauricio Pochettino as manager, the Spurs entered something of a renaissance, competing for the top spot in the Premier League in several successive years. In 2016–17, the last year the team played at White Hart Lane, Tottenham finished second in the league, its best placement since 1962–63, when it also finished second. The Spurs ended a long trophy drought in 2025 by winning that year’s UEFA Europa League (formerly UEFA Cup).

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

White Hart Lane was demolished in 2017, and the Spurs played home games at Wembley Stadium until April 2019, when Tottenham Hotspur Stadium opened. While it has been informally referred to as Tottenham or the Spurs over the years, the club in 2025 formally requested Premier League broadcasters to refer to it only as Tottenham Hotspur or the Spurs, as Tottenham is the name of the area the club is in, and not the club itself.

Key players

In addition to Jimmy Greaves, other prolific goal scorers for the Spurs include Bobby Smith, Martin Chivers, and Cliff Jones, who played during the club’s golden age in the 1960s. Steve Perryman played 854 times for the Spurs between 1969 and 1986, a club record for appearances. English greats Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker donned Spurs colors in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Irish striker Robbie Keane formed a potent goal-scoring partnership with Dimitar Berbatov in the 2000s. Glenn Hoddle played 490 times for Tottenham and later became the club’s manager. In 2023, in a match against Manchester City FC, prolific English striker Harry Kane overtook Greaves’s record of 266 goals. Kane’s total of 280 goals for Tottenham before he transferred out in 2023 remains the club record.

Tottenham Hotspur FC Women

The Tottenham Hotspur FC Women club has played in the women’s league system in England since the 1991–92 season. Prior to that, the club was known as Broxbourne Ladies, which had been formed in 1985. The team spent more than two decades in lower tiers of the women’s football league system before a second-place finish in the 2019 FA Women’s Championship led to a promotion to the Women’s Super League (WSL), the top tier of women’s football in England. The team’s playing kit is identical to the men’s team. Key players over the years have included American striker Alex Morgan, who played one season for the Spurs in 2020–21.

Fan base and rivalry

Tottenham’s fan base is one of the largest in English football. Spurs fans are known for singing “Glory glory, Tottenham Hotspur” at matches, an adaptation of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” For many years, because of the relatively large proportion of Jewish members in the Spurs’ fan base (they are no longer an outlier in this respect), the Spurs were subject to antisemitic chants at opposing stadiums. There are few instances of widespread hooliganism among Spurs supporters, with the exception of two trips to Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 1974 and 1983 and one to Brussels in 1984, which resulted in violence. Tottenham’s longest-standing and fiercest rivalry is with its close neighbor in North London, Arsenal Football Club; the two sides have met almost 200 times since their first match in 1909, with Arsenal leading the overall head-to-head record. The Spurs also have less notable rivalries with London clubs Chelsea and West Ham United.