How Tottenham Is Giving Fans ‘Tottenham’ Back

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Behind the Work in association withThe Immortal Awards

How Tottenham Is Giving Fans ‘Tottenham’ Back

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24/08/2026
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In a film marking the start of a fresh season for Tottenham Hotspur, the camera is turning away from players and spectacle. The club’s CMO Adam Gardiner tells LBB’s Adam Bennett why rebuilding the club’s identity begins with its supporters

There are no thumping tackles, slow-motion goals or hero shots of players emerging from smoke in Tottenham Hotspur’s new season film.

Instead, there is a child staring out of a bus window, Spurs shirts adorning ordinary streets, a baby being bounced in the sunshine and a supporter proudly revealing a tattoo across his chest.

‘Tottenham Till I Die’, created with creative studio Blind Faith, is deliberately uninterested in the usual machinery of the football season launch. Shot around N17 and among supporter communities further afield, including Seoul and Sydney, it presents fandom as something that lives between matches rather than confined to the stadium.

Coming after a difficult season on the pitch, the pivot is significant. For Tottenham CMO Adam Gardiner, who joined the club earlier this year after five years running marketing at Arsenal – Spurs’ fiercest rivals and, uncomfortably for anyone in N17, the more successful north London side of recent seasons – the campaign forms part of a wider attempt to strengthen a relationship with supporters that he believes had become less clearly defined over time.

“The move from White Hart Lane into the new stadium [in 2019] changed a huge amount, and over time there has been a sense that some of the Club’s identity and its connection with its core fanbase became less clear,” says Adam. “What attracted me was the opportunity to be part of changing that.”

Putting the Fans First

That task began, rather unusually for a global football club, with its own name.

Adam says supporters tend to talk affectionately about ‘Tottenham’, while the club itself has increasingly spoken as ‘Spurs’. To an outsider, the distinction might appear microscopic. But to him, it says something larger about place, history and the identity supporters believe belongs to them.

“When our fans speak about us with love, they call us Tottenham, but they’ve started to notice that we don’t call ourselves the thing they love most – Tottenham,” he says.

“This campaign is about giving them Tottenham back and showing we are proud of being Tottenham. It’s our identity, home, and strength, and this is our moment to believe in it again.”

That sense of place runs throughout ‘Tottenham Till I Die’. The campaign treats the streets around the club as seriously as the stadium itself, lingering on homes, families, clothes and faces. Lifelong Spurs supporter (and star of this year’s Christopher Nolan blockbuster ‘The Odyssey’) Himesh Patel provides its voiceover, and also appears on-screen.

It is a markedly human response to a season in which the club’s relationship with its supporters was tested. Adam says that, internally, the team at Tottenham were clear at the end of last season that ‘fixing things’ could not be restricted solely to what happened on the pitch.

“We’ve started to rebuild the connection, now we want to build belief, which comes from knowing who we are and what we stand for,” he says. “A new season gives us a moment to look forward, together.”

Seen From the Inside

Perhaps the most telling creative decision, though, is the person Tottenham put behind the camera.

Photographer Alfie Whiteman joined Spurs at the age of 10 and spent his entire professional football career at the club, before retiring aged 26 to pursue photography. And for Adam, there is an appealing tension to asking someone whose professional life was defined by football to photograph exactly what the club means.

Having lived opposite the stadium and spent much of his life inside Tottenham’s training ground and matchday world, Alfie brings an intimacy that would be difficult to brief into an outside photographer.

“As both a local resident and someone who has lived within the inner workings of the club since the age of 10, Alfie’s perspective is truly unique,” Adam says. “His photography uniquely embraces the people, the place, the character, the creativity, and sense of community that make the club what it is.”

Tottenham has since hosted Alfie’s first exhibition at a gallery inside its stadium. For ‘Tottenham Till I Die’, his camera is pointed firmly away from the elite football world he left behind.

It fits Adam’s wider argument that there is no archetypal Tottenham supporter. “One might have occupied the same Park Lane seat for 50 years; another might have fallen for the club watching Gareth Bale, Dele Alli, Harry Kane or Son Heung-min; another could be getting to a New York bar at 10am to watch a match,” he notes.

For him, the essential marketing challenge is finding what survives all those differences.

“There is no single definition of a Spurs fan,” says Adam. “Everyone has their own matchday rituals and different perspectives on what Tottenham means to them. That is the beauty of football fandom. What we are trying to do is find that common thread that connects us all to Tottenham.”

‘Tottenham Till I Die’ suggests the answer might have less to do with football’s increasingly polished global spectacle than with all the slightly messier, and more meaningful, ways a club gets threaded through somebody’s life.

And ahead of a new season, Tottenham appears keen to bring its fans back into the wider team.

Behind the Work in association withThe Immortal Awards
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