Welcome, everybody to soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell. I am very excited to be here, even if I am nervous, because today's

topic is one that is going to be greeted with immediate sarcastic answers, I'm pretty sure,

and immediate consternation, frustration, potential anger from the club that we're going to be

discussing, because Graham, the big question, is Tottenham Hotspur a big club? Why are we doing this, Graham,

Ruffin? You want to start there? Just for the rage bait, of course, of the whole situation.

We haven't even invited Ryan onto this episode to slander them as he does on a daily basis on the main feed.

Yeah, I guess it is just, I don't really, there's not really a timely

sort of news hook to this. It's just a question that seems to emerge every so often. And I saw a post,

maybe this actually is what made me think of it. I saw a post that was shared by Alexis from the

Cooligans, which of course he, the Arsenal fan, of course he shared that. But it was a post that read, it's comforting to know that no matter what is happening in football, Spurs are always the joke. And so that kind of like summed up a lot of the sentiment we see around Spurs. And we even reference to it to it Ryan more than maybe the rest of us.

We reference it on the show. So I thought it was maybe a good idea to deconstruct some of that

and dig down into why that is the case. I think it's an interesting jumping off point that

tweet, quote, message from Alexis because it, like, it's certainly not true.

There have been times when Spurs have been very successful for long periods of time, as we'll get into.

But there is an element there of, like, they have been a punching bag for different reasons.

Some of them fair, some of them unfair.

And it tends to come around because, like, even when we were doing our Champions League coverage this week, it feels like when we're trying to kind of pick out the big games, the big teams that we definitely need to focus on, Spurs maybe aren't top of that list. Maybe they're like midway down the order, generally speaking. And some of that has to do with opposition. Like if it's Spurs versus Barcelona, we're probably watching that

game. But Spurs versus Monaco, that gets like a 45 second summary in the Champions League review.

And so I think Spurs themselves don't always elevate, but they are still a big club, but maybe

they're not. And that's why we're going to do this, Graham. We're going to talk it all out and

kind of figure out where we land. I think maybe before we get into the Tottenham history and the Tottenham of it all, it might be worth kind of having a brief conversation about why this matters or what is a big club? Because they're American listeners who maybe are just getting into soccer or have always wondered, why do we have such fascination with quote unquote big clubs

and I said this to you before we started recording if you have like the golden state warriors

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