Welcome to Spurs Through the Ages — the complete history of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, told from the very beginning.

Over the next ten episodes, we are going to travel through one hundred and forty-three years of football history. From a group of teenage boys on Tottenham Marshes in 1882, through the darkness and the glory and the near-misses and the heartbreaks, all the way to a warm Wednesday evening in Bilbao in May 2025, when forty-one years of waiting finally ended and a first European trophy since 1984 came home to N17.

We will meet the men who built this club from nothing — a Bible class teacher who kept the books and believed in the boys, a Scottish player-manager who took a non-league side to the FA Cup, a Scarborough-born football obsessive who assembled the greatest club side England had ever seen. We will live through the years of relegation and the years of glory, the boardroom wars, the players who stayed and the players who left, the nights at Wembley and the nights in Amsterdam. And we will ask the question that runs through every chapter of this story: what does it mean to be Tottenham Hotspur? What is it, in the end, that makes this club what it is?

The answer to that question is woven into the very beginning. Into the name they chose. Into the motto they adopted. Into the way they decided, from the very first, that they would rather dare and fail than never dare at all.

This is Episode One: The Boys from the Marshes.

Research Sources

Phil Soar & Martin Tyler, 'Encyclopedia of British Football' — essential for context on the Southern League and the early professional era.

Julian Holland, 'Spurs: The Double' (1961) — includes useful material on the club's founding mythology and early identity.

Tottenham Hotspur official history (tottenhamhotspur.com) — for dates and records; the club's own account of the 1901 Cup win is detailed and valuable.

Wikipedia, '1901 FA Cup Final' and '1900–01 FA Cup' — reliable for specific match details, scores, goalscorers and attendance figures.

British Newspaper Archive — the Tottenham Weekly Herald, 1895–1910; contemporary match reports, crowd descriptions, and local social context. Indispensable for the Fan's Eye View segment.

Grokipedia, '1901 FA Cup Final' — comprehensive account of the semi-final route and the final itself, including the Bolton replay detail.

The Spurs History website (spurshistory.co.uk) — fan-maintained but thorough; useful for the early grounds and administrative history.

Andy Porter, former Tottenham Hotspur Club Historian — his written accounts of the 1901 FA Cup run, preserved on the club website, are an essential primary source.

Pathé News archive — footage of the 1901 FA Cup Final exists and is accessible online. Consider directing listeners to it in the show notes.