If players clap in a stadium full of boos, does it make a sound?
Do frustrated away fans — total spend: £30 on match ticket, £120 on trains, £30 on food and drink — ever walk away from a desultory performance with their heart lifted and eyes brimming with pride, burnished by the sincerity of their centre-backs applause?
Is regretful sorrow conveyed best by a rhythmic and solemn slowness, or a grim and strained intensity?
Does the players’ distance from the fans themselves — at West Ham’s Olympic Stadium, some 50 yards, at many lower league grounds, just five — have any correlation with the sincerity of their apologies?
Is a hands-up, heads-down mea culpa also allowed?
These are the questions that Tottenham Hotspur’s Djed Spence and Micky van de Ven will be asking themselves over the coming days, muscles sore, shins bloodied, but with hands unsmarting.
Among the unwritten rules and sacred cows that wander football’s pastures, defeated players clapping their own fans is held as beyond reproach.
The principle behind it is simple — fans have spent significant money, time, and energy in supporting their side. That, in itself, deserves gratitude, especially when fed into an algorithm that includes distance travelled, time of day, and severity of losing run.
On that scale, Van de Ven’s and Spence’s failure to clap the Tottenham supporters after their 1-0 home loss to Chelsea falls somewhere in the middle.
Some context: Spurs had played dreadfully, and despite still sitting fifth in the league, a run of successive dreary performances culminated in some of the loudest boos ever heard at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Cutting-edge acoustics work for negativity as well.
Walking onto the pitch at full time, new manager Thomas Frank — a man who admittedly loves a collective clap — pointed at his two retreating defenders with a single finger, before, somewhat theatrically, whirling it around to redirect them towards the Tottenham supporters.
The pair did not meet Frank’s eye, but appeared to greet him with words, striding off with gesticulations and slumped shoulders. They were also, visually, logically, self-evidentially furious.
There are a few ways to greet this reaction. One, the most immediate, is fan-focused — that at a stadium with some of the highest ticket prices in the country, the supporters’ contribution should be recognised.
Another surrounds the team dynamics. Just four months into Frank’s Tottenham tenure, is it concerning that his instruction was so obviously ignored?
And then there is the player perspective and the honesty that fans wish to receive. When a player claps the fans, an element of it, apologies aside, is a tacit implication that they care about the wider club.
So, taken in another way, by storming off after a frustrating defeat, are the players not demonstrating a genuine response that mirrors the feeling of many of those supporters? Or should the priority, instead, be to suppress those feelings and instead step forward, toe the line, and carry out a purely performative action?
This will not, by any means, be a universally held view, but it mirrors the nuances that a seemingly simple action carries within it.
The matter was deemed serious enough to ask Frank about in his post-match press conference — answer: “It’s just a small thing” — but this was by no means a media-manufactured storm. On Spurs fan accounts on social media, a fan-filmed video of the interaction received many thousands of retweets.
There is also, of course, another flipside. Vitor Pereira went down clapping, in a way, and what good did it do him or his team? Last Sunday, having lost 3-2 to Burnley, he approached the fans to applaud them, before quickly becoming embroiled in a confrontation with the home supporters, appearing to be held back by staff members.
“Two months ago, they sang my name!” he exclaimed afterwards.
But this is football’s double standard. The sport is allowed to be fickle. So are fans. Are the players and coaches? Absolutely not.
There is a fine line between taking supporters for granted and treating adults like adults — we’re talking about the scant matter of a 20-second clap, for goodness sake — but the entire discourse smacks of a creeping sense of the-customer-is-always-rightness, which, in many ways, is entirely unsurprising given football’s increasing commercial-led concerns.
But the laughable truth behind that phrase is its utter untruth, the knowledge, from everyone in on the gag, that customers are often fundamentally wrong. They may have wanted the pea and mint soup, but unfortunately, the word that left their mouth was tomato.
The majority of people would agree that there are clear red lines in this whole clapping charade.
In one hypothetical scenario, if a player received personal abuse about their family from hundreds of fans, for example, should they applaud? Most rational beings would say no.
So it follows that there are more nuanced scenarios. If a player feels that a crowd’s boos, midway through a game, has harmed their side’s chances of winning, should they still be bound to applaud that behaviour? Quite possibly not.
And ultimately, the right of personal refusal does matter. It is without doubt that a healthy dollop of empathy goes a long way. In an ideal world — given the difficulty of being a football supporter in a game beset by callous kick-off times and sky-rocketing prices — the knowledge that your side’s stars understand your frustration are clear stitches in the fabric of a club.
But what if the action is clearly performative? Does apathetic, glazed-over clapping move the needle in any sort of meaningful way? Apologies require sincerity, and so do thank-yous; more generally, they are contained in the intention rather than the action.
There is a future in which micro-behaviours are written into contracts, where applause becomes not just an expectation, but a demand. Does that lead to a healthier ecosystem around the sport? Does it really help that social fabric? No.
And if you disagree? By the same logic, an answer is at hand.
From the metaphorical centre-circle, I’ll respond dutifully to angry comments — to each and every one — with several emojis of some clapping hands. It’s from the heart. Divisions healed. Problem solved. Job done.