The flight from London to Bilbao only takes two hours, but my journey will take two nights.
I leave London on Sunday afternoon, take the train to Portsmouth, and then walk through the empty city to the port. I prepare to board the ferry. It will be my home for the next 34 hours.
Why am I doing this? In part because I had been joking about it for months on our Spurs podcast, The View from the Lane. I realised with a jolt one night that there could be nothing more humiliating than making a promise on a podcast and not following through with it. There is a bond of trust between podcasters and listeners that I did not want to break.
So after Tottenham won 1-0 at Eintracht Frankfurt in the quarter-final second leg, turning everything we knew about them on its head, I knew I had to book.
It struck me that a long, slow, almost quixotic adventure was precisely the right way to prepare for the final of the Europa League. This is a competition with its own distinct energy. The Champions League belongs to the world of money and celebrity; the frictionless lives lived by the one per cent of the one per cent; a world of private jets and black Mercedes Sprinter vans.
The Europa League is different.
When I arrive at the ferry terminal, I hope to see it already taken over by football fans. I want to feel that I am in the right place. I want a meaningful communal experience. I want the journey to teach me something profound about the game.
I confidently ask a middle-aged man sitting next to me whether he is here supporting United or Spurs. He looks at me blankly and says that he is walking a section of the Camino, from Bilbao to Santander. I tell him about the Europa League final. Something clicks and he realises why it was so hard to book a cabin at this time of year, and why he was given one meant for wheelchair users.
Eventually, the football fans start to arrive. Most drive onto the ferry. Some, like me, are on foot. It is no surprise that so many have decided to forego flying. And not because they want to hold themselves to promises made on podcasts. Following the cost of flights to Bilbao over the course of the season has been like following a stock market crash in reverse: every time you check, the numbers have shot up.
Fans confident enough to book flights months ago were able to get good prices, but if you waited until your team was in the final you will have to pay close to £1,000 ($1,300). People are being forced into increasingly complicated journeys. The ferry is slow but simple.
I meet two Spurs season ticket holders, Ben Islin and Paul Jackson, who have just arrived via a train to Petersfield, a long taxi and a trip to the Ship & Castle pub. They booked the ferry on their phones from their seats in the south stand at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium just as soon as James Maddison put Spurs 2-0 up against Bodo/Glimt in the first leg of the semi-final.
They did not want to take the risk of waiting until full time, never mind until after the second leg. Ben has packed a match-worn Nicola Berti replica shirt to wear on Wednesday night. Paul says he will cry if Spurs win.
My one-way ticket was £170 with another £125 on top for a four-berth cabin. Three or four people to one cabin was far cheaper than the same number of people booking three or four plane tickets to get to Spain.
I meet three Manchester United fans from Yeovil, sharing the same cabin. They plan to drive to a rented villa in Santander on Tuesday morning, then take the slightly quicker ferry back from Santander to Plymouth on Thursday.
As we leave England behind on Sunday evening, the bar starts to fill up. The mood is positive. Spurs and Man United fans are getting on well.
The fact that both teams have had such poor league seasons encourages something approaching solidarity, a shared misery that removes any possibility of hubris or presumptuousness. No one can be arrogant when they are below West Ham United with one game left.
I join a group of Spurs fans for a drink. We talk about the finals Tottenham have played in recent years. Everyone has their own memories of Madrid, of the 2015 League Cup final, of the 2021 League Cup final, which only 7,773 fans attended.
Spurs did not even score in any of those games. They have not scored in a final since Jonathan Woodgate’s header in 2008. Of course everyone wants to win on Wednesday, but even a goal would be a change.
We weigh this European campaign against Spurs’ disastrous league form, and how Mauricio Pochettino worked wonders at Tottenham but never won anything, whereas George Graham and Juande Ramos were never popular, but did win Tottenham’s last two trophies. “We only win things when we’re shit,” says Paul.
On Monday morning, it dawns on me that we still have more than 24 hours to go.
I have breakfast and walk around. I begin to feel restless. There is only so much time you can stare into the sea and think about whether Son Heung-min, Richarlison or Mathys Tel should start on the left.
Or whether Spurs’ tactics in their three wins against United this season will be at all replicable without Dejan Kulusevski and James Maddison on the pitch.
Or who Spurs’ five penalty takers might be. Could Pedro Porro take one?
We swing past the western tip of Brittany and turn south. In the afternoon, there is a quiz. I join a team with Spurs fan Alex and his mother Sue. Her first Spurs final was the 1981 FA Cup replay. “I’m a constantly pessimistic Spurs supporter,” she says. “I just call it being a realist.”
They decided to take the ferry, along with Alex’s brother Luke, because of their experience of travelling to the 2019 Champions League, when they took the coach from London to Madrid and hated it. “The coach in 2019 was so bad, 24 hours, 24 hours back, we could never do that again,” Alex says. “No legroom, no sleep, and the toilets… This is a lot nicer. It’s nice to make it the adventure that it should be.”
I struggle with the quiz but Sue carries our team. The first round is ‘Classic Telly’ and the first question is about the 1970s sitcom Rising Damp. With one question left, we are one point behind the leaders.
“What was the highest-grossing film of 2000?” I confidently insist it was Gladiator. The correct answer is Mission Impossible 2. We have to settle for second place. I feel like I have put the decisive penalty of the shootout over the bar.
I try to get over my disappointment by standing on the deck and seeing if I can spot a dolphin or even a whale.
On Monday evening, I return to the bar. It is full of fans and there is a singer with a guitar playing. He starts to play songs that specifically appeal to each team. Spurs fans sing, “I’m loving Big Ange instead” to Robbie Williams’ “Angels”. United fans sing their version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. Tottenham go again with “Can’t Smile Without You”.
Football songs briefly take over. For a moment this feels like a floating fan zone, a nautical BoxPark. But Jimmy on the guitar brings everyone back together with “American Pie”.
On our second night, we go through the Bay of Biscay, where the seafloor suddenly drops from 200m to 4000m as you leave the edge of the continental shelf. These are notoriously choppy waters. It is not as bad as I feared, not as bad as watching Spurs defend a 2-0 lead, or United play out from the back, but bad enough to stop me from sleeping.
Early in the morning, I leave my cabin and go up to the top deck. I see someone jogging laps around it and feel jealous. (My Monday step count: 4,957.)
I arrive early for breakfast on Tuesday morning. The restaurant is at the front of the ship and, at roughly 7am, I finally make out the shape of dry land in front of us. First I see the outline of the cliffs and hills, then the port of Zierbena, 20km north of Bilbao. I picture the thrill of walking on dry land again.
We file on to a bus and drive to passport control. I realise what an overwhelmingly English experience the last 34 hours have been. The songs at the bar. The gallows humour about the game. The quiz in which one of the answers was Noel Edmonds.
Ben had remarked to me that after Spurs got Liverpool in 2019 he would have preferred a foreign opponent in Tottenham’s next European final, simply for reasons of exoticism and difference. Many United fans would surely feel the same way.
But this is the nature of modern football. There were all-English Champions League finals in 2021 and 2019. There was another all-English Europa League final in 2019 too. Of course, other countries have done this: all-Spanish Champions League finals in 2016 and 2014, all-German in 2013. But only the Premier League could produce two European finalists who are this bad.
Even as they both suffer through their worst league seasons in modern history (Spurs have never lost league games at this season’s rate), in Europe they have summoned a clunky power that opponents find difficult to cope with. Both semi-finals were remarkably one-sided.
It feels like a vision of the future — two sets of English fans heading to another final in another European city, without either of the English sides succeeding or even impressing at home. I wonder about getting to Budapest or Istanbul next year.
(Top photo: Jack Pitt-Brooke)