I was chatting with a business associate the other day who happens to be a Liverpool fan. When he politely asked about my own club allegiance, I told him the truth: Tottenham Hotspur. I’m well familiar with how this makes me feel: the odd-but-familiar combination of forlorn hope and idiosyncratic pride (I typically don’t get into my half-baked New England Revolution support). What is more fascinating frankly is the recent reaction of others: They offer up something akin to lighthearted pity, mixed with genuine bewilderment. As in, Why would anyone choose that?

I do a lot of business in Asia where they love futbol but, as with the U.S., many follow an English Premier League club more ardently than any local outfit. This is the new model, what made the EPL so fucking rich that Sunderland outspends every club on the Continent other than Real Madrid and PSG.

But how is this matter of club allegiance overseas established?

Invariably, Asian cab drivers, lads in sports bars and folks walking the streets of Ho Chi Minh City in Chelsea shirts choose big clubs that win a lot. These are the sides who play on TV most frequently, especially in far-away lands, and so the resulting attachments might make a perfect sort of sense.

But do they really? I enjoy playing a game with U.S.-based Arsenal fans, with whom I frequently tangle, verbally, whenever the subject of support arises in public soccer-watching environments. I allow them to pity my Spurs habit. I’m used to it. I will even encourage talk of St. Totteringham’s Day, the calendar date each year (most years) when the Arse assures it will finish above Totty in the league table.

Eventually, I attempt to turn the tables, then the screws: “So, why Arsenal? You live in Chicago. What led you to support the club?”

Verbal fumbling invariably ensues, whereby these otherwise fine fellows (that’s charitable: they’re often finance dicks whose respective self-images require victories) try to explain their club attachment with high-blown, not-quite-believable declarations of love and fealty, such as, “I just love the tradition at the Emirates” (gag), or “I got hooked during The Invincibles season of 2002.”

Whereupon I get to the point: So, you’re a front-runner then.

Soccer Club Allegiance = blood + soil

This is pointed and mean but, honestly, what else could explain it? They don’t have the dexterity to lie believable or honorable, as in, “Well, I lived in New York and my local turned out to be a Manchester United bar,” or “My uncle’s from Manchester and he’s a Citeh fan from back in the dire days of Steve Israel.”

No. They are just honest enough to reveal the fragile egos that require wins and title chances to maintain interest from match to match.

Tottenham fans are not like this. The Guardian’s Barney Ronay recently offered up a pretty fantastic, bracingly candid and clever explanation for the bizarre masochism in which COYS folk engage with the club, match to match and season to season. I won’t attempt to better it here. In short, however, I will say 25 years of Red Sox, Bruins and Pats fandom from 1975-2000 prepared me very well for Spurs allegiance. I don’t ask for much and the anguish is baked right into the exercise. I am hard to disappoint. Apparently. I must inherently enjoy tilting at powerful windmills, like the New York Yankees, Montreal Canadiens and, yes, Wenger’s Arsenal.

Ronay’s very useful treatise also gets at how and why futbol allegiance is typically secured, and how post-modern, stateside EPL fandom is made manifest today.

I mean, who eventually gets hooked on Saturday morning thrills and spills, all the fan traditions and pageantry, then chooses to back … Wolverhampton? Anyone with any sense will eventually back Chelsea, Man City or Arsenal. Those who hew to the quirky or nostalgic might go with United (these days), or Newcastle, or Fulham — a lovely club whose penchant for American players has fairly won myriad fans on this side of the pond.

Tottenham may fall into these categories, but not so often of late, in my experience. There is nothing fashionable or attractively off-beat in supporting Spurs. Not today.

It’s instructive to note how the English deal with this issue of club allegiance. Like it or not, the game was invented by these people; their habits have spilled over into the world futbol culture in dozens of meaningful ways. For example, they have developed quite strict rules about whom one can outwardly support: There must be some blood or soil connection to the club, meaning a father, mother or uncle must have passed the fandom down — or one must have grown up in the region where Brighton & Hove Albion plays home matches, i.e. the south coast.

These sons and daughters of Albion are permitted to hedge in one small way: They may maintain a local club or otherwise lower-division affiliation that reflects this blood and soil, in addition to a top-flight club. The latter side is invariably on the tele often enough, or the ground is close enough, to lend meaning and higher stakes to their football-support.  The English cannot make a good pizza, but this construct makes a lot of sense.

One club at a time, Per Division

One cannot support two EPL clubs at once. In the world of English club allegiance, that’s right out. I learned this maxim in the 2000s when I did a series of stories for ESPN.com on the FulhAmerica phenomenon taking shape in and around Craven Cottage. I admitted to some Brit that I was a Tottenham guy but also that I’d become quite taken with Fulham FC, its lovely Fenway-type ground there on the Thames, the surfeit of Yanks then in the side, the quite splendid stadium walk-up through Bishop’s Park, and the proper pints of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord ale pullrf in local pubs like The Bricklayers Arms.

“You cannae do that, son,” he quickly informed me. “One big club. Maybe a local from back home. That’s the lot… Anything else would be unseemly.”

I’ve had this conversation with actual Arsenal fans, the ones born and bred in North London. At least they understand the dynamics. On some level these are Englishmen who became Arselings because they’re front runners, as well, but they have the cultural awareness — or the broader culture has prevailed upon them enough — to conjure an influential uncle, or credit Nick Hornby’s fine book Fever Pitch, or something…

In these fascist times, blood and soil are sadly in vogue for all the wrong reasons, but they do influence club support in honest, harmless ways. If I had to choose one or the other for its paramount impact, I’d go with geography. I first fell for Tottenham in the summer of 1978, when my U-14 club team toured England. Peter Shreeves — then the reserves manager at White Hart Lane — put my teammates and I through a fabulous training session. Seven years later, when I showed up in Hampstead for a university semester abroad, Shreeves was Spurs’ first-team manager. That’s what we call kismet.

During that winter of 1984-85, when every weekend produced back-page coverage of supporter punch-ups and pitch-invasions, Spurs further stood out for their stylish play and rather genteel fan culture in and around their home ground. They won far more than they lost — challenged for the league title that season before slipping to third, I believe. But there was no talk of this collapse being “Spursy” or indicative of endemic failure. By 1985, TOT was only 24 years removed from doing the league/FA Cup double. Today, 40 years further on (and still no league title), Tottenham Hotspur and their propensities to flatter & deceive are far more tangible. It’s prominent enough that big-hearted Liverpool fans express genuine concern.

And so, the club and its fans will remain the object of pity, before and after they go down, or hire back Mauricio Pochettino, or James Maddison returns from injury. Tomorrow’s North London Derby? I would give my left nut to watch the Arse drop points and/or Tottenham register its first win in eight — the first victory of the Igor Tudor era! Should it go badly? Hey, it’s early, but the Revs are looking capable.