A photo of Tottenham Hotspur star Djed Spence has emerged showing the player celebrating Arsenal’s 2015 FA Cup win over Aston Villa.
A photo shared on social media on Monday showed Tottenham Hotspur’s Djed Spence as a teenager, celebrating Arsenal’s FA Cup win over Aston Villa.
Spence can be seen draped in an Arsenal scarf standing on the pitch at the Emirates Stadium, where the club were holding a fan screening of the final.
The future Premier League defender would have been 14 at the time, and he was clearly a follower of the Gunners, with rumours suggesting he was watching the game with his father. Now a starter for Tottenham Hotspur, there are evidently some divided loyalties in the Spence family.
Spence certainly wouldn’t be the first Spurs player to have supported Arsenal in the past.
There was that famous picture of Harry Kane celebrating the Gunners’ Premier League title win in 2004, and Matt Doherty’s transfer to Spurs was announced by the club with a clip of the player deleting pro-Arsenal tweets from his Twitter account.
Much as Spurs fans would hate to admit it, Arsenal have been the dominant force in north London throughout most of their players’ lives. None of the current squad had been born the last time Spurs won the league in 1961, nor when they last won the FA Cup in 1991.
If a young Harry Kane wanted to see a title-winning team from north London, it was Arsenal. And if a young Djed Spence wanted to see a local FA Cup-winning team, that was Arsenal too.
Maybe in another 10 years we’ll have some professional players who were boyhood Spurs fans and can recall the glory of winning the Europa League over one of the worst Manchester United sides in living memory, but not just yet.