Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

London Soccer Fans Use Banned ‘Yid’ Slur at Match on Yom Kippur

Supporters of London’s Tottenham Hotspur team chanted “Yid Army,” a term banned by the governing body of English soccer, during a match on Yom Kippur.

Spurs fans, who call themselves the Yid Army, also chanted “We’re Tottenham Hotspur, we’ll sing what we want” during the Premier League match against Norwich City on Saturday and applauded team stars with the chant “Yiddo.”

The chants come days after the English Football Association released a statement saying that the association believes the term “is likely to be considered offensive by the reasonable observer and considers the term to be inappropriate in a football setting.”

The statement also said that “use of the term in a public setting could amount to a criminal offense, and leave those fans liable to prosecution and potentially a lengthy football banning order.”

The statement has angered the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust, which represents more than 5,000 fans, The Telegraph reported.

The Trust said in a statement that “should Spurs’ fans’ use of the Yid identity come to an end, this should be as a result of the feeling among the Spurs community that it was time to move on.” “While we recognize that Spurs fans use of the Y-word and associated identity may have caused some upset to members of the Jewish community, we sincerely believe no Spurs fan uses the term in a malicious way.”

The term is often used by other soccer teams to describe Spurs fans in a derogatory way.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.