How Arsenal Took Tottenham's Place, and Never Gave It Back

0:00 The 24th of May, 2026. Arsenal lift the Premier League trophy for the first time in [music] 22 years. 85 points, 26 wins, their 14th English title. On the same final day, across North London, Tottenham Hotspur beat Everton 1-0 and stay up. [music] 17th, two points above the drop. Arsenal have been in the top flight of English football since 1919. 107 years without a single relegation. No club in England has an unbroken run that long. But that run didn't begin on the pitch. [music] It began in a meeting room in Manchester with a vote. And the club that [music] lost its place in that room was Tottenham. This is how a team of factory workers from south of the river became

0:46 Arsenal and why their neighbors have never forgiven them. To understand Arsenal, you have to start with the name. It isn't a nickname. It [music] was a place. In the 1880s, the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, on the south bank of the Thames, [music] was one of the biggest factories in the world. It made guns, shells, and ammunition for the British Empire and it employed [music] thousands of men. In late 1886, a group of those workers decided to start [music] a football team. One of them, a Scotsman called David Danskin, is said to have [music] put in the most money for the first ball. Another, Fred Beardsley, had kept goal for Nottingham Forest. [music] They named the team after their workshop, Dial Square. Their first recorded match was on the 11th of

1:32 December 1886 [music] on the Isle of Dogs against a side called Eastern Wanderers. Dial [music] Square won. The pitch, according to the accounts of the time, was full of ruts and open drains. They played in red, in a nod to Nottingham Forest. [music] Within weeks, the name changed to Royal Arsenal. And the first badge showed three cannons borrowed from the arms of the borough of Woolwich. The Gunners were gunmakers. For years, they had no ground of their own. They played on Plumstead Common, then on a field on the marshes that had been used to raise pigs until [music] it flooded, then at the Manor Ground, famous for its mud. There were no stands at first. The crowd watched from army wagons borrowed from the arsenal and parked along the touchline. [music] Woolwich at the time wasn't even part of

2:17 London. It was in Kent. The club was a works team [music] on the edge of the map. Football in the south of England at the time was a gentleman's game. Amateurs, public schools, [music] Corinthians. The professional clubs, the ones that paid their players, were in the north and the Midlands. In 1891, Royal Arsenal turned professional. The London football authorities answered by banning [music] them from their competitions. So, the club looked north. In 1893, as Woolwich Arsenal, it became the first club from the south of England to join the Football League. [music] It worked for a while. In 1904, Woolwich Arsenal finished second in the second division and were promoted to the first [music] on merit. But Woolwich was a hard place to run a football club. It was on the

3:03 far edge of London, poorly connected, [music] and the crowd was mostly men who worked shifts at the arsenal. When the factory cut jobs, >> [music] >> the gates fell. By 1910, the club was in voluntary liquidation. >> [music] >> Think about where that left it. A professional club in the first division playing in front of a few thousand men on the wrong side of a river with [music] no bridge nearby. Every other London club was closer to the crowds. >> [music] >> Woolwich Arsenal was a first division team in a second division town. The man who bought it was Henry Norris, a property developer who had made his fortune building houses in southwest [music] London, mayor of Fulham, later a knight and a member of parliament. >> [music] >> Norris already sat on the board of Fulham. His first idea was to merge the two [music] clubs. The Football League

3:48 said no. So, he came up with a second idea. >> [music] >> If Woolwich couldn't sustain a football club, he would move the club somewhere that could. >> [music] >> The place he chose was Highbury in North London, all the way across London on the other side of the river, near an underground station, surrounded by people. [music] The land belonged to St. John's College of Divinity, a training college for the Church of England. Norris leased its playing fields for 21 [music] years for £20,000. The lease, it's reported, was signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, [music] and it came with conditions. No matches on religious holidays, and no alcohol [music] sold at the ground. Not everyone was happy. Local residents protested, the borough council objected, and two

4:34 clubs [music] complained to the league that Arsenal were invading their territory, Clapton Orient and Tottenham Hotspur, 4 miles away. The league allowed the move, but Arsenal arrived in the worst [music] possible shape. In 1912-13, their last season in Woolwich, they had the worst season in the club's history, three wins [music] in 38 games, 18 points. Their top scorer finished with four goals. [music] They finished last and were relegated. So, on the 6th of September, 1913, the club that played its first match at Highbury was a second division [music] side on a ground that wasn't finished. They beat Leicester Fosse 2-1. [music] The crowds doubled almost overnight. Within a year, the club dropped Woolwich from its name. What they hadn't done was

5:20 get [music] back into the first division. And then, the war came. When the First World War broke out, English football carried on for one more season. >> [music] >> In the spring of 1915, Arsenal finished sixth in the second division. Tottenham finished bottom of the first [music] and were relegated. Then, the league shut down. But, that last season had a scandal in it. On Good Friday, 1915, Manchester United beat Liverpool 2-0. Players from both sides, it later emerged, had fixed the result and [music] bet on it. Those two points kept United up, and the club that went down because of it was [music] Chelsea. When football came back after the war, the league decided to grow the first division from 20 clubs to 22. That meant

6:05 two extra places. [music] The meeting to decide who got them was held on the 10th of March 1919 in Manchester. The first place was easy. Chelsea had been relegated by a fixed match, so the clubs voted unanimously to keep them up. Several of the players involved in the fix had been [music] banned for life. Nobody wanted Chelsea punished for it. The second place was the one that mattered. >> [music] >> The obvious candidate was Tottenham, the other relegated club. Or, if not them, the clubs that had finished at the top of the second [music] division. Derby and Preston had already gone up. Next came Barnsley in third, then Wolverhampton Wanderers. There were two promotion places that season. Arsenal had finished sixth. And yet, when the clubs [music] voted, Arsenal got 18 votes. Tottenham got eight.

6:51 Barnsley got five. >> [music] >> The rest were split between the others. 41 votes in total. One for each club in the league, and one for its president. Arsenal were in the first division. Tottenham were in the second. Think about it from the Tottenham [music] side. Six years earlier, Arsenal had moved into their part of London over their objections. Now, Arsenal had taken their place in the first division after finishing sixth [music] in a lower league. Tottenham won the second division the very next season and came straight [music] back up, but the story was set, and it has never stopped being told. Nobody wrote down exactly how Henry Norris won that vote. That's part of why it has lasted 100 years. The most famous [music] explanation is a speech. The league's president, John McKenna, is

7:38 said to have argued that Arsenal [music] deserved the place for their longer service to the league. Arsenal had joined in 1893, Tottenham in 1908. [music] But, that story has problems. The newspapers that reported the meeting the next [music] day don't mention the speech. And if long service was the rule, Wolverhampton Wanderers had been in the league since its first season in [music] 1888, longer than Arsenal. The other explanation is Norris himself, a wealthy, well-connected [music] politician who had spent months talking to the other chairman. It has long been alleged that he did deals or that money changed hands. [music] No evidence of that has ever been found. What we do know is how Norris's football career [music] ended. In 1927, an inquiry by the Football Association into Arsenal's

8:24 finances [music] found that he and another director had taken money they weren't entitled to, including the proceeds from selling the team bus. Norris [music] left the game. He took the FA to court for libel, but he never came back to football. By then, though, his club was already in the first division. And since 1990, it has never [music] left. Norris's last great decision for the club was a manager. >> [music] >> In the summer of 1925, he hired Herbert Chapman, who had just won two league titles in a row with Huddersfield Town. Chapman arrived at the perfect moment. [music] That same summer, the offside law changed. Until then, a forward needed [music] three defenders between him and the goal line. Now, he needed two. Goals flooded in and most teams

9:10 didn't know how to stop them. [music] Chapman did. He pulled his center half back into defense between the [music] two fullbacks and rebuilt the team around it. On paper, the shape looked like [music] a W on top of an M. It became the most copied system in English football for the next 30 [music] years. He also understood that a football club was more than a team. >> [music] >> He added numbers to the backs of shirts. He gave Arsenal white sleeves. He pushed for floodlights decades before the authorities allowed them. [music] And in 1932, he persuaded the London Underground to rename the local station. Gillespie Road became Arsenal. [music] It is still the only station on the network named after a football club. And he spent money like no one before him. >> [music] >> In 1928, he signed David Jack from

9:56 Bolton Wanderers for more than 10,000 pounds, the first five-figure transfer fee in the history of the game. [music] A year later came Alex James, a small Scottish forward with baggy shorts who ran the team [music] from deep. On the wing, a teenager from Exeter, Cliff Bastin, who would become the club's record scorer for more than half a century. The results [music] followed. The FA Cup in 1930, the league title in 1931, and again in 1933. In January 1934, the story goes, [music] Chapman caught a cold watching a reserve game, and it turned into pneumonia. He died [music] on the 6th of January. He was 55. His team won the title that season anyway, and the [music] next, three in a row. The club that had been voted into the first division was now

10:43 the best team in England, and it had a stadium to match. New stands at Highbury, built in the [music] Art Deco style. The East Stand is still there, turned into flats, and it's a listed building. >> [music] >> In 1939, war came again. Highbury was taken over as an air-raid precaution [music] station, and German bombs hit it. The roof over bank was destroyed. [music] Arsenal needed some way to play, and the club that offered them a home was Tottenham. For the rest of the war, Arsenal played their home matches at White Hart Lane, on the ground of the team they had pushed out of the first division 20 years earlier. Wartime football was chaos. Players were soldiers, and teams borrowed whoever was home on leave. In 1941, the London

11:29 clubs, Arsenal among them, broke away to run their own competition, >> [music] >> and the Football League expelled them. A year later, they were let back in after paying a small fine. In 1946, Arsenal went home. Highbury had to be repaired. The First Division was waiting for them, and so was the place they had won by a vote. After the war, [music] the run continued. It survived lean years and great ones. In 1971, Arsenal won the league and the FA Cup, the double, and they clinched the league at White Hart Lane. In 1989, they went to Anfield on the last night of the season needing to win by two goals. In stoppage time, Michael Thomas scored the second. In 1996, the club hired a manager almost nobody in England had heard of, Arsène

12:15 Wenger. He came from Japan, from a club called Nagoya Grampus Eight, >> [music] >> and he changed how English players ate, trained, and recovered. With Dennis Bergkamp, Patrick Vieira, and Thierry Henry, he won two doubles, and in the season 2003-2004, his team went the whole league season unbeaten. 26 wins, 12 draws, no defeats, [music] the Invincibles. Their unbeaten run lasted 49 games. [music] In 2006, Arsenal left Highbury for a new stadium a few hundred meters away, >> [music] >> the Emirates. It cost around 390 million pounds, almost [music] all of it borrowed. To pay for it, the club sold its best players for nearly a decade. [music] It went nine years without a trophy. Through all of it, it stayed up. Every

13:02 other club in the Premier League today began [music] its current spell by winning promotion. Everton, the next longest, have been up since [music] 1954. Arsenal's place, the one they've kept for 107 years, is [music] the one they were voted into. In December 2019, Arsenal hired a former captain, Mikel [music] Arteta, as manager. He had never managed a club before. For six seasons, his team came close. Three times in a row, it finished second. Then came 2026, Arsenal's best season in a generation. The league title after 22 years. A Champions League final in Budapest, lost on penalties to Paris Saint-Germain. Their 14th English title to go with a record 14 FA Cups.

13:47 Tottenham spent the same season fighting relegation and stayed up on the final day. In North London, the rivalry is a hundred years old and both sides still tell the story of 1919. >> [music] >> For Tottenham fans, it's the original sin, the season Arsenal stole their place. For Arsenal fans, it's a question that answered itself. Whatever happened in that room in Manchester, [music] the club that got the place has never given it back. Factory workers from Woolwich, >> [music] >> a property developer who moved them across London, a vote nobody can fully explain, and a hundred and seven years without going down. [music] Next in this series, another English club and another origin story that starts [music] somewhere you wouldn't expect.