October 14, 2026
Jimmy/for PhillyVoice
It was cool to see heavily invested Eagles fans all weekend in London.
Over the last decade or so, I've been doing press box food spread reviews during my travels to road games around the NFL. This summer we retired that bit, since I've now been to every stadium in the NFL, reviewed every team, and didn't want to "Jump the Shark," so to speak. We published one final official ranking of every team, from 32 to 1.
Many of you requested that if I traveled to London for the Eagles' overseas matchup against the Jaguars, that I review the spread at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. And, well, of course I went! So, OK, I'll bring this bit out of the shed for one week.
To begin, I should probably clarify that there was no press box. Our seats were among the fans. I was seated near the 15 yard line, pretty close to field level. It was perfect football weather and a cool stadium, so I rather enjoyed the in-game experience. One of my favorite venues ever to watch a football game was when the Eagles played the Chargers in a soccer stadium in Los Angeles, after the Chargers had moved out of San Diego but before SoFi Stadium was built. In that interim, the Rams played at the L.A. Coliseum (a landmark, but also a complete dump), while the Chargers played at what is now called Dignity Health Sports Park, which was a really cool intimate setting.
That Chargers venue had a capacity of a little under 30,000 people, and on that day I'd say that at least 25,000 of them were Eagles fans. The percentage of Eagles fans filling Tottenham was similar. But we'll get to that shortly. I covered that Eagles-Chargers game outdoors as well, and just like on Sunday, the weather was perfect. From a media perspective, Tottenham was a little like the soccer stadium experience in L.A., but in a much bigger stadium and in front of a far bigger audience of a little under 70,000.
Our food was in a large, comfortable media workroom. Here's what they had:
If you Google "three onion tart," you'll see that it is "a savory pastry made with a mix of three onion varieties — typically red, white, and green scallions or leeks — layered over a buttery crust with cheese, thyme, and cream."
I appreciate the effort on that, but at an event where there are a lot of face-to-face conversations, I don't want to be breathing "three onion tart" all over peers and players.
The other item above that requires some explaining was the "Warm Golden Syrup and lemon sponge: Stem ginger vanilla custard," shown below:
The idea here is that you ladle the vanilla custard over the lemon cake. And, I gotta say, that was pretty damn good. My plate:
At halftime they had some pretty crappy chicken fingers.
Side note: I also got chicken fingers at a pub on a quick refuel during one of my walks through the city, and they were bad, too. It feels like there's some opportunity for an American who knows how to make a bangin' chicken finger to clean up there.
Overall, it was a solid enough spread, nothing special, but Tottenham gets bonus points because of the cool vantage point, the modern facilities, and exceedingly helpful staff.
I'll go B+.
I flew into London early on Friday morning, and walked around the city for two days. Step counts:
• Friday: 45,484 steps
• Saturday: 51,799 steps
My adventures took me through sections of the city like Paddington, Kensington, Chelsea, Battersea, Southwark, Downtown London, Soho, Westminster, Notting Hill, etc. For example, here were my Saturday travels:
Anyway, I only post that screenshot to say that the entire city was absolutely crawling with Eagles fans. In those two days, I saw at least a thousand people wearing Eagles gear, "Go Birds'ing" other Eagles fans when their paths crossed. It was kind of awesome to see something unite so many strangers, even when the team kinda stinks this season.
I also checked out one of the four Passyunk Ave. bars, which you may or may not have already read about somewhere else. They are Philadelphia sports-themed. I went early one morning to the smaller Kensington location before it filled up with drunken Eagles fans, and they allowed me to snap some pics of the place. Here's the outside:
That dude 👆 casually hanging outside just looked very Philly to me for some reason.
And the inside:
Passyunk was cool, but, it also kinda felt like when the Simpsons were in Japan and they went to "Americatown."
On gameday, Tottenham was rocking. First, here's an idea of the ratio of Eagles fans, to other fans:
Stadium is about 90% filled. Eagles fans’ dedication to travel is impressive. pic.twitter.com/03DOhHbyHB
— Jimmy Kempski (@JimmyKempski) October 11, 2026
I would rank the showing like so:
1) Eagles fans
2) (GIGANTIC CHASM)
3) Fans wearing jerseys of players from random teams not participating in that game
4) Jaguars fans
And they were loud. I don't know if this quite does it justice, but here was the crowd after what seemed at the time like Jake Elliott's game-winning kick.
— PV2014 (@PV__2014) October 14, 2026
Certainly, you saw fans affect the game, as crowd noise helped the Eagles' defense stop the Jags by causing a false start and two (!) delay of game penalties during a goal line stand midway through the fourth quarter.
Back at home, one thing that has happened at Lincoln Financial Field in recent years is that Eagles fans have lost their edge to some degree. In Week 3, my friend Deniz Selman snapped the below pic during the Eagles' eventual loss to the Rams. As you can see on the scoreboard, it's the fourth quarter, the Eagles have the lead, there's two minutes left, and the Rams were trying to drive for either a game-tying field goal or game-winning touchdown. Look at all these empty seats!!!Eagles fans would mock that kind of poor fan showing if it happened in another city, and I think there should be some concern about the eventual new stadium watering down in-game fan passion because a lot of the hardcore folks are going to be priced out. (But that's maybe a discussion for another day.)
But in London, it was cool to see what this fanbase looks like when it's all hardcore fans.
Overall, 10/10 experience, highly recommend if they go back soon. 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
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