The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur News and Links for Thursday, September 16

Hi, everyone!

At the top today is forward Jessica Naz.

Ramble of the Day

Several weeks ago, a video of Rosella Ayane and Shelina Zadorsky dancing on Instagram reminded me to check in on the club’s TikTok, since it was clearly a video primarily planned for that platform. I wanted to know, more than a year after launching the account, if Tottenham have made the idea worth the effort, especially because I wasn’t particularly impressed by the account in its first days.

Looking at the last few months of Spurs’ TikToks, I can’t say my opinion has changed much. There are very few original TikToks; the collection is mostly attempts to take meme templates and use them in videos of highlights. The only one of this genre I actually liked was one that celebrated Son Heung-min, but that’s because I’m always up for a video expressing love to Son.

There is some original content scattered in there, which is better than the other stuff because it isn’t predictable. Towards the back end of last season, the folks running the TikTok account were doing Q&As tailored to the platform, which is how I learned that Harry Kane would rather talk to animals than know all of the world’s languages. The best thing, no question, is the aforementioned video of Ayane and Zadorsky. I believe it’s objectively fun to watch footballers attempt TikTok dances, because I tried plugging in different footballers for a thought experiment and I was curious about every last one of them. I bet others feel the same.

Maybe once the teams get into the full swing of things this season, the more original TikTok content will show up. I have to say, though, I think my initial worries were legitimate — this is not an account with elite TikToks. That said, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The TikToks are mostly respectable (minus this one announcing Emerson Royal’s arrival), so it could always be much worse.

tl;dr: I checked on Spurs’ TikTok more than a year after it launched, and it’s still boring.

Stay informed, watch this: retired gymnast McKayla Maroney details her experience surviving sexual assault by former national team doctor Larry Nassar and the failure of the FBI to properly investigate the case

Links of the Day

Members and families of Afghanistan women’s and girls’ youth teams left the country and will seek asylum in Pakistan.

Ex-Brazil international Pelé left intensive care after undergoing surgery to remove a tumor on his colon.

A longer read: John Muller on possession value and the work of those working in analytics to understand actions that make up the majority of a game for FiveThirtyEight