Tottenham Hotspur academy graduate, goalkeeper, and amateur DJ Alfie Whiteman has long been the most INTERESTING player on Spurs’ team, by some distance. How often does the fourth keeper for your favorite
club go on London radio and do DJ sets that features songs by Cocteau Twins, Vincent Gallo, Elliot Smith, and Jon Brion, accompanied by his own photography? Or release a book featuring arty faces made from the various supplements he took as part of his football training regime? Or play Aphex Twin in the locker room after training? His personal Instagram is filled with artsy, occasionally risqué photos and tableaus that evoke an art student, not a professional footballer.
I wrote about Alfie last year after his RTS Radio London streaming set. Whiteman seems like an incredibly cool and fascinating guy, someone who has a lot of interests and talents that stretch beyond kicking a round ball around an expanse of green grass. But he never really seemed like a footballer. A lot of that is because, well, he rarely saw the pitch. Whiteman carved out a wild career in football that saw him, due to his homegrown and club-trained status, carve out an unlikely spot in a Champions League caliber team, but one where those homegrown and club-trained attributes were more important to Tottenham than his actual goalkeeping ability.
In a decade at the club, Whiteman made exactly one appearance — as a second half substitute in 2021 Europa League match against Degerfors, the same Swedish club where he later spent two different loan stints in 2021 and 2022. His Spurs contract expired this past summer and he quietly departed the club that has been his home since 2015.
I expected to see Alfie’s name pop up on social media announcing that he’d signed a new deal with a new club. Maybe something in League One or Two, a struggling team that had a vacancy and that provided an opportunity for someone like Alfie with Big Club Experience to establish himself as a No. 1 for the first time in his career.
But those stories never showed up. Instead, we have an Athletic article today that announces that Whiteman has hung up his gloves for good at age 26 to pursue an entirely different career — he’s now a photographer and filmmaker for London-based film company Somesuch.
Honestly, I couldn’t have chosen a better second career for Alf. And unsurprisingly, he talks in honest and unflinching terms about why he left the game, his football career, and what changed in him to prompt this dramatic career switch.
“I signed for Spurs at 10 years old. Then I left school at 16 and went straight into this full-time life of football. When I was around 17 or 18, living in digs, I just had this feeling inside of, ‘Is this it?’ Getting on the mini bus, going to training, doing the Sports Science BTEC and going home to play video games. I realized, ‘Oh, I’m not happy here’ from quite a young age.
“The stereotype of a footballer is generally quite true. It’s the golf, washbag culture. I was that young footballer. I wanted the Gucci washbag and I drove the Mercedes. You all just become a reflection of each other. You’re a product of your environment. It’s the way football is in this country; it’s so shut off from anything else. You go to training and then you go home, that’s it.
“I guess I always felt a little bit different. My team-mates — who I got on well with — called me a hippie. That was their definition. But then, when I was 18, I met my ex-girlfriend, who was a model. She was a bit older than me. Her best friend was a director. It just started opening my eyes to what life has to offer.
“So as I was getting a bit older around 18 or 19, I started meeting new people and realizing a bit more about myself, and understanding the football bubble, because it’s so insular.”
People joke about certain keepers being “professional backups” at big football clubs. They’re the ones “stealing a living,” being paid to show up and train, occasionally making the bench, never really called to action except in an injury crisis but still collecting a (pretty good!) paycheck. That was Alfie. He never got his big break in football, but his connection to the game opened some other doors, especially in filmmaking circles, something that he says he became fascinated with. The Athletic notes that he started hanging out in the film industry, volunteering his time in and around sets on his days off from training.
“Football is a short career regardless, even if you do really well, and I knew that I didn’t want to stay in it. It was about trying to gain experience and be proactive in learning about these things I was also interested in, but mainly because I was enjoying it, and was surrounded by the kinds of people that were doing what I enjoyed as a job. They were making things. It was really inspiring.”
The penny seemed to drop when he was on loan in Sweden, which he talks about as being formative in determining whether he wanted to stay in football or start to figure out what he wanted to do next. At the time he was struggling after picking up a serious injury and going through the daily grind of training with very little prospects for ever actually making it into a match.
“The training and stuff, it’s all repetitive and in the shadows. It’s like f***ing Groundhog Day. Tottenham have an incredible training ground with incredible facilities, and I was working with the best players. But it wasn’t fulfilling. I want to be in a high-pressure game, or feel progress. When you’re not playing, it’s very difficult to do. It’s even worse, it’s more like you’re regressing.
“I learned a lot [in Sweden]. I was in a new environment, in nature. I’ve got this exhibition coming up in spring about a body of work I did while I was there, which is all these self-portraits and weird things. I never planned it to be, but it served as this period of introspection. I look at the work now, and these feelings of being a bit lost or torn are in it. That was in 2022, so it’s always been there.
“There was a weekend when I went home, and I started contemplating all my options. I had other things I’ve been building on the side and it was more exciting to me. To put it plainly, I saw happiness in these other avenues.
“It got to this point where I’d rather end this on my terms than go to a club that I just didn’t want to go to. When I was younger, I always said I didn’t want to play in the lower leagues; it was always about the highest level. Otherwise, I’d rather do something else. So I just took this step into the unknown, and I was like, ‘Oh, holy s***. I’m actually doing it.’ Anything can happen. I’m in complete control of my life, and it’s really exciting and really scary.”
In his new role, Whiteman has moved from using his eyes and hands to track footballs to framing and composing photographs. He’s already done photo shoots for moderate British celebrities and has created a couple of short films. What comes through the most from reading the interview is that he seems happy. He’s accepted that he will not play at the highest levels of football again, but he’s beginning to find satisfaction in something new.
I think that’s pretty awesome, and brave, and inspiring. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this on the site, but Alfie emailed me after I wrote about him on Cartilage Free Captain last year, thanking me for the piece and saying a bit about how it was stretching and a little scary to stick his neck out in something that isn’t being a keeper for Tottenham Hotspur. To this day he’s the only Spurs player who has ever emailed me directly about something I’ve written. He didn’t have to do that. It was incredibly flattering. I still think he and I would be friends.
Alfie Whiteman will not be remembered for the things he did while between the sticks at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. He has a Legacy Number thanks to his first team debut vs. Degerfors, but he’ll likely be consigned as a footnote in Tottenham’s long and illustrious history. That’s okay. I’ve never met him, but I strangely feel like I know him just a little bit through his art and our shared musical tastes, and I respect the hell out of him for making the difficult decision to change careers and pursue something that is an obvious passion for him.
For that reason, Alfie Whiteman will always be one of my all-time favorite Spurs players. COYS, Alf. I’ll watch for you on the red carpet at Sundance.
