Depending on your definition of London and how far down the English Football League pyramid you’re willing to look, there are as many as 28 teams that play football in London. When there are that many clubs, it becomes very difficult to talk about the games between them as genuine derbies. With the likes of Crystal Palace, for example, the match that they take part in that has the most enmity involved isn’t even against a team based in London, but is instead against Brighton & Hove Albion. Little wonder, therefore, that those outside of London look upon the so-called ‘derbies’ that take place with a degree of disdain involved.
Yet it is also true that some clubs that play their games in the nation’s capital really do dislike one another. There is no love lost when it comes to the North London Derby, for example. It might well be something to do with Spurs in general, considering the game between them and Chelsea often throws up some genuinely exciting matches. Given the sheer number of teams in London, we’ve made the decision to only look at those that play their matches in the Premier League or Football League, which might help to explain why we’ve missed out the club that you support. The ones we’re looking at specifically are:
- AFC Wimbledon
- Arsenal
- Brentford
- Charlton Athletic
- Chelsea
- Crystal Palace
- Fulham
- Leyton Orient
- Millwall
- Sutton United
- Tottenham Hotspur
- Watford
- West Ham United
- Queens Park Rangers
The Derbies
In spite of the fact that they are big-name clubs that spent the 2024-2025 season in the Premier League, amongst others, not every London club considers a match against another London club as a derby. Brentford will want to beat Crystal Palace when they play one another, for example, but the supporters aren’t feeling as though they rule London if they win. Instead, such rivalries are more commonly limited to the geographical location of the teams involved. Even then, though, it isn’t set in stone and it’s entirely fair to point out that some teams are more likely to consider games against other sides as being of higher importance.
North London – Arsenal v Tottenham Hotspur
You can read about the North London Derby in more detail elsewhere on this site, but there is no way that we could have an over-arching page about London derbies and miss this one out altogether. The reason it’s a derby of such passion is largely because Tottenham Hotspur feel as though Arsenal encroached on their part of town, with the Gunners having originally been located in South London. In 1913, however, they decided to move to Highbury, which was located in North London and right on the doorstep of Tottenham. That would probably have been enough to cause issues on its own, but more was to follow.
At the end of the 1970-1971 season, Arsenal won the First Division title when they defeated Tottenham on the final day of the season at White Hart Lane. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they then repeated the trick 33 years later in their Invincibles campaign. The only difference was that they won 1-0 in the 1970s and drew 2-2 in 2004. Either way, the Spurs supporters who could stomach staying in the ground had to watch their arch rivals lift the First Division and then the Premier League trophy. Little wonder the matches between the two sides each season are amongst the most hotly contested and eagerly anticipated in the division.
Chelsea v Tottenham Hotspur
Other than the fact that both Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur are based in London and that the two teams play in the top-flight of the English game, there isn’t really any reason why there would be a huge amount of tension between the two sides. Tension there is, however, with supporters of the two teams putting the other club high up in their list of rivals. Spurs aren’t exactly London’s must successful side in terms of trophies won, which might help to explain why the FA Cup win against the Blues in the ‘Cockney Cup Final’ of 1967 means so much to supporters of the North London side.
There is an argument that the rivalry is really quite a modern one, if for no other reason than the Premier League seems to engender such feelings in supporters. If you want to get a sense of how mad games between the two teams that be then the one that took place in 2023 might well show it. It involved the return of former Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino to face his former club and there were five goals disallowed in a game that still ended 4-1 to Chelsea. Add in two red cards for Spurs players and you can see why this game is rarely thought of as a gentle one between two friendly clubs in London.
Arsenal v Chelsea
For those outside of London looking in, there is definitely a question mark about whether or not you can even call the matches between the two sides a derby. Sure they’re both based in the same city, but the sides swap players so often you’d think that they had some sort of exchange program in place. The list of players that have lined up in both red and blue is long and has shown no sign of abating in the modern era. Imagine a world in which Newcastle United and Sunderland regularly sold players to one another? It would be a topsy-turvy place indeed, which helps to explain why this matchup really isn’t all that ferocious.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been some classics played out between the two sides. There was certainly no love lost when Chelsea hosted Arsenal for Arsène Wenger’s 1,000th match in charge of the Gunners and promptly smashed them 6-0. It was also something of a humiliation for the North London club when the two teams met in the Europa League final in 2019 and the Blues won 4-1. The fact that former Chelsea man Petr Čech was in goal for the Gunners made it much more painful for some Chelsea fans than they probably would’ve liked, but at the end of the day they got to lift the shiny thing at full-time.
West Ham United v Millwall
‘Everyone hates us and we don’t care’, sing the Millwall supporters. That is true, largely because they regularly demonstrate racism, xenophobia and sexism in a manner that means they are very hard to like. With that in mind, we could easily have put pretty much any London-based team here and it would be fair to refer to them as rivals. It is the proximity of the two clubs to one another that helped to spur a rivalry early on in the existence of the two of them. When the clubs were based at their original grounds, the working class supporters would often end up competing over the same contracts, for example.
The fact that the two teams have gone up against one another so often over the years means that familiarity has bred contempt to some extent. In fact, one of the few reasons why things aren’t as angry as they once were could be found in the fact that they haven’t had to face one another as often in more recent times. Even so, the reality of the matter is that both teams are considered to have large hooligan contingents, even in the sanitised version of football that we know of nowadays. If they’re likely to face one another for some reason, a heavy police presence is normally needed to at leas try to maintain order.
Chelsea v Fulham
When it comes to the West of London, there are a few clubs that could be part of the conversation. Queens Park Rangers are certainly located over that way, with Brentford also being around the area. In truth, though, it is the proximity of Chelsea and Fulham to one another that means that games between the two are probably the most’ derby-ish’ of the area. It certainly doesn’t hurt that supporters of the two teams often come from different socio-economic backgrounds, with Chelsea fans considering themselves to be much more working class than those that spend their time heading to Craven Cottage on a regular basis.
Chelsea would probably say that their main rivalry in London is against Tottenham Hotspur, whereas Fulham fans would definitely point to the Blues as the team that they most want to get one over on. That is the nature of success, when other teams become your priority and your rivalries shift as a result. It is probably also a good example of how the fact that two clubs are based in London doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re rivals taking part in a derby every time they play. Instead, the sides are much more likely to be annoyed at dropping points to teams closer to the in the table than close to them geographically.
West Ham v Leyton Orient
Head over to the East of London and it isn’t just the Hammers and Millwall fans that have a dislike of one another. Prior to 1965, all three of West Ham United and Leyton Orient were considered to have been in Essex. The change in the mid-60s meant that they were suddenly part of Greater London, meaning that a world of other ‘derbies’ became part of their lives. For the Hammers, Leyton Orient were a team that supporters disliked the most, if for no other reason than Dagenham & Redbridge wasn’t formed until 1992, so they didn’t have the history that West Ham and Leyton Orient managed to drum up over the years.
Are They Really Derbies?
As you might have worked out by now, there is definitely an extent to which not all of the matches that involve teams based in London would really be considered derbies. For those outside of the capital, games between Chelsea and Arsenal barely count, so there is no way that people are going to get excited about Sutton United taking on Watford in the same way as they would if it was Everton against Liverpool. London never really feels like a city to most people, instead appearing more like a series of small cities stuck together. There has to be a degree of proximity to make it an interesting question when they play one another.
There were 14 teams that spent the 2024-2025 season plying their trade in the Football League whilst being based in London, but most of them either didn’t play one another because they weren’t in the same league or when they did meet the match wasn’t as interesting to supporters as matches with teams based elsewhere in the country. Sure, there will always be a desire to win the match, but it doesn’t have the same level of important to the fans as the Merseyside Derby, Manchester Derby or Tyneside Derby does. The ability to brag that the ‘city is red’, say, isn’t something that Charlton Athletic supporters will have over AFC Wimbledon fans, say.