Gamechanger
Page 1
CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TITLE PAGE
KICK-OFF: THE MAGIC OF THE WEMBLEY CUP
‘COULD HAVE BEEN GREAT AT SNOOKER’
TOP 10 VIDEO GAMES
STAND-UP GUY
TOP 10 FOOTBALL PLAYERS
KOMPANY MAN
TOP 10 FOOTBALL VIDEO-GAME PLAYERS
BEHIND THE MASK: FIFA PLAYA
TOP 10 STADIUMS
BEING MYSELF: SPENCER FC
SPENCER’S FAMILY TREE
THE ROAD TO WEMBLEY
HALF-TIME: THIS IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
HASHTAG IT!
HASHTAG UNITED ESPORTS PLAYERS
RETURN TO WEMBLEY
TOP 10 FOOTBALLERS I’VE PLAYED WITH OR AGAINST
#GRUDGEMATCH
MY YOUTUBE XI
GOING INTERNATIONAL
HASHTAG SQUAD LIST
LOVE AND HATE
FULL TIME: DROP A LIKE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE BOOK
Alright, mate, how’s it going?
Believe it or not, I haven’t always been football mad. But then FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 came out. FIFA inevitably led to Football Manager. And that’s where I started getting properly hooked.
Now I’m a football club owner who’s played to 20,000 people at Wembley Stadium and travelled the world with my team, Hashtag United. And the best bit of all? I’m not even that good.
So, how on earth did this happen? How did someone who spent his life playing computer games and making YouTube videos pull it off?
I’m hardly sure myself, but here’s my attempt to tell the story.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Spencer FC has over 1.9 million online subscribers who enjoy his football, gaming and eSports videos. 4-million people watched him play with Champions League and World Cup winners at Wembley Stadium. To-date, he has had over half a billion views on YouTube and is at the forefront of football’s new digital world.
I stormed down the tunnel with the roar of the crowd still ringing in my ears. It was all square at 3–3 against Weller Wanderers in the 2016 Wembley Cup final. This was supposed to be our big day at Wembley, our Champions League final – the biggest match of our lives – but we’d played like we were strangers so far and I wasn’t happy with the way things had been going at all.
I was fuming as I got to the dressing room, but our manager, Arsenal legend Martin Keown, pulled me to one side and said, ‘Spence, don’t go in there angry. We’re riding a wave after fighting back from 3–1 down so you’ve got to keep it super-positive in there with the team.’
He was right. And with 20,000 people watching in the stands and millions more on YouTube, we knew we had to up our game for the fans. We came out full of intent in the second half … only to go 4–3 down to a goal from Wanderers forward Theo Baker.
I looked across at my teammates, at legends like Jamie Carragher, Patrick Kluivert and Robert Pirès, at freestyler forward Daniel Cutting who was desperate to score, and at my own brother Seb, such a strong competitor, and I knew we had it in our locker to turn this around. ‘Come on, boys!’ I shouted.
In the 63rd minute Robert Pirès went tearing into the box, as he had on so many occasions for Arsenal in the Premier League, and squared the ball for ChuBoi to put an easy finish past the keeper. We were back in it, and when that man ChuBoi won a penalty for us only six minutes later we had an opportunity to take the lead.
There was only one man for the job in my eyes: Seb.
It’s difficult to describe just how loud it is playing in front of a crowd of thousands of people at the home of football. You have to shout at the top of your voice just to even attempt to be heard, and my voice was already hoarse. But at that moment, in the hush that descended as Seb stepped up to take his penalty, you could have heard a pin drop. The tension was unbearable, but Seb remained cool to the last. He wrong-footed the keeper and slotted it effortlessly into the back of the net. Get in! I ran straight to the corner for Seb’s trademark golf celebration: he mimed putting a ball into the hole where I was playing caddie with the flag.
As children, we’d kicked a ball about in the back garden with each other, pretending we were playing at Wembley for England or West Ham. For both of us to be playing in the same team, celebrating his goal, at the real Wembley Stadium was beyond our wildest dreams.
But we still had a job to do. With our defence expertly marshalled by Jamie Carragher, our forwards had the freedom to attack, and we kept the pressure on Wanderers. Manny made it six for us and then Daniel Cutting finally got his Wembley goal to put us 7–4 ahead after a superb run from Séan Garnier. Surely the game was ours now, but I didn’t dare contemplate it. We needed to keep cool heads until …
The final whistle blew. I couldn’t believe it. We’d done it – we’d won the Wembley Cup for the second year running! We’d fought back from 3–1 down to an unbelievable victory! The crowd roared its approval, and every moment felt like I was walking through the dream I’d spent most of my life practising for.
I collected my winners’ medal from our manager Martin Keown, and then, as team captain, I took my place at the centre of the winners’ podium, with friends, family and football legends – my teammates – either side of me. I grinned at the camera and to all the people watching at home, with my hands hovering above the trophy, before I lifted it triumphantly above my head, just as I’d seen so many FA Cup, World Cup and Champions League winners do on TV. The fireworks went off with a bang, the flamethrowers lit up, the glitter cannons rained the shiny stuff down on us and we all started jumping up and down as the celebrations began. It was every bit as crazy and awesome as I’d ever hoped for.
It was quite simply the best moment of my life.
So, how on earth did this happen? How did a kid who at one point couldn’t even get in his school team end up playing at Wembley Stadium in front of 20,000 people? How did someone who spent his life playing computer games and making YouTube videos get to play football in the same side as World Cup- and Champions League-winning players?
How did the creator of a YouTube channel write an introduction to his book that reads like the start of a professional footballer’s memoir?
I’m part of a growing movement of people who, despite fervently supporting a Premier League team and loving the sport at the top level, want more from the game than what the Football Association and FIFA serve up. With my YouTube channel Spencer FC and my Hashtag United team I’m a football club owner outside the traditional football structure. I’m putting out football matches that are drawing audiences bigger than many professional clubs, and I’ve been lucky enough to do that alongside the great friends and family I’ve played football with for decades.
I’m doing it because I love it. I love video games, I love making YouTube content and I live and breathe this beautiful game of ours. In our community – the world that millions of YouTube creators and viewers inhabit – we connect the dots between all of this and engage with the game and the audience in ways unlike anyone has before.
As my Twitter bio reads, life’s a game called football and I intend to play it. Over the last few years I’ve changed the game so I can play by my own rules and map out my own road to Wembley. This is how I did it …
Alright, mate, how you doing? Welcome to my story, and like any good story, it makes sense to start at the beginning.
Believe it or not, I wasn’t always football mad. In fact, it really amazes some people considering how much my life revolves around it now that I didn’t really get into football properly until I was 12 or 13 years old. If you compare that with my older brother Seb, who was obsessed by the time he was 5, playing at
a very high level and smashing it by the time he was 12, you can see I had a lot of catching up to do.
My dad, a lifelong West Ham supporter, did his best to get me into it, of course. He took me, Seb and my younger brother Saunders to West Ham games, and I loved going to Upton Park – it was a great day out with the family, with the roar of the crowd and the kind of cheeky language on the terraces you definitely didn’t hear at home – but I had no urge to watch the game on TV, let alone play it. I just wasn’t that bothered about it.
But that all changed for me massively during 1998, which was a big year for football: firstly, it was the World Cup in France, and secondly, it was the year I properly got into the video game FIFA: Road to World Cup 98.
I watched the England games during the World Cup with my family, and we’d all gather round the TV and cheer the lads on – legends like Tony Adams, Alan Shearer, David Beckham and Michael Owen. When England played Argentina in the last 16 of the tournament, we were all perched on the edge of my mum and dad’s bed going mad at the game. Michael Owen gave us all hope with an unbelievable goal – that was his special moment and I idolised him for it (I also kind of loved that his surname was the same as my middle name) – and then came Beckham’s kick on Diego Simeone … oh no! Becks was sent off but England were brilliant, fighting for everything and drawing the game 2–2. But when they went out on the dreaded penalties, I was in tears. So much for not being bothered.
Moments like this started to add up (not always with tears, of course), and then there was FIFA 98. I’d played video games before, things like Mario Kart and GoldenEye, but playing FIFA with Seb was the next level.
We’d play the game against each other in two-player mode on the PC, long before you could compete online, and Seb would use the keyboard and I’d have the mouse. It was basically a stitch-up, as it was close to impossible to win on the mouse. You had to physically move the mouse to move the player, so I’d move the mouse one way to move my player … and whack into the keyboard. I’d go the other, and the mouse would go off the desk. Seb was better than me by a million miles anyway, so I didn’t stand a chance. But it didn’t put me off. I loved it, and I kept chipping away, playing and losing all the time but slowly getting better. What’s the old phrase, ‘You either win or you learn’? Well, I guess in this case you could say Seb well and truly took me to school.
FIFA inevitably led to Football Manager (which was called Championship Manager back then), and that’s where I started getting properly hooked. It’s difficult to play Football Manager without an obsessive streak, and it takes over lives – I’d come home from school and go straight upstairs to play it for hours on end. But the thing about Football Manager is that it’s a singular obsession. You get so invested in it, and it means so much to you, but you could turn to the person sitting next to you at school, who is just as much a Football Manager nut as you, and say, ‘Mate, you don’t understand. Batistuta scored thirty goals for me in my first season, but then I got in this other guy and he scored forty – it was amazing!’
And this person will just say, ‘Sweet, mate.’
He doesn’t care at all. He’s not invested in your game like you. He’ll tell you about his own game and you’ll be rolling your eyes and saying, ‘Sweet, mate,’ too. The internet has changed all this now, obviously, but back then the life of a Football Manager obsessive could be a lonely one.
When I started secondary school, it was at a different school to the one most of my mates were going to. They went to the private school nearby, while I did my 11-plus exams and applied to a couple of really good grammar schools in the Essex area, one called KEGS (King Edward VI Grammar School) – up there with the best in the country and closest to home – and another called Westcliff, which was bloody miles away. I ended up at Westcliff.
For the first few years of secondary school I was up at six o’clock in the morning to catch a bus that basically took the scenic route around the whole of Essex so I could get to Westcliff. Added to the fact that I was a bit gutted to be going to this school without any of my mates there, I didn’t take to things very quickly. At the end of my first week, my mum asked, ‘How’s school going? Have you made any friends?’
I said, ‘Yeah, I have. There’s this one guy, he’s a really good lad. I always have a good chat with him and we spend a lot of time together.’
‘Oh, yes. What’s his name?’ said Mum.
‘His name’s Bob,’ I replied. ‘He’s the bus driver.’
We laugh about this now, but back then, while it might be a bit hard to believe, I wasn’t always the chatty, confident guy you see on YouTube. I’ve always been a bit of an attention-seeker – call it middle-child syndrome if you like – and I loved doing school plays and things like that. I was a bit of a geek too, into things like Warhammer and joining the school quiz team, but I struggled at first with being the new boy. Football would change all that.
Playing Football Manager had given me an education into the game, all the teams, the players, the stats – the amount of information you can absorb in football is crazy – but now I wanted to play the game in real life too.
One thing I’ve had throughout my whole life is a good attitude. When I get into something, I always give it my best. Now, that’s great, but at some point you have to get some ability, right? Coming to football so late meant I really didn’t have any, so I thought to myself, I’m going to catch up – I’m going to get as good as the other guys.
If you’ve ever read a footballer’s autobiography by someone like Wayne Rooney, who talks about obsessively kicking a ball against the wall of his grandmother’s house when he was a kid, imagine an unbelievably bad version of that and you’re still not close to where I started in my back garden.
Gradually, I found a group of mates to play football with at lunchtime. In English lessons, I’d scribble down England XIs or Premier League XIs in my rough book with the lad sitting next to me. All we talked about was football. Things changed at home, too. Seb and I hadn’t got on all that well as kids, but football started to bring us closer together, even if there was still a huge gap in our skill levels, and we started to bond and become really close friends.
By this stage, I was hooked on football – but I wasn’t satisfied. Playing at lunchtime or in the garden was fun, but I wanted a more competitive opportunity. I needed to join a Sunday team. After an unsuccessful trial with Seb’s team, Brentwood Boys, I eventually started playing for a club called Hartswood Stars. By ‘playing’, I mean mostly training and watching from the sidelines. I think in two seasons with Hartswood Stars I might have started just three games. It was slow progress.
When I was 14 we moved house. We relocated from Brentwood to a small village near Chelmsford called Little Baddow, so I needed a new club (probably for the best – if this had been Football Manager then the virtual me would have handed in a transfer request a long time ago on account of not getting enough game time!). There was a local team called Heybridge Swifts. The men’s side were a good team, semi-pro, but the kids’, well, they were a bit more average – which meant I had a chance.
I was the new boy once again. I was nervous at first, worrying about whether the other kids would like me, though mainly I was worrying about whether I’d get in the team. I needn’t have worried about the latter, as I got in the team quite quickly because the manager loved me for my good attitude (I was super-keen) and the fact that I was never late to training.
I was right to worry about the former, though, as I don’t think the other kids in the team particularly liked me. Not because I was a bad kid or anything, but it was more that they all went to the same school and knew each other from there. I was quiet and shy at the time, certainly in the football world. They would have been shocked if they’d known I loved performing in school plays.
There was another reason, aside from my attitude, that helped me get into the starting line-up. At that age, the one thing no one was really doing was heading the ball properly. A huge, up-and-under
goal kick? Forget it – few 14-year-olds fancied planting their head on the end of one of them. So I saw an opportunity. I was playing left-back at the time – a position people aren’t exactly queuing up to play – and I’d make sure I got up into the centre circle and headed the ball back each time. I was tall for my age, which meant few people had a chance of beating me in the air, and this made me invaluable to my team. I’d practise at home, too, and I’d even score a few headers as I improved. But my feet, well, my feet were terrible.
Being stuck out at left-back meant I was in the position where I could do the least amount of damage possible, which was just as well because I was right-footed. Playing there slowly but surely improved my left foot, however, which meant that eventually I could claim to be two-footed, just as long as you understand that meant I was equally bad with both feet.
Now, when I talk about this team being ‘local’, what I actually mean is they were an eight-mile bicycle ride away. My mum and dad worked long hours while my brothers and I were kids, so they weren’t usually around to give me a lift to training, but I didn’t care. Football was my entire world by this stage, and I would cycle eight miles there after school and I’d get the bus home with my bike when it was too dark later on.
One evening after school, I was cycling to training on the pavement when my wheels locked and I suddenly skidded and went flying off onto the road, straight in front of a car. The car only clipped my wheel, but it sent me into the path of another vehicle. My heart was in my mouth for a split second, time seemed to stop … before I went over the bonnet and crashed to the ground.
I was unbelievably lucky, not that you’d have thought it if you’d seen the state of me. I gingerly got to my feet, trembling and with blood streaming down the side of my head and pouring from my knee, gravel-marks peppering my legs. My bike was in a sorry state too, in a crumpled heap by the kerb with the front wheel bent and buckled.