by Spencer FC
Being super-busy, KSI was impossible to get hold of, so in the end it was his newly appointed manager Liam who we chatted with. KSI agreed to present a show for us, where he would go to various Champions League football matches around Europe, and share it with his subscribers and tell them to check out Copa90. I produced the show, which is how I got to know KSI, and I consider him to be a good friend now.
That’s the other bonus with collaborating – you get to meet some great new people.
It turned out to be money well spent, as KSI helped us gain loads of new subscribers, but despite his incredible influence, it looked like we were still going to fall short of that magic number of 100,000. We had other obligations on the channel too, like making a certain amount of original content, and we were running out of money, so we couldn’t just continue paying YouTubers to front videos and help us hit the number. We needed to make more affordable content that would still be effective in bringing in more subscribers. It didn’t seem like an easy problem to solve.
I thought to myself, Why is KSI so successful? And the thing I kept coming back to, apart from his larger-than-life personality, was his FIFA content. At this point in early 2013, the YouTube FIFA community was growing rapidly thanks to popular game-modes such as Ultimate Team. Why couldn’t we make our own FIFA content too? It was cheap, easy to produce and I absolutely loved FIFA, so we were well stocked in the passion department. I’d never made a single gaming video in my life before this point, but it now seemed clear to me that our own FIFA show was exactly what we needed to push us over the edge.
So, along with another guy who worked at Copa90 called Neil Smythe, we came up with the idea for someone to play a comedy character on the show with a hidden identity – like the Stig on Top Gear – and he would play FIFA against celebrities and other YouTubers. Collaboration, as ever, was key, and these other YouTubers could ask people to check out our content on Copa90 and, if they liked it, subscribe. At this stage we didn’t know who would play the character, but we thought we had a fairly foolproof plan to get the subscribers we needed.
Some of my colleagues weren’t quite so convinced by it, however. I arrived at one meeting to find that our FIFA show had been wiped from the programmes-in-development board, and I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced that the channel would be sunk without its own FIFA show, and if we didn’t make it to 100,000 subscribers, we could all lose our jobs.
I was so convinced, in fact, that in a meeting when I was making my point – probably a little too forcefully, as I was known to do at the time, but that’s just my enthusiasm getting the better of me – I put my own job on the line if the FIFA show didn’t get us enough new subscribers. Andrew Conrad, a very experienced TV producer who called the shots, was willing to back me; however, he was equally willing to say, ‘If it doesn’t work out, Spence, you’re going to lose your job.’
Fine. If we didn’t make it to 100,000 subscribers we could all be out of our jobs anyway. The show was a goer – and maybe I needed the fear once again to really make it work.
The first thing we needed to sort was who would play our masked FIFA player. It had to be someone pretty decent at FIFA so we could at least make it competitive with some of the other FIFA YouTubers. He needed to be pretty funny too, so that he could be cocky enough to play this delusional character who thinks he’s the best at FIFA.
The show would work so that when our FIFA player won, it would make for quite a big thing, this mystery man beating a seasoned YouTuber with half a million subscribers who would have to do some kind of FIFA apology if they lost.3 So whoever played him would need a pretty thick skin. But if our FIFA player lost, he’d have to do a much more embarrassing forfeit.
We started casting, and we couldn’t find anyone. The only person who showed any promise at all was David Vujanic, who already presented a show called Comments Below for the channel. The problem was that he was six-foot-five tall, so you’d be able to work out who was behind the mask straight away. We needed someone a little less conspicuous if we were to maintain his secret identity as a talking point. And then someone said, ‘Spence, why don’t you do it?’
Now, it would be stretching credulity just a little to suggest that the idea hadn’t crossed my mind, but because I had championed the show so passionately, I hadn’t wanted people to think it was just because I wanted to be the star of it. But if someone else suggested it, well, how could I refuse? ‘OK, then,’ I said, with just the right amount of reluctance in my voice, ‘I’ll do it.’
We still hadn’t worked out exactly what the character I’d play would be, and we did a pilot show with the character called the FIFA Gimp, with me dressed in an orange morph suit with eye holes cut out so I could see the screen. It was every bit as terrible as that sentence suggests. In fact, it was worse – and what made it worse still was that the first big YouTubers for the show were already booked in for the following week.
With the clock ticking, I came up with the name FIFA Playa the day before we made the trailer. He was a wannabe gangsta, a gamer from the streets, but really he was just a geek in a mask. We needed to sort his look out pronto, so naturally we headed down to the home of quality costume design, Sports Direct, where we picked up a Lonsdale cap and a snood. I summoned the spirit of Ali G and perfected my best mock ‘urban’ accent (which in reality sounded like a poor imitation of radio’s Tim Westwood). We were ready. Or at least more ready.
We put the trailer out with the FIFA Playa in fine obnoxious form, burning £5 notes as if to say, ‘I don’t need the money, mate.’ The FIFA Playa’s message to his opponents was simple: ‘If you lose, you’re going to get mugged off in front of the whole of YouTube.’ The trailer went viral – thankfully without the need for me to get my top off and sing ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ – and the general reaction seemed to be, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’
Fifa Playa made his debut against NepentheZ in February 2013, talking the talk but failing to deliver on the pitch, going down on penalties. His punishment? A relatively tame one compared to the standards of later episodes, but it still involved standing in the middle of a rush-hour tube carriage in London and announcing an apology to NepentheZ at the top of his voice – something I’d not be too keen on doing as myself. But, as Batman no doubt agrees, it’s amazing the power of a mask.
The FIFA Playa would play a different YouTuber every week, and it proved a huge hit with the viewers, as we easily reached and then surpassed our subscriber target. We were all going to keep our jobs. Phew! I couldn’t have been happier for our channel, and I didn’t really have time to feel vindicated or anything like that – I was having too much fun doing the show.
In an early episode the Playa took on KSI’s brother ComedyShortsGamer. We headed over to a nice little corner of Hertfordshire where the two brothers lived together with their parents, and I waited outside in full FIFA Playa clobber while the production team got things set up in the living room.
Now, I hadn’t quite appreciated just how dodgy I looked in my snood and hoodie, lurking outside the respectable home of a couple of YouTube superstars, but then the curtains started twitching and I could see people looking out at me. Finally, a neighbour’s front door opened and a woman shouted at me, ‘What are you doing here? We’ve called the police so you’d better clear off.’
Steady on! My voice slipped back out from the ghetto into the friendlier land of Essex grammar-school boy and I pulled my mask down and said, ‘It’s all fine – we’re just filming something. Please don’t send the police! I’m nice really.’
Once inside the KSI–ComedyShortsGamer household, however, the snood remained firmly in place. I knew KSI well from producing his Copa90 Road to Wembley show, but he had no idea who the FIFA Playa was, and I intended to keep it that way. I remained ‘in character’ for the entire time, even when the camera wasn’t rolling, to maintain the mystery. It was the worst kind of method acting for everyone in the vicinity as the FIFA Playa was such an obnoxious individual. To make things
worse for ComedyShortsGamer, I beat him in our match, and he delivered what was surely a heartfelt apology to the camera by way of punishment.
We knew that keeping the FIFA Playa identity a secret was vital to the show’s appeal, and the speculation over who he really was only helped the buzz around it. There were times when the mask was a hindrance, however – and not just on KSI’s street.
When the FIFA Playa went to the FIFA Interactive World Cup to play two-time world champion Alfonso Ramos, we warned the event organisers in advance that I’d be arriving as a masked character. We included some photos of what I’d look like and told them to be prepared, because they wouldn’t be used to having someone like the FIFA Playa in the press box.
‘No problem,’ they said.
When we turned up, however, they wouldn’t let us in. ‘Guys, we talked about this,’ I said. ‘It’s not really a wannabe gangsta here to cause mayhem in the competition. It’s a character, and you invited us to come in the first place.’
No dice. We had to film the piece with Alfonso after hours instead, and it was as FIFA Playa that I beat the two-time world champion. The shirt I mentioned earlier actually reads, ‘To the FIFA Playa, you’re the best FIFA Player in the world.’
We upped the stakes with the punishments and apologies in the show in some surreal ways. I put dog food all over my face and had CapgunTom’s dog lick it off. When I lost to RossiHD, who lived in the south-west of England, the home of graffiti artist Banksy, I had to spray-paint how bad I was at FIFA all over a wall. (Don’t try this at home, kids.)
We flew out to Reykjavik to play GudjonDaniel and he beat me, so my punishment was to go to the middle of a shopping centre and admit to the world I’d been taught a FIFA lesson by Iceland’s ‘national hero’. If you’d told me a year before I’d be sitting in a motorised children’s car in an Icelandic shopping centre saying, ‘I am a chav,’ to camera, I would have thought I’d had some kind of mental breakdown.
As we developed the character the FIFA Playa’s aggressive ‘urban’ accent was soon ancient history, replaced by more of a raspy mockney tone. We wanted to make the character more self-deprecating and likeable than the earlier version. Whatever accent he sported, there was plenty of ridiculous rhetoric to keep everyone entertained and appalled in equal measure. He’d remind everyone of his vibrant background by opening the show with his rap alias and one of his gangster nicknames:
‘Yo, what’s up. It’s your boy the FIFA Playa, aka Lethal Injection, aka Stevie Two Shoes.’
FIFA Playa was raised on the streets by a Belgian lady called Marie, but he maintained that his biological father was a guy called Edgar Allen Sports (EA Sports). He had some serious daddy issues, as he believed his father had invented the game (when in fact it was the company EA Sports) and that was why he was so good at it. Reality would bite soon enough for the FIFA Playa.
All the FIFA roads on YouTube seemed to point towards its biggest star, and while FIFA Playa had won and lost against some of the most well-known and talented players in the world, he could not escape his destiny. He had to face KSI in the match to end all matches.
The build-up was huge, with YouTubers like Dirty Mike, AirJapes, R9Rai and MGH throwing their opinions around as to who would come out on top, the majority of them tipping KSI, which did not sit well with the so-called son of Edgar Allen Sports.
By this time KSI was starting to suspect the FIFA Playa’s secret identity. It probably wasn’t that hard, given that we’d been spending a lot of time together with me producing his show, and when word got out that he was saying he thought I was the FIFA Playa, we knew it was time to take action and throw him off the scent.
One day, when we were doing some filming for his show in Trafalgar Square, we had someone from the office of similar height and build to me, a lad called Tom Pryce, dress up as the FIFA Playa. He turned up in the middle of the shoot and didn’t say a word – he just photobombed it and ran off. KSI stood there saying, ‘What the …?’ while we all looked on. Now that he had seen FIFA Playa and me in the same place, he couldn’t possibly continue to think it was me, could he?
He wasn’t the only one who got suspicious. One particularly dedicated YouTuber managed to find some videos from my own channel (which wasn’t very big at the time so must have taken some finding – I was just a guy working behind the camera at Copa90) and used them in a video he made comparing the freckles on my arm in one of my personal videos with those on the arms of the FIFA Playa, coming to the conclusion that it must be me. This level of forensic detail was starting to get a bit CSI for me, though it only added to the appeal of the show.
In the build-up to the showdown with KSI, the FIFA Playa assumed the lotus position on a tyre swing on a housing estate; he pumped some serious iron, and announced to the world: ‘It’s the battle of the big dogs. Lucky for him, I’m wearing a muzzle!’
KSI was no less determined, giving plenty back: ‘You’ve been tormenting me all these months. So many people constantly asking, “Who is this FIFA Playa?” Well, I’m here. Come on, are you scared or something?’
The stage was set, and KSI’s living room wouldn’t suffice for a major head-to-head like this, especially if his neighbours didn’t like the look of a snood-wearing prowler once again. Instead, the Playa and KSI took their positions in a boxing ring in the Lonsdale boxing club, gloving up and walking out dramatically with their respective ringside allies in tow – the #PlayaArmy and KSI’s mates.
One of KSI’s cornermen was none other than Simon Minter, aka MiniMinter, someone who has gone on to absolutely smash YouTube and be a huge part of KSI’s group the Sidemen. And if you look in my corner, two of the lads behind the Playa Army masks were actually my brothers Seb and Saunders, proof that they’ve been supporting me since day one, only here they were doing it under their Playa Army aliases Macca and Lil Fif.
KSI and FIFA Playa did the obligatory eyeball-to-eyeball stare-down at one another, and took their positions in the ring, mano a mano. And then we took our boxing gloves off to play, obviously. It wouldn’t have made for much of a match with them on.
The stakes were high: KSI would have to concede his position as the number-one FIFA YouTuber and admit that the FIFA Playa was top dog if he lost; while something unspeakable would be done to FIFA Playa in the Ultimate Fighting cage if he tasted defeat. And there was the literally small matter of the tiny trophy inscribed with KING OF FIFA up for grabs too.
FIFA Playa took charge of Real Madrid while KSI had Bayern Munich at his command, and KSI won a tight match 1–0, the first of a best of three. The second time around the Playa’s Swansea side were against KSI’s Northampton team (with Adebayo ‘The Beast’ Akinfenwa leading the line), and the Playa didn’t disappoint this time, winning the match with a goal in the last-minute of extra time, sending the Playa Army – all six of them – wild in trademark machine-gun celebration. At one match each, there had to be a decider.
An emotional connection informed the team picks this time. KSI chose the team he supports, Arsenal, and FIFA chose Brazil, the country of his birth, or so he claimed. KSI took the lead and tore around the ring, finishing with an elbow drop to the mat in, frankly, an over-the-top moment of celebration. It wouldn’t last, however, and when the land of the nuts levelled the score, it was time for a well-rehearsed hand-grenade celebration with the Playa Army.
Over the course of three matches there was still nothing to choose between the FIFA Playa and KSI, so extra time and then potentially penalties would be required to separate them. KSI isn’t the number-one YouTuber for nothing, though, and he still had a little something left in the locker. With penalties looming, he managed to steal a winner – celebrating this time with an off-the-rope high-five with his corner. He then closed out the match. It was the ultimate #MiseryCompiler for Stevie Steak Knife.
Nothing, however, could have prepared the FIFA Playa for the true brutality that was to follow from KSI’s mouth. ‘You do know that EA Sports isn’t a person,’ he said. �
�It’s a company.’ The quick check on Wikipedia that followed was enough to guarantee that this was the biggest fatherly revelation on camera since Luke Skywalker found out about his parentage at the end of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
There was the small matter of the punishment to come too, in which the FIFA Playa was padded up and KSI put his gloves back on. ‘You don’t know how many people would love this opportunity,’ the FIFA Playa said in a rare moment of insight. KSI then went to town on the Playa, in some very family-unfriendly moments of violence, which have now been witnessed by millions of people online.
FIFA Playa’s revelation allowed us to make a mockumentary series that had less to do with him challenging other YouTubers and more to do with his life. Behind the Mask saw FIFA Playa get fired from Copa90 and then do pretty much everything he could to get himself a second series.
Behind the Mask was one of the most creatively rewarding projects I’ve had the pleasure to work on, and it was a testament to everyone at Copa90’s hard work that we’d been able to take a character based around a video game and make a whole series about him without a minute of FIFA action in it. Lawrence Tallis in particular deserves a lot of credit in helping form the character of FIFA Playa – it definitely wasn’t a one-man effort.
The Behind the Mask story included all kinds of escapades, with the Playa getting his bum out in public, smashing up Sean Wright-Phillips at FIFA like a Greek plate and coming face to face with his lunatic superfan Thomas Gray. It wouldn’t be the last time he ran into him. When he had a crystal-ball-based epiphany up in Edinburgh during the comedy festival (no ice-cream van included this time), the Playa knew what he must do next: Xtreme FIFA.