Gamechanger

by Spencer FC

  To make the match an extra-special occasion, we sold tickets for it – the first crowd at the Hashtag arena – and we had around 500 people there watching, with all the proceeds going to the charity Movember. Theo Baker would also be making his debut and, let’s not forget – and it was easy to do it in the atmosphere that was building – three points were up for grabs in a division in which we’d need 20 points in 10 games for promotion.

  Palmers are your archetypal kick-you-off-the-park Sunday league team. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve got some decent players, but we knew they would be physical and we knew they really didn’t like us. I think they felt we’d come into their territory somehow when in reality we were operating in an entirely different space. Maybe they were jealous? I’m not sure, but the atmosphere was far from friendly that day. We didn’t hate them – they were just another opponent to us. Like any half-decent team, we’ve got the sort of players who can mix it when things get physical, and we knew we’d have to match them in that regard, as well as play some good football, otherwise they’d walk all over us.

  All of which meant it was a difficult game for the referee. We came in at half-time 1–0 down and a little surprised that our midfielder John Dawson had been the first player to be booked, given the challenges that had been flying around. We might have been raising money for charity but there was precious little sense of that on the pitch. They had really celebrated their goal, a close-range header that gave Andy in goal little chance. It clearly meant something to them.

  There was no Martin Keown around to tell me to keep it calm this time as I gave my half-time team talk. I was desperate for us to just try to keep it a bit more simple, to play the straightforward first pass, and tried my best to get that message across.

  One shrewd thing we did do was to bring on midfielder Jack Harrison. Now, Jack’s a really good player, but not everyone who has watched our games will necessary have picked up on that. He was captain of England Independent Schoolboys in his youth and he’d been in the squad a lot, but he wasn’t always available for games. Remember, these boys are amateur footballers, which means they have jobs to go to and other commitments. I hadn’t picked him for the starting XI because we’d been winning, and you don’t break up a winning team, but this was his chance to show us what he could do.

  He didn’t disappoint. He came on and really made a difference, and we were by far the better team in the second half, with Palmers sitting back, trying to protect their lead. There was still plenty of physical stuff going on – and plenty of handbags, too – but we weren’t going to allow that to distract us. Dan Brown finished beautifully in a crowded penalty area to bring the scores level, and we celebrated wildly. It clearly meant something to us too.

  With just over 10 minutes to go, Jack Harrison capped off a gamechanging display with a goal. It wasn’t the cleanest contact on the ball, but it didn’t need to be, perhaps fittingly for a game like this, and it was the least we deserved for our performance.

  We still had to see the remainder of the game out, and things got quite bad-tempered and silly before the end. Rich Beck, the man-mountain, was rightly booked for his efforts to stop a free-kick being taken quickly, putting one of the Palmers players down in the process, and then a bit of nonsense kicked off before the whistle was finally blown.

  What a relief. We’d won the battle of the YouTuber teams and earned the bragging rights, but it had been tough – hard-fought, bad-tempered at times and undoubtedly the most physical game Hashtag had played by far.

  The officials hadn’t had the best of games, as Palmers felt aggrieved by a couple of offside decisions, and I was not happy that we’d received two bookings and none had gone their way, especially given the challenges they’d been putting in. Ryan Adams had been elbowed twice and there were two instances on me that should have been straight reds, in my opinion.

  But the whistle had gone and the game was over. The 500 people in attendance had witnessed a firm but fair match – shout-out to them by the way for not only raising so much money for charity, but also braving the blistering cold that night. It was a tight game that could have gone either way. Smiv, who doesn’t play but films and edits the Palmers content, had a good view of the proceedings and he was gracious enough at the time to say that we deserved the victory.

  Beating Palmers saw us rise to the top of the YouTube tree as the number-one side on the platform – a place I felt we already were, to be fair, but this had proved it. There were always going to be people who wouldn’t be converted, and those who preferred to watch the Sunday league experience on YouTube, and that’s cool with us. We’re not trying to pinch that audience – it’s never been us or them. I’d say, ‘Watch us and watch Palmers, or Manny’s Eltham or ChrisMD’s Sunday League Experience – we do different things and it’s all great.’

  If you want to see a really good representation of what happens in Sunday league, watch some of these channels. If you want to watch a bunch of mates living their crazy dream and playing in stadiums they’re nowhere near good enough to set foot in, and going up against players we have no right to, then watch us. Watch us all, if you like!

  The most important thing to us was that we’d won and silenced some critics in the process. Now we could move on from silly comments questioning our ability. I’ve gone on record time and time again saying that we’re nothing special football-wise. All beating Palmers did was prove that we were better than them, and that we were certainly good enough to play in Sunday league if we wanted to. That was enough for me.

  Next up: we had plans to take Hashtag United to dizzying new heights. Quite literally, as we planned flights to Northern Ireland and the USA. Hashtag United were about to go international.

  Today, eSports is big business. All around the world millions of people are tuning in online to watch some of the best players take each other on at games such as League of Legends and DotA 2 for serious prize money. It’s treated as a national sport in some places, particularly in countries like South Korea, with stadiums full of people watching the players battle it out in the flesh.

  This might sound mad to some of you, but it shouldn’t for too much longer; eSports is basically just competitive gaming, and it is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world. Whether you consider it an actual sport or not could well determine which side you’re on of the generational divide that had my dad telling me I could have been great at snooker!

  The football-game side of eSports has been pretty slow in coming to the party. I started commentating on some FIFA eSports tournaments back in 2014, and no one was coming to watch. There were people watching online, of course, but nothing like the numbers that other video games were drawing. I would work at events where there were only a handful of fans watching on our FIFA stage, but down the hall there would be thousands of people going mental and cheering on their favourite players at Call of Duty. I wondered why.

  I love commentating at these events. I could easily have said no to it as I had my hands full at the time, but I was really interested in doing it. I was already doing commentary over my own FIFA games and I was up for the challenge of doing it as a neutral for an audience in a competitive sport.

  It opened up a new world to me. I got to know a lot of the players and see all the nuances of FIFA eSports. Knowing how popular a game FIFA was, with such a huge amount of people playing and watching videos by the likes of me, KSI and plenty of other YouTubers besides, I thought there was huge potential in this.

  I really wanted to be part of it and I had to get in early with it. There were no real FIFA eSports teams around, and I had a hunch that EA Sports – the makers of the game – were going to invest more in this area. It made sense for them to try to turn FIFA into one of the world’s biggest eSports, and I saw an opportunity.

  When I created Hashtag United, it was not only with the aim of making a real football club with my mates, but also with the intention to build a FIFA eSports team.

  The appeal was simple. It was going
to take years to build a real football club from scratch and take it to the heights I really dreamed for it, but with an eSports team I could, with just a few smart moves, potentially have the number-one team in the world much quicker.

  I wanted to do it creatively, however. I wanted to get some great content out of it and use the reach I had on my channel to generate some interest in it. By this point, early in 2016, I was working hard to up the production values on my shows considerably.

  I had started a new series called Bench Warmers, which was basically my version of a TV panel show, a bit like A League of Their Own but for a YouTube audience, with YouTubers on the panel. We got ‘The Beast’, Adebayo Akinfenwa, on one episode, and in later shows we’d get special guests like Tottenham and England midfielder Dele Alli and West Ham’s Reece Oxford. The show was made in a studio in London in front of an audience and looked – or at least I hope it did – like it wouldn’t be out of place on TV.

  I looked to TV again for inspiration when it came to building my eSports team. Game Academy was my version of The Apprentice, in which I would play the Alan Sugar role, taking a group of ten young hopefuls keen to be the first signing for my eSports team through a series of challenges and eliminations over several episodes before the final two duked it out for a 12-month contract on my team.

  To find our contestants, we teamed up with an online gaming website called Gfinity. Everyone joining this website had to play in a qualification bracket and, of the 12,000 people competing, we picked the top ten for the show. Game Academy was how I first got involved with Umbro, too, who helped fund the show. It would prove to be a useful contact for the Hashtag United kit.

  The standard of the applicants was seriously high, and I was handed some real beatings as I played the contestants. After six episodes and an awful lot of FIFA, we got down to the final two, Harry Hesketh and Kieran Brown. First they had to endure the classic interview episode – with Alex and Seb doing the grilling on my behalf, much like Karren Brady and Claude Littner do for Lord Sugar on The Apprentice – and then they played in the Gfinity Play Like a Legend Grand Final event before the guys went head to head.

  And what a final it was. Harry Hesketh came from behind to snatch victory in a pulsating encounter in added time. He won the 12-month contract to be our first eSports player, and as I handed him his official Hashtag United shirt I could see big things in this kid’s future. Hashtag Harry had a very nice ring to it.

  We added three more players, with Tassal Rushan, Ivan Lapanje and Dirty Mike, or Hashtag Mike as he’s now known, joining Hashtag Harry in the eSports team. You might remember Mike’s mum playing my mum at FIFA on my channel, and Mike would represent Hashtag United at the American tournaments. With two UK players, a Swede and an American, we really had gone international!

  We’d put together what I considered to be the best FIFA eSports roster in the world, and people like Harry have exceeded all expectations. At the FIFA 17 Ultimate Team European regional final in Paris, Tass won the whole tournament, beating the cream of professional FIFA players in the process and qualifying for the Ultimate Team Championship final in Berlin in May 2017. He also earned a cheeky $30,000! Harry, Ivan and Mike all qualified for regionals too, which is an amazing achievement when you consider how competitive the qualification process on FUT Champions is.

  The sport itself was growing. The total prize money in the European final was $100,000, and at the Ultimate Team Championship final it was $400,000, more than ten times what the big events had been paying out in previous years. Not only that, but BT Sport and ESPN were broadcasting the finals so they’d be on TV, not just online. The ‘real’ world was starting to take note.

  This surge of interest of course attracted other people who wanted a slice of the action, and that’s great for the sport. Clubs like Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and Wolfsburg in Germany have invested heavily in eSports teams, while West Ham were the first Premier League club to do it, and I was happy to help them get it off the ground. I was even happier to see Manchester City sign Kieran Brown, who was the runner-up in Game Academy. A few of the other applicants from the series have gone on to be signed by pro teams and perform well at events too. Pretty good for a load of unknowns! Maybe we should do another one …

  The FIFA tournaments take place all around the world – it’s a truly international affair – and you have players fighting it out on the consoles wearing their club colours. So there will be players in PSG, Wolfsburg, Man City, Ajax or Schalke shirts … and some wearing a Hashtag United kit. It’s incredible!

  These players are all paid a salary – so they don’t have to get jobs and can spend all day getting better at FIFA – and then they win prize money on top. It’s not the kind of money that pro League of Legends or DotA players get right now, but it’s a dream job for some people. Obviously, we can’t afford to compete financially with the PSGs and Man Citys of this world with our wages, but we can offer our players something these clubs can’t.

  Through the exposure he gets from being part of our set-up, Harry now has his own YouTube channel with well over 200,000 subscribers, from which he can make extra revenue. We can offer these players the platform to do that. Harry and Mike have been involved with the Hashtag United football team too as they are both decent players. I don’t think the PSG eSports player is going to be involved in the first-team squad any time soon!

  More football teams and YouTubers are getting involved, but obviously it’s becoming increasingly expensive to start in it from scratch, so it was good that we got involved early. I’m extremely proud of my eSports team and I love it that we go toe-to-toe with the big clubs. I think it’s brilliant that you’ve got this old world of traditional football, with the likes of Man City and West Ham, overlapping with the new world of YouTube teams like us.

  It’s become an increasingly big part of what we do, to the point where I even had to miss the 2017 Sidemen match because of a clash with the Ultimate Team Championship Grand Final in Berlin. I was gutted to miss it, but I had to be there to support the Hashtag lads, as well as to perform my commentary duties. Working at the events is a lot of fun. We have a great team made up of legendary eSports-casters Joe Miller and Leigh ‘Deman’ Smith, as well as football royalty Jimmy Conrad and FUT expert and streamer ChuBoi.

  Ever since I was first introduced to FIFA eSports I’ve been a bit of a fanboy, and I felt that starting my own team would be a fast-track way to owning a club that was the best in the world. Tass’s victory in the tournament in Paris was a big step to achieving that, making us the number-one ranked team in the world at the time.

  It’s funny how things turn out. When I was young, all I was interested in was football and football video games, and that line has followed me throughout my life, with my playing football every week and making FIFA videos, to where I am now. With Hashtag I play football for my own club and I run an eSports team. It feels like I’m doing a slightly more grown-up version of everything I was doing as a kid, and that’s not a bad feeling at all.

  It wasn’t just the Hashtag eSports players who were getting used to travelling the world to play for the club. We took to the skies with Hashtag United in Division 2 of our real-life Road to Glory quest as we played our first match outside of England in Northern Ireland, and we had something special lined up with our American tour.

  These away trips were brilliant for building that all-important quality, chemistry, and I think the American tour in particular was where I had to stop a minute and think about just how insane this was. We were taking an amateur football team of 22 players and staff to travel around the USA on the kind of pre-season tour you read about Premier League teams doing. You definitely didn’t get this in Sunday league.

  The US tour was sponsored by Coca-Cola, a brand so huge they’re more used to partnering with FIFA to sponsor trophies like the World Cup. Seb put the deal together with them and they were great, giving us complete creative freedom to make what we wanted to. When working with brands, I find it
always works better if they’re empowering you to do something you want to make, rather than coming to you with their own idea and a chequebook, and we’ve been lucky enough to have that relationship with brands like EE and Top Eleven, and now Coca-Cola.

  Taking an amateur team on tour came with one very big issue, of course. All the lads have jobs and their own commitments and, while the tour wouldn’t cost them any money, it would mean taking time off work and leaving families behind for the week, which was much harder for some than for others. Some people, understandably, couldn’t make it. I’d never expected us to have to make these kind of demands on their time.

  But the spirit we’d built in the squad after everything we’d been through together meant that plenty of the team were more than up for it. They were fully invested in what we were doing, and they didn’t want to miss a minute of it.

  Part of the motivation for starting this whole thing in the first place was to see more of my mates, and by this stage I was probably seeing them even more than I had been at school! Traditionally, football teams tend to finish up when people hit their mid to late twenties as we all had, and people have kids and get married and generally start taking their responsibilities more seriously, but Hashtag United was keeping us together. The wives and girlfriends – the HashWags – no doubt hated me for constantly taking people away from newborn children and families, and now I was stealing them off to America.

  Unbelievably, our top goal-scorer Dan Brown was expecting a child while we were away, but that wasn’t going to stop him coming. He would fly out for the first bit of the trip and return home before we went to New York so he could be there for the birth of his baby … or so he hoped! There are no guarantees where this sort of thing is concerned, and there was a chance he would miss it.5