by Spencer FC
And his strike partner Ryan Adams came to me with an even bigger problem shortly before the tour. Ryan is a self-employed carpenter, which meant that taking the time off work to come on tour would be even more difficult for him, as he doesn’t get paid when he doesn’t work. There’s no holiday pay for the self-employed. Added to that, he’d just had a kid too, so he had bigger family commitments at home. He was coming anyway though, until the eve of the tour, when some mug broke into his van and stole all his tools and gear.
Ryan was gutted, obviously, but he told me he couldn’t afford to have the time off and replace his gear as well, so he’d have to miss the tour. We were gutted too, and not just because of the goals and assists we’d be missing out on. I got the Chairman on the blower to see what he could do to help.
The Chairman got in touch with TradePoint, who sorted Ryan out with a £2,500 voucher. I surprised him with it and we did a kind of Supermarket Sweep trip to the store and bought some new tools, which meant he could make it to America after all.
It was amazing to be able to use what we were doing on YouTube to turn such a negative into a positive for Ryan. Because of the viewers we have, we’re in a position where companies like TradePoint want to work with us, so we have you guys watching and supporting us to thank for that too. Being able to do things like this makes us feel like we’re part of a family, and that within this family we’re part of the wider community on YouTube. It’s incredible.
That’s what makes us a bit different from your standard football team. Ryan is without doubt one of our better players. He could probably go elsewhere and play to a higher standard than he gets with Hashtag, but he wouldn’t have us and the wider YouTube community there to help. He wouldn’t have 50,000 followers on Instagram and the taste of recognition that playing in front of hundreds of thousands on YouTube each week offers.
The US trip was a fantastic experience, both in terms of building camaraderie in the squad and opening us up to new experiences. We played at the training ground of brand-new Major League Soccer team Atlanta United against a staff team, including former USA and Fulham player Carlos Bocanegra. We also went to watch the Atlanta United first team play in their packed stadium against Chicago Fire, which was just incredible.
And, speaking of new experiences, I managed to bag a hat-trick out there too. Well, sort of. In our game against the Coca-Cola team, I scored what many call the ‘perfect hat-trick’ as I got a goal with my left foot, right foot and my head, although one of them was a pretty calamitous own goal. I think it was Faisal ‘Manjdog’ Manji who christened it the ‘imperfect hat-trick’, and I’ll take that! Even scoring more than once in a game was new territory for me in a Hashtag shirt.
The team were turned out differently for the US tour as we finally had our bespoke Hashtag kits made by Umbro. The kits were something special, made to the same specification as a Premier League football kit, with that snug fit loved by the top players. Thank God I’d carried on my fitness work after my 28th birthday!
We had an away kit made too, which was in the original colours of the Hashtag seven-a-side team Faisal and I had started years before. Twitter is a useful tool for us, and we tweeted a little teaser of the kit before it landed to gain some interest. It was amazing to have been part of the design process and to see the kits in the flesh. We were really happy with them.
We sell the kits in our online store, but we’re mindful of how expensive football kits are for young people. We’re not going to charge what a Premier League football club would, despite the shirts being of identical quality and having the same production costs, so we try to make them affordable for our fans. I love the idea of a kid wearing the Hashtag kit kicking a ball around in his local park or back garden.
The kit wasn’t the only new addition to the side, either. We used Twitter leading up to the tour to give a teaser of a new player we had signed, giving a little bit of a reveal each time. The player was another YouTuber, Charlie Morley. Our fans had been talking about him for a long time and he was a great addition to the squad.
There is a strategy, of course, behind our tweets, the timing of them and the way we share things such as the kit and a new signing. We don’t want to be boring and just flatly announce these things. We want to do it in the most creative way possible and offer stories with which our audience can engage, and we want to time these things right, not just get them done at the last minute.
And they are all part of a broader strategy we have for Hashtag in which we don’t want to stand still and just rest on our laurels. That’s why we did the Hashtag Academy trials, where we invited our viewers to enter a competition to find a new player for the team. We had 20,000 people enter to earn the right to join me and my mates in the team. We’ve been living our dream, and it seemed only fair that our audience should have the chance to join us in that.
That series was so successful that we didn’t only discover one new player, but a handful of talented lads, and a whole new Hashtag Academy team has now been created. We want to keep moving and improving, adding to the squad and the experience all the time and seeing where it takes us.
My dad always told me that if you want to make a successful business in the long term, it has to be able to work without you. Otherwise you will work yourself to the bone, and having you on top of everything will actually end up limiting its growth.
Fine. That all made sense. But how on earth am I going to do that when I’m in all the videos?
I have heeded his advice as far as I can. I have Alex and my brothers, Seb and Saunders, involved now, taking on a lot of the work I do off-camera. With those guys involved, and with my dad on physio duties for Hashtag and my mum even helping out from time to time, it feels like a real and very modern form of family business.
And with Hashtag United, the unthinkable will happen one day. There will come a point when I have to hang up my boots, whether that’s because I’m no longer good enough to get in the team (and you can insert your own joke here about not being good enough right now!) or because age has caught up with me. I’m relatively old by YouTube standards, but I’m probably in my prime by football-player standards; as I got into the game late I’m still convinced I’ll be hitting my peak some time in my late thirties!
When the time comes, I will move upstairs – I’m confident the Chairman will find a suitable role for me – and the club will carry on. Because Hashtag is about more than me.
It was always my dream to own a football club. It was just something I imagined I’d do when I was much older and had the means to do so, but we are way ahead of that. Hashtag wasn’t created to make money; it was always a passion project. What we’ve got is pretty special, and I believe the possibilities are limitless.
With the audience we attract, we are way beyond our means in terms of the level of football we play. We have more people watching our games than some fully established professional clubs, yet we are outside the traditional footballing structure. We are nothing to do with the Football Association or FIFA, and I think that scares some people.
I think the old guard get annoyed by the fact that we’re getting sponsors and big audiences while not playing by their rules and not giving them a penny, but why should we? They don’t own football. They may think they do but they really don’t. If you look at the mess institutions like FIFA have got mixed up in, with controversial World Cups in Russia and Qatar, corruption scandals and its status as a non-profit organisation despite having billions in the bank, you have to wonder why we’d even want to march to the beat of their drum.
Beyond our video-game inspired divisions structure, who knows what the future holds for the club. Maybe one day we will join the FA and try to be a team playing in a traditional league. Maybe Hashtag winning the 2033 Premier League trophy isn’t quite as ludicrous as it sounds. After all, if Leicester City can do it …
But right now I fear that the minute we do that, we become like every other one of the 92-plus professional football clubs in England. A
nd right now we are having more fun making our own path.
We have a different model for a football club, and I think it’s much more interesting if we celebrate the things in football that aren’t currently celebrated. We want to be part of a newer, more progressive and diverse form of football for the modern fan, more reflective of the audience we enjoy on YouTube.
The kind of club we are means that we can do the things that those in the traditional leagues can’t. The essence of the beautiful game isn’t broke, so we don’t need to rip up the rules and start again, but we can look at bringing in things that fans genuinely want to see because we’re not hindered by these old and slow institutions.
It’s easy to forget that football starts with passion. It’s the love of the game that sees people turning out for Sunday league sides all over the country, that sees people travel for miles to watch their team, no matter how bad they are, and has young people turning on in their millions to watch things like the Wembley Cup.
And for me, playing for Hashtag with the mates I’ve been playing with for years is all about keeping that love alive.
When I finished university my dad took me for some food at Pizza Hut in Reading. I only had a few hundred subscribers on YouTube, and my future stretching out in front of me felt like a blank canvas. I remember thinking it was quite a pivotal moment in my life, and I was keen to get some good old-fashioned fatherly wisdom from Stevie CB. Between mouthfuls of pizza I asked him generic questions about what the main things were that he’d learned along the way and what advice he could give me as a young man about to take on the world.
Then I got a bit more specific. I was dabbling in things like stand-up comedy and radio, pursuits that, if they worked out, had the potential to bring me a level of acclaim and recognition. I was fairly certain my football ‘career’ wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to gauge my dad’s thoughts on someone pursuing a line of work that could lead to a life with less privacy and more attention than the average person. I asked him, ‘Would you rather have everyone in the world know who you are, with half of the world loving you and the other half hating you, or just a hundred people know who you are, but they all love you?’
My dad answered in a heartbeat. ‘I’ll take the hundred that love me, thanks,’ he said.
I just couldn’t get my head around it. The whole world would know who you are! And yes, half of them might hate you, but I didn’t really think that would apply to me. Surely if you behaved in a way that you didn’t think was deserving of hate, you’d be fine?
Fast-forward a good few years to today, and a lot has changed – and I’m not just talking about my dietary habits. The whole world clearly doesn’t know who I am, but my subscribers now number in the millions so I haven’t only got that hundred people who all love me, either. And I have learned that, no matter what you do and how you behave, it is not going to stop people deciding they don’t like you, no matter how unwarranted it may be. Especially when they have their anonymity to hide behind on social media.
We have a lot of young viewers, and we’ll get tweets from kids wearing a Hashtag shirt that their mum’s bought them and it makes me really proud to think that this thing I’ve created from nothing is now making a little kid happy. It reminds me of when I was their age and I got my first West Ham shirt. If I’ve made anyone as happy as that made me, then it’s definitely made my day.
Sadly, we’ve learned from experience that I can’t really retweet that sort of thing, even if the tweets ask me to. What should be a nice moment for a kid and their parents, having me acknowledge that and share it with my wider fanbase, can often end up in unnecessary and utterly hateful abuse from a small but venomous minority of people. Some of the stuff we get from Twitter trolls is just despicable.
I think that’s what stings the most sometimes about the haters. Yes, by all means, have a pop at me – I get no end of stick about how average I am at football (that’s kind of the point, guys) and far more poisonous comments on top of that, and I’m used to it by now – but don’t do it to someone who isn’t putting themselves out there for this kind of vitriol.
I had to warn the other Hashtag players very early on that they would need to develop thick skins if they were going to put up with the abuse on Twitter and in the comments below the videos, and it obviously affects some more than others. The best thing, of course, is simply to ignore it and not respond to any of it but, as our match against Palmers proved, it’s one thing knowing it and quite another acting in this way. We definitely shouldn’t have responded to provocation.
It’s a sad reality that we have to face but, to borrow a quote from Batman, some people just want to watch the world burn. I feel sorry for them, really. A highlight of their day is targeting someone, often a person who’s done nothing wrong, and trying their best to make them feel bad. I mean, that’s a pretty sad existence, isn’t it? The truth is that often some of these trolls are actually kids themselves and they probably aren’t having a great time in their own life, so they decide to pick on others. It’s classic schoolyard bullying, really. The difference is that social media allows them to compete for retweets to see who can be the best bully in the world.
Sometimes I don’t think sites like Twitter or YouTube do enough to stamp out this sort of behaviour, but it’s so hard to police. Ultimately, as long as people have fake usernames to hide behind, this sort of thing will continue. Particularly in the UK we have a habit of trying to knock people down when they do something with their life. I’ve never really understood it myself, but I’ve come to accept it.
It’s not just on Twitter and in the YouTube comments that I’ve encountered this sort of behaviour, either. I wouldn’t class myself as famous – last time I checked there were definitely no paparazzi outside the front door – but in certain gaming and football environments I do get recognised.
In 2016 I was vlogging all my West Ham games and I’ve even been lucky enough to have done a few things with the club, such as introduce them to the world of eSports and host their kit launch at the new stadium. The latter was spectacularly badly timed, as it was around the same time that the club made Tony Carr redundant. He ran the club’s academy and brought through amazing players like Rio Ferdinand and Frank Lampard.
I did the kit launch because the original presenter, a reasonably well-known reality star and West Ham supporter, pulled out at the last-minute, and I got a lot of stick for it because some of the older audience didn’t like the idea of a YouTuber presenting their team’s kit launch. It didn’t matter to them that I had a track record in presenting this sort of thing; for them a YouTuber is a catch-all term, a signifier of a new era that they don’t feel comfortable in, so they decided to target me.
They’d be much more happy with other West Ham fans from mainstream media presenting the event, like Mark Wright or Ben Shephard. Now, no disrespect to those guys, but what makes them more suitable than me? Is it because they appear in a 40-inch box in your living room instead of on a laptop screen or on a phone?
On top of that, people gave me a load of stick for the club supposedly treating me better than they did an academy legend, as if somehow the two were related and they’d had to choose between keeping Tony Carr and getting me in to do the kit launch. ‘Sorry, Tony, we’re going to have to let you go because we’ve got Spence in to host our kit launch for free …’
It made no sense but, like a lot of online abuse, the trolls don’t let the facts get in the way of a good smear campaign. The truth was that a lot of West Ham fans were annoyed, not just at the Tony Carr situation but also at the lack of transfer activity that summer and the recent move from our beloved Boleyn Ground. There was a lot of negativity among the West Ham faithful and, for some reason, a few decided to aim it at me. Off the back of the kit launch I got plenty of hate, and not just from people hiding behind Twitter and live-stream comments.
I went out to Slovenia and Romania for West Ham’s Europa League away matches, and I got a fair bit of stick from West Ha
m fans. Alex was with me, and she got plenty of abuse too, which was really out of order and unwarranted, and someone even tried to start a fight with me. I just didn’t get it. I’ve never received a penny from West Ham, despite what some people think, and I’m a fan who just wants the best for the club.
The Romania game in particular, where we, the away fans, were kept in a cage, was a really bad experience, and at one point after I’d done my vlog, I had a run-in with a ‘fan’ and thought, I’m going to get my head kicked in here …
I stuck up for myself (verbally, at least!), and thankfully the situation didn’t get out of hand, but it made me think I shouldn’t have gone to the game. It just wasn’t worth it. I’m a lifelong West Ham fan, always will be, and a season-ticket holder. I love the club, but I definitely won’t be in a hurry to travel to some of these away games in future. It probably put Alex off going to football as well, which is a real shame.
Believe it or not, I also need to be careful when I’m playing football. The match against Palmers showed how necessary it was for me not to respond to physical provocation – a couple of players definitely singled me out and were looking for a reaction – and it means that, as much as I’d love to, it’s not so easy for me to just go and play seven- or five-a-side somewhere local in a league any more. I’ve had to wind that down.
I’ve had people target me in these kind of games, too. I’m not a shrinking violet and I will react if someone does it on the pitch. Maybe not physically every time – but certainly verbally. In one match I had a guy repeatedly grabbing my neck, like he was trying to choke-slam me, and I said something to the ref. When the player did it for a third time and the ref did nothing, I just pushed the guy to the floor, as I think a lot of people would.