I had a good thing going, making YouTube videos at home in the evening and doing a job that was perfectly suited to me in the day. I really liked that job and the people I worked with, but the minute I stopped feeling it, I quit.
I’ve always had something in me that makes me think I’m never going to do something I don’t want to do. I decided pretty early on that my most valuable currency was time, not money, and so I was always willing to do loads of things for free. Don’t get me wrong, money is very useful, but I always believed that once I’d found what I wanted to do I’d work hard to get really good at it, and then money would come along with it. But I’d never do something I didn’t want to do, and I’d reached that point with doing tweets and managing a Facebook page for someone else. There was no grey area for me; it was all black or white. My passion for things like YouTube had grown and I wanted to make my own content, so that was it for me: I was leaving. Though history would have to repeat itself before I finally got around to making my own stuff for real.
After I quit I spent the summer of 2011 presenting the live version of the TV game show Minute to Win It – one of the few my mum hadn’t appeared on – which was presented by Joe Swash and Caroline Flack. I basically did the shows on the road where they didn’t have the budget to pay Joe Swash. If I learned one thing that summer it was that I’m not the best at faking enthusiasm. If I’m naturally into something then great, I’m super-pumped: Let’s go! That’s why I love doing my own stuff. But I found it harder to do something I didn’t really believe in.
I distinctly remember being shouted at through my ear-piece by the director in the middle of a live show to ‘look like you want to be here’. The truth was, I didn’t. Well, not for ever, anyway. It was good fun for a few months, but pretty soon I wanted to do something different again.
My dad gave me a job at his new renewable energy company that he ran with my brother Seb for a while, and a lot of my mates would say, ‘What are you doing? A minute ago you were interviewing Steven Gerrard, now you’re driving a Transit van delivering solar panels!’ I could feel the clock ticking a bit, and still living at home was hardly living the dream. But then a job working for a very different kind of Kompany came my way.
I got a phone call from BigBalls saying that Vincent Kompany, the Manchester City and Belgium captain, had been in touch because he was looking for a social-media guy, and they thought I could be it. Sure, I might have quit my last job because I’d had enough of doing social media for someone else, but this was the sickest version of that job: good money for not even full-time hours and a seat in Vincent’s box for every home game at the Etihad.
‘Yeah,’ I said, immediately putting my principles to one side in the glare of a job offer from one of the best players on the planet. ‘I’ll do it.’
So I went through the interview process, starting with meeting his people, which went well, and then I had to meet Vincent himself. We were originally going to meet after a game in London, but his schedule changed at the last minute so instead we did it over Skype. It won’t surprise you to learn that I had no problem at all talking to him over an online camera, but for some reason my camera wasn’t working on this occasion so all we had was audio.
Vincent was clearly a very switched-on businessman as well as a great player, and I told him about all the exciting things I thought we could do to give him a real social-media presence. I told him how much I looked up to him, how I was a defender too and in the end I just came out with, ‘Come on, let’s do this.’
‘Yeah, cool,’ he said. ‘I just need to look you in the eye and make sure I can trust you.’
We quit the call. I got the camera working again and then called him back. His face was on the screen, totally impassive, just looking at me. It could only have been for a second, but I don’t think I’d ever felt so self-conscious in my life, just sitting there, letting him judge what I looked like. And then, very coolly, he just said, ‘Yeah, you’re good.’
And that was that. I was now working for Vincent Kompany.
Immediately, it meant I could move out of my parents’ house and head for the bright lights of London. I moved in with some mates in Angel, Islington, and I would go up to Manchester a couple of times a month, where I’d often go to stay at Vincent’s house, and I even visited Patrick Vieira’s house too. And the opportunities for name-dropping the best footballers around didn’t stop there.
I got to hang out with Carlos Tévez, which for this West Ham fan was pretty cool given that he’d scored the goal that kept the club in the Premier League in 2007. The language barrier meant that the conversation wasn’t exactly enthralling, but that hardly mattered when I went home to tell my jealous mates about it!
I would meet all the other City players too, going into the players’ lounge after games, chatting to people like Yaya Touré and Sergio Agüero. One day, after a meeting at the club’s training ground, Vincent was driving his Porsche on the motorway, with me in the passenger seat, when I looked across at the next car – another Porsche, naturally – and there was Mario Balotelli driving, giving us the eyes. He gave us a look that said, ‘Uh-huh,’ and Vincent gave him a look back, with his all-business face on … then Balotelli broke into a big grin and accelerated. Vincent followed suit, and we were zooming down the motorway.1 It was crazy!
I was living the dream. The job at We R Interactive had been cool, but now I was properly in the football world. I was thrown in at the deep end, working closely with Manchester City, directing Q&As and productions in their ground well above my experience level. But the best part of the job was getting to know Vincent.
I think he was the best centre-back in the world that year – remember, this was that season, the 2011–12 season – and we got on really well. He’s only a little bit older than me, and we’d speak on the phone about social-media ideas for ages and then just chat for half an hour like mates at the end. I couldn’t believe it: I was 23 years old and friends with the Manchester City and Belgium captain.
I’ve been lucky enough to meet and get to know a number of professional footballers in my career so far, and every now and then you meet one that really impresses you. When a footballer is a great talker, has a really amiable personality or just that little something special about him or her, people will often say that they are destined for a career on TV after hanging up their boots. Vincent, for me, was a step above the rest. He was intelligent, determined and diplomatic in a way that made him stand out from the crowd. Forget TV, I could see Vincent being the Prime Minister of Belgium when he finishes pocketing strikers for a living.
One final aspect of the job would have been the icing on the cake for some. I was getting paid really well to work four days a week, but in reality I could get most of the job done in six or seven hours if I worked hard, which left me plenty of free time to do things like go to the gym every day, play football and, of course, play Football Manager.
I started making YouTube videos regularly for the first time, instead of just putting them up every so often, and I finally turned my efforts away from the comedy videos I’d been doing and towards football content. Making football-related content was a really big step for me. Even though I’d been schooled in the encyclopaedia of football otherwise known as Football Manager, had improved hugely as a player to be able to play to a (semi-) decent standard and knew as much about football as anyone at the table, I still had a kid’s mentality about being able to express my opinions to the world. I still felt like a little boy coming to the game late, so if I was faced with someone else who’d been kicking a ball since he was a toddler, I somehow felt a bit inferior and that I wasn’t allowed to speak up. I thought that if I broadcast my thoughts to the world, there’d be someone in the comments saying, ‘Yeah, but you weren’t even in the football team till you were 14.’
Spending time with Vincent, arguing my point about players and backing myself when needed, had helped me shed some of this, but the biggest enabler to finally shed this mentality came f
rom doing stand-up comedy. When doing a comedy gig, you can get up in front of a room full of people you don’t know and say to yourself, ‘What if they don’t laugh?’ Or you can say, ‘None of these people know me. If something goes badly, they won’t remember me tomorrow. The only person who will remember it was a bad gig is me, and if I choose to learn from it instead of fixate on it then it’s a positive rather than a negative.’ Just like playing FIFA 98 with the mouse, I would either have a good gig or I’d learn.
You can take this mentality into anything. I applied it to approaching girls (before I got together with Alex, of course). If you approach a girl you like nicely and she’s rude to you, you can choose to forget she exists straight after. There’s a polite way to reject someone, and if she doesn’t choose this option then she probably isn’t worth it anyway. It doesn’t have to affect your life. I took this attitude into my YouTube football videos, refusing to worry any more about whether anyone would react negatively to them or call me out as some kind of fraud – which in reality would never happen because no one but me cared that I got into football late.
Vincent didn’t care about any of these extra-curricular activities – he just wanted the job done to a high standard and anything outside of that didn’t matter to him. He was astute enough to know that, as he obviously earned an unbelievable amount of money, he could hardly be tight with paying his staff, so he was always very generous and looked after those who worked for him. I really respected him for that, and it’s a lesson I certainly took from him.
I probably should have thought, I’ve lucked out here. But instead it had the opposite effect on me. It didn’t sit well with me earning a really good wage and having all this free time. I started thinking it wasn’t right, and if I wasn’t being made to work hard in what I was doing I needed to find something else. Unbelievably, as we approached the business end of the 2011–12 football season, I was getting itchy feet once again.
I wanted to see the season out, as I’d only been working for Vincent for about seven months and he had been very good to me, so I canvassed the opinions of my dad, my brothers and loads of my mates. They all told me the same thing: ‘Do not leave. Give it another year. You’re young and there’s no rush.’
Their advice was no doubt absolutely sound and logical, and whenever I run a vote on my YouTube channel now I always try to go with the majority – the people have spoken and all that. But on this occasion it took only one person to confirm what I already knew I should do. My friend Sam Rowland, who’s a talented film director, was the lone voice of dissent. He simply said, ‘Mate, if you don’t want to be there you should leave.’
So I had this difficult discussion with Vincent at a time when he was captaining a team challenging for the title, playing must-win game after must-win game, and had much bigger things to worry about than the future of his social-media manager. I told his manager, a lovely guy called Klaas, that my heart wasn’t in it and that it would make a dream job for someone else – just not me. Klaas invited me up to Manchester for what I assumed would be the courtesy of telling Vincent face to face.
Vincent and Klaas had other ideas. They had a league title to think about and just wanted to nip it in the bud. Over some food they asked, ‘What can we do to keep you? Is it money?’
It definitely wasn’t money, but it was difficult for them to understand why I would leave such a great job with nothing lined up to do instead. A better job would have made sense to them. I wanted to make more football YouTube videos, something I could easily have done on their watch as I had plenty of spare time, but it just didn’t feel right. I knew I had to strike out on my own: I needed to give myself the fear. 2
They offered me all sorts of incentives to keep me, all of which seemed great but I knew I had to stick to my guns, before Vincent offered to drive me to the station to head home. It was just me and Vincent in the car, and when he pulled up outside the train station he turned to me and said, ‘Look, we’ve said what we want to say today. I think we’ve made our point, and it’s up to you ultimately. But let me give you some advice, not as your boss, not as a footballer, but as a guy who’s only a little bit older than you. I know you’re an ambitious guy, and I respect that. If you stay for one more year you will leave with my utmost respect. I will be a guy you can always count on. Think about it.’
That was the first time I wavered throughout the whole process. It was only one more year, after all. I talked to Seb, who has always been the person I go to for advice when it comes to my career. His thoughts were unequivocal: ‘Now you really have to stay!’
But when I thought about it, I knew I was going against that thing in me that says if I don’t want to do something, I should stop doing it. As crazy as it sounded, I knew Vincent deserved better, and I couldn’t carry on doing that job. I gave Vincent my decision and he wanted me to call it a day immediately. I left a couple of weeks before the end of the season.
On the final day of the football season in 2012 I was wearing a Manchester City shirt (which I justified to myself because West Ham were in the Championship that year). Like millions of fans around the world, I leapt to my feet as that amazing ‘Agüero!’ moment happened, when Sergio Agüero scored an injury-time winner to give Manchester City their first league title since the 1960s, winning it on goal difference in one of the most exciting season climaxes ever.
My first thought was purely, Unbelievable! What a moment!
I was over the moon for Vincent and the club.
My second thought was a bit less generous: If only I’d stayed, I might have got a decent bonus!
Only a week or so later I put up my first Premier League poem video on YouTube. It was hardly a Shakespearean-worthy piece of verse, but it was a fun, irreverent review of the season in a basic poem, and I was pretty proud of it. The amount of time I put into writing it and getting the footage together meant that I never would have made it if I’d still been working for Vincent. I’d have just gone to the gym or played Football Manager instead. I needed to give myself the fear, to have no job or money coming in to motivate me to get on and do it, and as soon as I put it up I knew right then that I’d made the correct decision.
My Premier League poem was my first big football video on YouTube. It got over 75,000 views on it in one day (a record for me) and that feeling was a bit of an ‘Agüero!’ moment for me personally – something money simply couldn’t buy.
TOP 10 FOOTBALL VIDEO-GAME PLAYERS
Patrice Loko
Despite having to use the mouse, I still bagged plenty of goals against my brother with this Paris Saint-Germain striker on FIFA 98.
Tonton Zola Moukoko
So much better on Football Manager than he was in real life. Every Football Manager career would start the same: buy Tonton from Derby and then win things.
Adriano
One of the best players Pro Evolution Soccer has ever seen. His left foot could score from the halfway line. If only he’d been that good in reality.
Marco Sau
Pure pace, very cheap and one of the first players I fell in love with on FIFA Ultimate Team.
Michael Owen
His legend card on FIFA 15 carried my Once a Lion series, and then I packed him on The Zarate Kid, which was unbelievable.
Taribo West
Was always available on a free transfer at the start of Championship Manager 2001–02. Quality centre-back with not-so-quality hair.
Gabriel Batistuta
The Argentinian Alan Shearer. Playing for Roma in Championship Manager 2001–02, this guy never stopped scoring.
Edgar Davids
Seb and I used to say this guy had a ‘license to shoot’ on Pro Evolution Soccer, which meant that we shot on sight as soon as he got the ball.
Marco Di Vaio
Not a headline-grabber, but on FIFA 05 Seb and I effectively did an early version of Ultimate Team when we created squads with ratings handicaps and Di Vaio led my line up front. He was the key figure in my turning the tables
against Seb and finally becoming better than him.
Hernán Jorge Crespo
One of the legends who smashed it for me on my London United football series. He had a partnership with Davor Šuker that was priceless.
Special mentions: Michael Duff (Cheltenham right-back), Maxim Tsigalko, Sergio Agüero, Davor Šuker, Danny Whitehead, Djair Parfitt-Williams
I didn’t remain a free agent for long. BigBalls – who had hooked me up with the We R Interactive job and the Kompany role – got in touch once again and asked if I’d like to come and work for them, this time on a YouTube football channel. How could I turn that down?
BigBalls had won the pitch to make a YouTube Originals channel called Copa90, and I started work there about a month after leaving Vincent Kompany. I was only the second person employed to work on the channel, and I helped shape the identity of Copa90 and got some great presenters in. I produced a show called EuroFan, presented by DJ and comedian Tom Deacon, whose success in the Chortle Student Comedy competition was one of the inspirations for me doing stand-up in the first place.
My years of experience of doing my own material on YouTube helped massively, as I was able to bring strategic elements to putting our content up, such as when was the best time to do it to get the most views? What kind of videos should we be making? Who do we need to collaborate with?
Our goal, set by Google for that first year, was to get to 100,000 subscribers. Without hitting that target, we’d have to look elsewhere for future funding and we were starting from zero. No one knew who we were, so it was always going to be a challenge, and about eight months in we were off-target and it didn’t look like we were going to make it. We did two major things to change that.
The first was approaching KSI, who is the UK’s biggest YouTuber and a huge FIFA gamer, and asking him to do a show for us. Collaboration is the key to growing on YouTube: you can benefit from your collaborator sharing your content with their subscribers and vice versa. Although in this instance, given that we didn’t have much to offer in the subscriber department, KSI had to make do with getting paid instead.
Gamechanger Page 4