Gamechanger

by Spencer F. C.

  Forever Blowin’ offered me a formula that worked well on YouTube. After 25 episodes and falling agonisingly short of my target of winning Division 1 (the West Ham alumni could only take me so far, it turned out), I followed it up with a series called Once a Lion, which abided by the same format except that to qualify for the team, a player had to have at least one cap for England.

  My team started off being really bad, with some of the worst one-cap wonders to have played for the Three Lions, and I’d gradually build to have a squad with players like Wayne Rooney and Harry Kane up front, as well as legends like Michael Owen. The Slazenger pot of destiny was back, of course.

  I even got my parents involved in the channel. My mum played Texan YouTuber Dirty Mike’s mum at FIFA, though I suspected foul play when Mike’s mum scored a wonder goal to win the battle of the mums. I had to give him a whole Team of the Week team for that (they cost a lot of coins, you know, which we’ll come to later).

  We had a return match, this time the battle of the dads, neither of whom had played FIFA before. Perhaps my dad would appreciate just how difficult and worthwhile mastery at FIFA was now. My dad got revenge for Mum and beat Dirty Mike’s dad on penalties, and he was very pleased indeed – not least because England had actually won a game on penalties for once.

  While I might have looked like I was having a ball onscreen, things weren’t quite so straightforward behind the scenes. I was working hard on my content pretty much every single day and night. A typical day would see me sitting up editing until 4 or 5am, while poor Alex was trying to sleep in the same room as she had to get up for work in the morning. She had a good job at advertising agency Leo Burnett that she needed to be fresh for every day, and given that I’d been doing pretty much the same thing for a year prior to that with the FIFA Playa, she was incredibly supportive and understanding.

  On top of this, Alex and I had a channel we did together, called Spencer & Alex. We’d originally started the channel as a kind of modern-day photo album for ourselves, to document all the great things we’d done together and to look back on when we’re old. There were silly little videos on there of things like Alex plucking my nostril hair (seriously, do not try this at home, kids) and some more memorable, travelogue-style stuff like a road-trip around Europe and Alex doing the London triathlon.

  Of all the problems to have with the in-laws, however, a joint YouTube channel is certainly a very modern one. Alex’s dad is Polish and her mum is a devout Catholic. They’re lovely, lovely people, but they’re quite traditional and conservative, and I think it’s fair to say they weren’t massive fans of some of the first videos we put up. They really didn’t like one in particular.

  We made a video showing Alex’s reaction to an infamous video doing the rounds online, which shall remain nameless in the pages of a family-friendly publication such as this. Her parents got the wrong idea and felt I might be exploiting her in some way, making her watch something so upsettingly disgusting, giving little credence to the idea that Alex was perfectly capable of making her own mind up about whether she wanted to watch something like that on our channel.

  It wasn’t like we were getting the sort of views any kind of exploitation would justify anyway – hardly anyone was watching back then. Looking back at it now, I can understand their concern. They were just looking out for their daughter, who was relatively new to the YouTube world, though my intentions were, of course, honourable.

  I would eventually go on to gain their trust and they’re fully behind what we do now, but it took time. The only thing I now wonder about is whether they actually watched the infamous video to see how disgusting it was. Now that would have made for an interesting reaction video.

  We did get some completely unexpected success with one video on our channel, though. We woke up one morning to find a silly video we did called ‘How to Annoy Your Boyfriend’ had a million views. We couldn’t believe it!

  I’d had this kind of success with FIFA Playa, but there’d always been a strategy behind those videos, doing collaborations with other YouTubers and maximising our exposure through any means we could. With this, we’d just put it up and thought nothing of it.

  It turned out that internet news source The Daily Dot had got hold of it and featured it on their website, and to this day we just can’t figure out how they found it. We didn’t put any clever tags on it or anything – they just randomly came upon it. It didn’t turn our channel into an overnight success, but it did give us a decent boost in subscribers and a bit of hope that maybe we could do it again. It reminded me that sometimes good videos just get discovered completely organically – something which seems to happen less and less now as YouTube is unfortunately far from a perfect meritocracy.

  Once I was working all the hours I could to make a success of Spencer FC, I needed to sit down with Alex and have what could have been a difficult conversation with her. No, it definitely wasn’t the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ conversation, it was more, ‘It’s not me, it’s you.’ But I was talking about who was going to edit the Spencer & Alex content, so it wasn’t anything too dramatic!

  I said to her, ‘Look, I love doing Spencer & Alex, but I can’t edit the videos any more because I’m snowed under with my channel. If you want to continue our stuff, you need to start editing our videos in your own time.’

  It was a big ask, as she had her job to go to and she didn’t have any experience of editing videos, but I wasn’t asking her to do anything I hadn’t been prepared to do when I’d had a job. She was up for it. I taught her the basics pretty quickly and I looked over and checked everything she edited, giving her feedback as she went, and she gradually got the hang of it.

  As we started to make more and more content and increasingly spent most of our time at home editing, the flat-share was starting to feel too small for our needs, and in the interests of Alex getting a good night’s sleep without me sitting on the computer until all hours at night in the room, we made the decision to move out to Hertfordshire where we could afford the non-London rent on a two-bedroom flat (giving us room for a separate office space). Hertfordshire came with the added bonus of being near to where my brother Seb lived, though little did we know then that we’d be so busy during our time living there we’d barely see him.

  I was earning just about enough from YouTube to cover my rent and outgoings by then, and Alex was improving as an editor all the time. She’d reached a really good standard by the time we’d been in Hertfordshire for a few months. She hated the commute to London every day, and we talked about her one day quitting her job to come and help me once I was earning enough money to support us.

  But how much was enough? If we waited until I was earning the right amount, we might never get there. We realised then that there was something else Alex needed to do that I had been prepared to do before her. We needed to take a gamble: Alex needed to quit her job. Here came the fear again …

  We had enough saved to help us get by for a little while, and that, along with the small amount I was making from my channel, enabled us to come up with a plan: we would smash it for three or four months, working together, and see how we got on. If we couldn’t make a go of it, or if we hated working together and being in a relationship at the same time, Alex would go and get another job, but we weren’t banking on that. As Hollywood star Will Smith says, ‘There’s no reason to have a plan B because it distracts from plan A.’

  We worked like dogs, every day for a year. We didn’t have a single day off, and a day in the life might consist of editing as many as four or five videos in a day, going to meetings, answering loads of emails, filming content or coming up with new ideas.

  I was flat out every single day, and Alex was no longer just editing Spencer & Alex content, but stuff for Spencer FC too. We kept that quiet for a long time as we were worried about what people might think about someone who isn’t that into football editing football content, but it was FIFA content, not pure football, and I was still watching every video and ma
king changes where necessary. Besides, Alex was a really good editor by this stage, and it freed up loads of time for me – time that I could spend pursuing other projects and growing the channel.

  When December 2014 rolled around, we embarked on something we would soon come to call Deathcember, and it almost killed us. Not literally, of course, but it took an awful lot out of us.

  We did the Christmas Advent Calendar, where we uploaded a video every day of me opening a load of Ultimate Team packs, just like the doors of an advent calendar, for the full 25 days of Christmas, plus an extra show for Boxing Day where I played a tournament with the Advent Calendar squad I’d created.

  Doing this alongside our usual shows meant that for pretty much all of December we were doing two videos a day instead of our usual one, and we barely slept. I must have got about three hours a night for the entire month, and we even had to make a video on Christmas Day. It was great for the channel in terms of views and it was a really fun show, but we kind of hated it at times too, if I’m honest. That might have come across when a very tired version of myself lost two out of three games with the team I’d created, which was sorely lacking in that magic quality of chemistry, and I declared, ‘Why would you create a team out of a random group of players that have no association whatsoever?’ Bah humbug, indeed.

  None of this would stop us doing it all again the following Christmas, of course!

  As if the Advent Calendar series wasn’t enough, I also decided that December would be a good month for me to reinvent the wheel – or at least the TV gameshow Wheel of Fortune.

  I called my new show The Wheel of Futune (with FUT standing for FIFA Ultimate Team), and that’s pretty much where the similarities with Wheel of Fortune ended – though, in the spirit of producing physical props, which had been a feature of my shows so far, we did have a homemade wheel. Alex put a lot of tender loving care into crafting and painting that bad boy, and it’s still going strong after three seasons!

  The production values were going up. I dressed up in my best showbiz-presenter/circus-performer garb to present the first episode. OK, we weren’t able to match the levels of a real-life TV gameshow – ‘We didn’t have the budget for that,’ I pointed out in the first episode – but I felt we could become a nice middle ground between a typical YouTube video and a well-produced entertainment series on TV.

  The premise of the show was that I would spin the wheel before every match, and wherever it landed I would have to obey the command for my next FIFA match. So, some parts of the wheel offered me the opportunity to open player packs, which might include some good players to add to my squad and would obviously help me in the game, and some allowed me to buy players. But other parts of the wheel meant I had to do a challenge or I would be made bankrupt. The only players I could use throughout the series were those the wheel gave me.

  These restrictions made my target to win Division 1 harder, not least because the players I would be up against were playing the game with nothing inhibiting them. Now, I’m a decent FIFA player – I’m not world-class by any means, but I’m not bad – which allowed me to achieve some epic victories against good players who had their best team and no restrictions on them. It might have taken 48 episodes, over 250 players and nearly 150 spins of the wheel, but in my first series I achieved my target of winning Division 1.

  Some of the challenges the wheel might make me do included playing with a team that had zero chemistry (meaning the players had no links to each other, which inhibited their on-pitch performance) or with everyone out of position (so that I would have a goalkeeper up front and a striker in goal), and every now and then I’d sneak a 1–0 victory against a decent team. I loved it when that happened!

  And my loving it was, I felt, where the real heart of the show lay. By the time I was doing The Wheel of Futune I was getting decent subscriber numbers. In fact, I was picking them up quicker than before. Any worries I’d had about replacing FIFA Playa with the more family-friendly version of myself were long gone.

  I wasn’t achieving this through chasing viewers and working out tactics to bump up subscriber numbers. I was making series that I genuinely enjoyed because I knew my passion would come through in the content. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of fake stuff on YouTube – fake reactions, fake enthusiasm, fake people – but I can hold my hand on my heart and say that I’ve never faked a single thing. Every ounce of excitement and enthusiasm you see in my content is 100 per cent real. When you see me celebrate a goal or ‘packing’ a great player, that’s genuine.

  As I’ve said before, I’m not one for faking enthusiasm, and the fact that I’m still making The Wheel of Futune videos today should tell you a little something about just how much I enjoy it. Regardless of view counts or comments, if I ever stop enjoying something I stop doing it. I’ve proven this with the jobs I left earlier in my career and it’s part of my personality that I don’t see changing.

  If I could pinpoint any single factor in the success of Spencer FC, it would be that year that Alex and I spent putting in such a shift. But that really isn’t unique on YouTube. If you look at anyone with any degree of success on the platform, the one thing the majority have in common is that they work hard. Even if you don’t like their content, most creators will still have had to work hard to get to where they are. It isn’t always easy to appreciate that, but most YouTubers are all too familiar with some very late nights to keep putting out the content that we do.

  What was pretty unique about the work Alex and I were putting in was that we were doing it together while being in a relationship. Now, guys, I can tell you right now that it could have gone very wrong. Very wrong indeed. Working every day without a break with your partner isn’t exactly the best foundation for a relationship, as every stress and every strain from both the work and the relationship filter over and affect both sides of it. For the wrong couple, even with a solid-as-a-rock relationship, it could have been horrible. If you asked my mum and dad if they could manage working full-time together, you’d get a very strong ‘NO WAY’ in response!

  Thankfully, we managed it pretty well. I’m not going to say there weren’t fraught moments, but during that year we learned that we could work together and live together and keep our relationship strong. We had no choice but to commit to it all, and thankfully it started paying off. Within six months we were making more than enough to pay our rent, and within a year we would move to a bigger place. But, most importantly, securing our finances and making a success of the channel meant I was able to make the content I wanted with the production values I’d envisaged at the start.

  I can never give Alex enough credit for how much she helped me and allowed me to chase my dreams. Who knows what would have happened if she’d said ‘no thanks’ when I asked her to start editing Spencer & Alex videos back in the day? The fact is she jumped on board and her commitment, enthusiasm and tireless work ethic are some of the main reasons I’m here writing this book. She is a gamechanger.

  One route I could have pursued to make life easier and to get the money coming in quicker would have been to have a FIFA coin sponsor on my channel, but I made the decision very early on to turn my back on this form of income.

  In FIFA Ultimate Team, you can use in-game coins to buy better players. You can earn these coins gradually through playing the game, or you can speed up the process by paying real money – dipping into your own pocket – to buy FIFA points from the makers of the game, EA Sports.

  Now, the points are expensive to buy, especially if you’ve already shelled out the not-insignificant sum for the game itself, so naturally, as is always the way in any economy, especially on the internet, some enterprising people found a way to hack the system and sell the coins themselves – at a heavily discounted rate.

  This practice was illegal as it was effectively undercutting the people who owned the rights to the currency (EA Sports), but the appeal was simple: cheaper in-game coins. To think of it in old money, imagine a Panini football sticker book fi
lled with fake stickers bought from a guy on the street rather than the official manufacturers.

  These enterprising people took a similarly novel approach to their marketing strategy: they paid to have links to their websites advertised on the channels of prominent FIFA YouTubers. And they paid a lot of money to do it with YouTubers who had millions of subscribers – all potential customers.

  For a couple of years, some YouTubers got incredibly rich from doing this. We’re talking tens of thousands of pounds a month. I could have been earning this kind of money, and lots of YouTubers I know were, and fair play to them, it’s not my place to judge. You might think me mad not to, given the struggle Alex and I went through to make a success of the channel, but I made the decision when FIFA 15 came out that I wouldn’t be accepting a coin sponsor, and I did it for a couple of reasons.

  Firstly, EA were starting to crack down on it and punish people who bought the black-market coins. I didn’t feel comfortable advertising something that could get one of my viewers into trouble. ‘Spencer told me to do it,’ they’d say, and who could blame them? I didn’t think it would be a responsible thing for me in the long term to put my viewers in that position.

  Secondly, EA were beginning to punish the people advertising coin sellers too. So, yes, in the interests of self-preservation, I didn’t want my account getting shut down or to be forced to stop one of my Road to Glory series short. These series were my lifeblood at the time and part of the story I was telling on YouTube.

  The third reason was one that I wasn’t entirely confident of at the time but I was growing to understand. I felt there was a chance that being associated with this murky illegitimate industry may have an adverse effect on me later down the line. This wasn’t a career path in which I wanted to just dip my feet in, get rich quick and then move on to something else. This was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and I didn’t think the potential risks outweighed the obvious benefits.