Gamechanger

by Spencer F. C.

  Victory for Spencer FC was a great result for me and my channel. You couldn’t have written a better script for it, really, though people have asked me since, ‘What would you have done if you’d lost?’

  If we’d lost we’d have lost, simple as that. We’d have said we wanted to be back next year to have another go at it. The action on the pitch was 100 per cent real, so the outcome was out of my control. But what a result!

  That first Wembley Cup was an absolute gamechanger for me. The smartest thing I got out of the deal with EE wasn’t money, but the right to have the content on my channel rather than an EE-branded channel. That content was easily the biggest in terms of views so far on my channel, with the final eventually attracting over 16 million viewers.

  Having the Wembley Cup content on my channel and the support of all the other YouTube lads playing gave me a massive injection of hundreds of thousands of new subscribers, so that every video I made after that got substantially more views than before. In the long term, that would mean more money in the form of advertising revenue, which is earned according to the amount of views. Money that I could then plough back in to making content of a similar quality. I think in total my channel grew by more than 250,000 subscribers during the few weeks that the Wembley Cup content was released. Insane.

  My first appearance at Wembley was a dream come true for my channel. It really put me on the map and opened doors in ways I was yet to fully appreciate. On a personal level, I loved playing there, but it didn’t really sink in at the time as my mind was in two places at once, both on the production and the match itself. It was only later that I thought to myself, Bloody hell, I played at Wembley!

  I’d come a long way from the guy sitting in his bedroom editing videos at 3am while his girlfriend slept in the bed next to him, and I made a promise to myself that, if I was lucky enough to get to play at the home of football a second time, I’d try to appreciate the moment just that little bit more.

  HALF-TIME: THIS IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS

  Inside the Spencer FC Bedroom Studio

  Ultimate Team card ⋀

  At the FIFA 17 launch EA Sports were kind enough to make me my own Ultimate Team card. They made me a right-back because that’s where I played in the 2016 Wembley Cup. They were definitely generous on the stats, outrageously so, to the point where I have a better rating than Rio Ferdinand. He’s not too happy about it!

  West Ham seat ⋀

  My dad sitting in one of the actual seats from the Boleyn Ground dugout! I bought this for my dad for his 60th birthday at the West Ham auction following the move to the London Stadium. He loves it!

  Wembley Cup ⋀

  The Wembley Cup trophies. As you can see, the 2016 one is bigger, in line with the bigger production of the series. I like to take these things literally!

  Spencer FC football mishmash poster ⋀

  This is a really cool poster made by Alex Bennett. When I included his original mishmash poster in one of my vlogs, he reached out with an idea to make a Spencer FC version.

  Wheel of Futune ⋀

  The infamous wheel handcrafted by Alex has served me well over three seasons on YouTube.

  Spencer FC game capture ⋀

  This is the device I use to capture FIFA gameplay. I even had my own Spencer FC one sent to me.

  I came out of the Wembley Cup on a high unlike any I’d experienced before. I was really happy with the content we’d made, my subscriber numbers had rocketed and my only thought was, I want to do this all the time.

  Playing at Wembley obviously wasn’t something I could do every week – but playing football on my channel was very much within my grasp. For whatever reason, people seemed to love watching YouTubers playing football. We weren’t the best players around by a long way, but there was something that was making people tune in.

  The idea of starting my own football club began to take shape (I told you I’d always wanted to own one), and my channel was now making me enough income that I could afford to plough that money back into it and fund my own football content.

  Of course, that didn’t mean I could afford to pay the biggest YouTubers to play every week. And, on top of that, the logistical difficulties of coordinating the diaries of these guys was a headache even for a one-off match, much less a weekly game. No, if I was going to do it on a regular basis it would have to be with a group of people who weren’t YouTubers. Now, who did I know who was pretty decent at football and would be up for playing on YouTube every week? Let me see …

  Hashtag United existed as a team long before it made its debut on YouTube. Faisal Manji and I started it as a seven-a-side team when we were both living in Clapham, south London, and we played every Sunday in a league. My friends Woody, TJ and Lovatt – all boys who had also played for Carmichael-Browns Athletic (CBA) when we were at school – played in the team too. However, just as a lot of people stop playing football when they turn 16 and their youth team finishes, so a lot of people hit their mid to late twenties and stop too. People start having children, getting married and become busier in their careers, and adult reality starts to bite. There just isn’t as much time for football any more.

  I definitely hit such a period. After moving to Hertfordshire I had to temporarily hang up my Hashtag boots, although Woody and Faisal kept the team going in London in my absence. During that mad year of work with Alex, I was playing once a week for Taplow Swans, where a load of my mates still played, but then we moved back to Essex and that stopped. If you’d asked me then if I thought it was likely I’d be playing regular 11-a-side football again, I’d have said no. I was too busy with work and just couldn’t see it happening.

  I definitely didn’t want to take my foot off the YouTube gas, but what if I could create the perfect marriage between producing content for my channel and playing football regularly? What could be better than that? To do it with my mates too, and keep together that group of players with the history we had with each other, well, that would be pretty special too, wouldn’t it?

  The plan all along was to make more football content on my channel. I just never thought it would be content of me actually playing football, much less in the team I had been part of on and off for the best part of a decade.

  Hashtag’s beginnings, however, were rooted in some devastating news.

  September 2015 marked the third anniversary of the death of a friend of mine from school. Joe Surtees had played for CBA when we were at sixth form together. He was a very fit and healthy guy who out of nowhere suddenly got leukaemia.

  I visited him in hospital a few times when he was ill, which was while I was working for Copa90, and I thought he was recovering well. And then I got a phone call from Faisal one day at work saying that Joe had died. It was awful news and a real wake-up call: a reminder of just how precious our time on this planet is and how quickly it can be taken away from us.

  We decided to put on a memorial match in honour of Joe, with all the lads from the old CBA team taking on Joe’s university mates. We made a prize, the Joe Surtees Memorial Trophy, and I planned to put on a whole day of it and film the occasion.

  A couple of days before the game, we learned that another member of that CBA team, Daniel Chalangary, our goalkeeper, had passed away too. We had lost two of our school team already and we were only in our mid-twenties.

  We wanted the day to be a celebration of the two guys, and it was a great afternoon and we raised a good bit of money for a blood-cancer charity. We, CBA, won the match on penalties, and I did some commentary over the highlights of the game. I’d never put a football match I’d played in up on my channel before (with the exception of the Wembley Cup), and I thought it was a good way to introduce my viewers to my mates.

  A lot of people in the comments said they’d love to see us play again, and then a YouTube channel called The Football Republic, where my younger brother Saunders used to work, saw the video and offered us the perfect opportunity.

  In the spirit of that number-one YouTube
rule for growth, collaboration, The Football Republic challenged us to a match. This game offered us the perfect chance to see if we still had what it takes and it would produce what eventually became a pilot episode of our brand-new football series that ended up being a huge part of the channel.

  If we were going to do this, we needed to do it right. I had no desire to just sit someone at the side of the pitch with a camera and see what they could film. I wanted to recapture some of the production values that had made the Wembley Cup so successful. For me, if this was going to work it would need to represent the same thing the Wembley Cup did – a load of mates getting to do stuff that your normal amateur footballer doesn’t get to. That included having high-quality footage of every game so that we could relive all the best (and worst) bits afterwards. I wanted it to be filmed with multiple cameras, so we needed to get all the gear necessary for that, and we got some football kits sorted with the Spencer FC badge on them.

  Of course, one thing we did need to do was put the actual team together. The original Hashtag United was a seven-a-side team, so we needed to pull in some extra players to make up the numbers. Naturally, I turned to my brother Seb, and he brought some of his mates from school and university into the fold. I knew many of them very well – some of them through a slightly bizarre way.

  When we were younger, Seb and I created custom teams with our mates on Pro Evolution Soccer, and we’d battle it out on a regular basis. My team was made up of the CBA lads and Seb, being at university at the time, based his around his University of Northampton First XI team. Through this I learned of players like Dan Brown, Phil Martin, John Dawson and Andy Jeffs-Watts long before I had the pleasure of meeting them in real life.

  I got us a manager for the match too, the absolute legend that is Adebayo ‘The Beast’ Akinfenwa.

  Now, I had no idea how we were going to get on in the game – it was all a bit of an experiment, really. Would we get thrashed? If we did, would that dim my enthusiasm for it? Was there any real appetite for amateur football with my mates instead of star-draw YouTubers?

  We were about to find out if this idea had legs.

  The Football Republic were managed by True Geordie, who had commentated on the Wembley Cup, and there would be two matches, one played on my channel and another on theirs. I needn’t have had any fears about whether we’d get thrashed. After Akinfenwa demanded some pure ‘Beast mode’ from us, we did just that and ran out 3–0 winners on my channel, before we dished out an even more convincing 7–1 thrashing on theirs.

  Seb’s mates took us up a level, no doubt about it. We already had some good players in my group, but lads like Phil Martin and Dan Brown were pure class. I came off the pitch thinking we didn’t look too bad at all. We’d also inadvertently created one of the best strike partnerships I’ve ever played with – Dan Brown and Ryan Adams. Ryan was my mate from Taplow Swans, and teaming up with Dan Brown, a player nearly a decade older than him, was a match made in heaven.

  But, as ever on YouTube, it was up to the viewers to decide. At the end of the video on my channel, I asked if people would like us to keep the team together and do it regularly. The response was overwhelming, with 99 per cent of people wanting us to do it. Unlike the time I solicited advice on whether I should continue working with Vincent Kompany, I went with the 99 per cent.

  By this stage, Seb had officially joined Alex and me on the business side of things. He’d always been my go-to person for advice, so when things really started taking off it made sense for him to actually take on the commercial side of the channel. I hadn’t seen much of him when we’d lived in Hertfordshire at the same time, but I would be seeing a lot more of him now.

  We put our heads together and started asking ourselves, ‘What does this football-club series we want to do look like? What is this team? What are we even going to call it?’

  I didn’t want to call the team Spencer FC in the long term. I’d always cringed at the fact that some people had thought I’d called our youth team Carmichael-Browns Athletic after myself, rather than as a bit of publicity for my dad’s company in return for money for our kit. This wasn’t about making it the Spencer show – I wanted it to exist as a separate entity, like a new brand. Something that we felt, done properly, would have potential to grow a lot bigger than little old me.

  I know that I can’t play football for ever. Making the club separate to Spencer FC would allow it to continue after I’d hung up my boots, and it would mean it could be something everyone in the team could take seriously and believe in. And that, after all, was what this team was about: a group of people with a shared history making something new to continue playing together – and to explore the limits of what was possible as a YouTube football club.

  With our past in mind, there could only be one name: Hashtag United. It was perfect. We made a new YouTube channel and other social-media accounts for Hashtag United (though the videos would go on Spencer FC as well), and we designed what I think is a pretty decent badge too.

  The trolls like to say things like, ‘Why are you named after a keyboard button? What does it even mean?’ But the simple fact is that it is a very modern symbol and word that is known almost exclusively from its use in social media. As we are a club that represents a new wave of football, born of social-media and online platforms, the hashtag encapsulates this perfectly. You can use the # symbol as shorthand for the club – #. You can play around with it on social media. You can even make the symbol with your hands, something we’ve not been shy about doing since we formed.

  Next, we needed a concept. I was adamant that we wouldn’t be just another Sunday league team. Quite a few people were doing Sunday league on YouTube already, and years before Spencer FC, I’d done something similar with the semi-pro team my dad was a physio with, East Thurrock United.

  I started filming their games and the team talks, and putting together a little highlights reel with me commentating over it. It was pretty straightforward, and I definitely hadn’t found my YouTube persona yet, but I got some great footage. It was proper aggressive stuff at this level. The manager would go mad at the players in the dressing room, swearing his head off and letting it all out like one of those fly-on-the-wall documentaries about football clubs. Think The Four Year Plan (about QPR) or Being: Liverpool, but at a much lower level.

  The non-league side of football is something I’m quite passionate about and I’ve travelled with East Thurrock to many a game, including their first-round FA Cup tie against Hartlepool and their eventual promotion to the National League South. There was a time when Seb and I thought Hashtag should be a semi-pro team from the off, one that we didn’t play in but instead the series would be about us running the club and trying to gain promotion to professional football. However, we felt that this was an opportunity we could revisit at a later date. There was a timeframe on how long we could continue to play football ourselves and, for whatever reason, our audience seemed to want to see us play, so we decided to concentrate on that before it was too late.

  So I felt that Sunday league content had been done, and on top of that, there were limitations around it that would have severely interfered with my plans. Firstly, in Sunday league you’re playing in a league system with loads of random people. They might not want to be filmed. On top of that, you’re then going to monetise that content. You would need release forms to cover you, otherwise you might find yourself on extremely dodgy ground.

  I never want to build something on a base that could be pulled away from me. The business side of YouTube is one that the comments section and viewers don’t always appreciate, but there are a lot of content creators out there who build channels and careers off what is essentially illegal content. It wasn’t something I was prepared to do. Imagine if we won a huge cup final but then the opposition refused to sign release forms and we couldn’t legally upload the content from it? No, if we were going to do this we’d need to know that our hard work and results, good or bad, would be there to stay for the audien
ce.

  The second concern was the venues. In my post-Wembley Cup world I wanted high production values, which meant filming the matches in a very specific way. You need to film football from high up to make it look decent, and you can’t do that on a Hackney Marshes pitch. On top of that, games get called off all the time – waterlogged pitches, the other team not being able to field a side, you name it. If I wanted to build a series on YouTube that my viewers could rely on, I didn’t want to have to say, ‘Sorry, we’ve got no video for the next three weeks because the weather’s been terrible.’

  So we decided to take all these limitations around Sunday league off the table and protect ourselves a bit. We found ourselves a 3G pitch – a synthetic surface – so that we’d never have to call a game off because of the weather. This pitch was in a stadium in north London, which meant we could mount our cameras high to make the games look decent.

  I think some people on YouTube might have got a bit confused by what we were doing, almost as if we thought we were too good for Sunday league. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’d all played Sunday league football for a decade and some of us still do. Playing for Taplow Swans had been my big release at the end of a tough week and I loved it. We all loved Sunday league. The question wasn’t ‘Do we like Sunday league?’ It was ‘Do we want to build a series around Sunday league?’

  The answer was no. But without the Sunday league structure, what would we do?

  Before we’d even sorted the minor detail of the format of the league system we’d compete in, we managed to land ourselves a kit and sponsorship deal.

  We did a deal with Umbro where we would have our own bespoke kits made by them to the same standards of a top-flight club’s, and in the meantime we would wear a yellow-and-blue off-the-peg kit with our badge on. Loads of teams on YouTube wear a kit made by a well-known sports brand, but we were the first to do a proper deal with one and have an official kit provider. This meant we were an approved reseller of Umbro too and were legally allowed to sell their merchandise. This was a big moment for me. Umbro had made the England kit throughout my entire childhood, and now me and my mates had a proper deal with them on our own team’s kit. Insane!