Gamechanger

by Spencer F. C.

  To my mind, football kits look weird without a sponsor or at least something in the middle of the jersey. Even Barcelona, who had famously gone without a shirt sponsor for years, eventually came round to this way of thinking. Thankfully, EE, who we’d worked with so well on the Wembley Cup, were able to offer us a short-term deal. They were happy with the exposure, and we were happy with a good-looking kit complete with a sponsor.

  It was on the train to talk to Umbro about the kit that we finally nailed the concept of the series, too. Seb and I were going back and forth, and then he said, ‘Why don’t we do it like a Road to Glory series on FIFA?’

  I’d made loads of these Road to Glory series on my channel, in which you start off in Division 10, obviously playing other people in Division 10 (which usually means they aren’t much good), and work your way up to Division 1. You have to get a certain amount of points within 10 games to get promoted. It starts off easy in Division 10, with only 12 points required for promotion, but then gets progressively more demanding as you climb the pyramid, with 23 points from 10 games required to win the title in Division 1.

  You might play other people in these matches, but you’re not in a league against them. The only person you’re in a league with is yourself. You’re completely siloed off in that regard. That’s brilliant on FIFA, because it means you’re not stuck in a league structure where you’re waiting for other people to play. You can log on at any time of the day or night and find someone in the world to play you.

  And that’s where it became appealing for us. It meant we had the freedom to know we could always have a game, and because we would only be in a league against ourselves, it meant every episode would simply feature our matches.

  It was a brilliant idea from Seb, and it was an idea that was completely applicable to my audience. They loved FIFA and seemed to enjoy my Road to Glory videos, and they would totally get this. It might take a bit of explaining to someone outside the FIFA YouTube community – ‘So who else is in this division?’ But that was OK by us. This was a new form of football, after all.

  We decided on a five-division structure instead of ten, with the idea that we would play a match every couple of weeks all year round (with no summer break, unlike those work-shy types in the pro leagues!). We had no way of knowing how long it would take us to work through the divisions because we didn’t really have any idea how good we were, but I was quietly confident that we could probably get the job done in a couple of years, which seemed like a good amount of time.

  I wanted to make a big commitment to something, but I didn’t want to get stuck languishing in Division 5 indefinitely. We had a couple of guys in their mid-thirties, and I couldn’t be sure how long they would want to continue playing, so two years seemed to make sense. Besides, I couldn’t guarantee the show would be popular, either, so if we made it to two years I’d know we’d be doing something right. What we’d do after we won the Division 1 title, if we ever did at all, we didn’t know yet, but we figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

  One thing we were sure about was that we didn’t want to go out challenging the best teams in the area and get smashed every time from day one. In FIFA, when you start out in Division 10, you play easier teams and it’s pretty straightforward to get promoted. So we wanted things to mirror the FIFA game and give us an opportunity to get used to playing together again, otherwise we risked getting smashed in Division 5 and killing the series before it even started.

  To do this, we decided to theme the divisions, and so for Division 5 we picked a theme that would give us the best chance of winning some games. The theme was other YouTube channels (sorry, guys – no disrespect intended!), and we’d work our way up to the bigger challenges as we hopefully climbed the divisions.

  I’d always dreamed of owning a football club, but I’d thought that was an ambition I was years away from. But here we were, making one. With the kit, the stadium, the team and the format in place, there was just one thing left to do: play some football.

  Hashtag United’s first official game in Division 5 was against Dream Team FC … plus a very special ringer they had in their line-up.

  Filming inside the dressing room for the videos I made for my dad’s team, East Thurrock, was in my mind as I made this a big part of the Hashtag episodes. In the first video, we get our brand-new, box-fresh kit from Umbro, complete with names and squad numbers on the back of the shirts.

  It wasn’t the only idea I took from my East Thurrock days. I had made my dad the physio, drawing another nice little line from our beginnings as CBA. And I would commentate over each video, offering unbiased4 insights into the match.

  I gave a little pre-match team talk and announced the starting line-up – without the expletives from the manager that coloured the East Thurrock videos – before I told the boys that ‘The Chairman’ was offering us an incentive to win our first game: a brand-new pair of Umbro boots of our choosing. The rewards offered by our mysterious Chairman would become a regular feature of the series, and this was once again an example of us borrowing a mechanism from video games, as we saw these challenges as accomplishments like you may find on Xbox or PlayStation. As for who the Chairman was, that’s a whole different matter entirely …

  This being YouTube, the matches were collaborations, so often we would have a rematch on our opponent’s channel afterwards to give them some content to take from the game. These rematches were more like friendlies. They wouldn’t affect our standing in the division – only the match on my channel would do that.

  Now, let’s Hashtag it, boys! We kicked off against Dream Team FC, and we could see a very special player in their line-up. Cherno Samba is an ex-professional footballer you might not have heard of … unless you’ve played Football Manager, that is. He is a Football Manager legend, an absolute world beater in the computer game, and it was a nice touch to have him on the field with us.

  His Football Manager stats couldn’t help his team here, though, and fittingly it was Faisal Manji, one of the original people behind the Hashtag seven-a-side team and CBA, who scored Hashtag United’s first goal proper in its new guise.

  We went on to win the game 3–2, an amazing result in our first match, and we secured both the Umbro boots, thanks to the Chairman, and, most importantly, the three points. We needed 12 points from 10 games to get promoted (though there would be no dead rubbers: if we secured the 12 points quicker than that, we would be instantly promoted). Getting three in our first match was a great start.

  Next up, we played my old mates at Copa90. In my pre-match talk I explained to the lads that the Chairman, who only ever really seemed to speak to me, had promised us something really special if we got three points: a game at Wembley Stadium. Maybe I would get a second chance there after all, Mr Ray Wilkins! The lads were thrilled at the possibility, particularly Seb, who I know would have loved to have played in the 2015 Wembley Cup.

  We’d had a really good camera set-up in the first match, using the height that a stadium afforded us, a four-man crew and six cameras including GoPros in each goal to offer some decent video replays. But we took things up a notch in this game with some broadcast-television-quality graphics of the team sheet, made by YouTube FIFA royalty Marius Hjerpseth, laid out in formation. It was pretty slick stuff, and our en vogue 4–2–3–1 formation, with Dan ‘not The Da Vinci Code author’ Brown at the tip of it, wasn’t too bad either.

  We listed the substitutes in the graphics, as well as the man playing in that all-important behind-the-camera role, my younger brother Saunders. Hashtag was becoming a real family affair, with both of my brothers and my dad involved, and Saunders, despite not playing on the pitch, was every bit as vital to the operation as anyone in the team.

  Saunders directs the Hashtag shoots, and he and a couple of mates he lives with, Glen and Robbie, basically have a production company going in their house. They edit the Hashtag games for us, and then I add my voiceover and give them a quick once-over before they go up. It was
great to have someone I could not only trust, but who had all the right skills necessary for the production. Saunders had been professionally trained as a cameraman and editor and was already flourishing in the industry off his own bat, having worked for FremantleMedia and done plenty of YouTube content for them. He has his own YouTube channel as well called Saunders Says, where he does travel and lifestyle vlogging. I highly recommend it!

  Copa90 had some familiar faces in their team in the form of my Wembley Cup teammates Poet and Vujanic, and it was great to see them, but once the whistle blew it was all business. It was a tight match, but that man Dan Brown justified his first start for Hashtag United by opening the scoring, and Ryan ‘not the American singer-songwriter and definitely not the ageing Canadian rocker called Bryan’ Adams got us a second. They would become two very familiar names on our scoresheet. Despite Copa90 getting a goal back, we were good for a 2–1 win … and a trip to Wembley.

  Playing at Wembley with my fellow YouTubers had been fantastic, the best football experience of my life so far, but doing it with my mates – this was next level. I went way back with these Hashtag boys. Faisal and I had kicked a ball about in the Hatfield Peverel train station car park together when we were kids who couldn’t find anywhere else to play, and now we were playing at Wembley. That’s pinch-yourself stuff. As a group, we had football history, friendship history and family history. There quite simply was no group of lads I’d rather be doing this with. But we weren’t there to make up the numbers: I knew from experience that you enjoy these occasions all the more when you leave with a victory.

  Our opponents were Vauxhall, one of the England football team sponsors, and they’d taken a leaf out of Dream Team’s book and got themselves a couple of ringers. Former England internationals Ray Parlour and Graeme Le Saux would be turning out for them.

  I was determined to savour the moment a bit more this time, and we even did the national anthem, which was special. Typically, as soon as the whistle went, all I could concentrate on was winning. And, boy, did we win that day.

  We were 4–0 up after half an hour, and Ray Parlour was going mental. He started kicking off. ‘Who on earth made these teams?’ he shouted, and all I could do was think, What are you on about – you’ve got you and Graeme Le Saux on your team!

  Those guys couldn’t influence the game though, perhaps because for them this was just another game at Wembley following an illustrious career made up of games a million times more important than this, and we ran out 8–2 winners. For us, this was as big as it got, so we made sure to leave it all on the pitch. Three games in, a 100 per cent record, and to play and win our third game at Wembley … to do that with my mates was something beyond my wildest dreams. And not just mine.

  Rich Beck is one of my best mates from uni. I played alongside him in his dad’s Taplow Swans Sunday league side, and he was now Hashtag’s ‘man-mountain’ (the name given to him by Akinfenwa in our pilot-episode game) centre-back. He scored two penalties that day, and he told me later that it was his life’s goal to score at Wembley. It was just amazing and empowering to think we were really making all of our dreams come true, together.

  And it didn’t stop there. The next match would offer a chance to make one of my teenage self’s greatest ambitions come true when we took on the people behind the reason I spent so much of my adolescence locked away in my bedroom: the makers of Football Manager.

  These guys weren’t just a bunch of armchair football fans. They had a really decent five-a-side team who I’d come up against before, and I knew that we would get turned over if we weren’t at our best, so I really drilled into the guys just how important this game was. If we won, we were promoted to Division 4, so there was a lot on the line.

  As if that wasn’t enough, the Chairman had negotiated an amazing incentive for a Hashtag victory. If we beat the Football Manager team, we would be put into the actual game of Football Manager 2017 as ‘newgens’. Now, for those of you who don’t play Football Manager, what that means is that, when you go through the game for a good few seasons and the current crop of players get old and retire, new youth-team players come through to be the stars of tomorrow. In among those new players would be us: there’d be a Spencer Owen, a Ryan Adams, a Rich Beck. Hats off to the Chairman – it was a hell of an incentive.

  I privately thought we might get turned over in that game, having seen their five-a-side team, but instead we smashed them 7–1 – an incredible result for us. We had been promoted in the minimum amount of time possible, and as the cries of ‘Championes, championes, olé, olé, olé!’ went out in the dressing room afterwards, I allowed myself a little moment.

  As a teenager I’d dreamed about being in Football Manager, even though I’d got into football late and becoming a pro was never an option for me anyway. How else would you feature in the game unless you were a professional footballer?

  We were rewriting the rule book. I wasn’t even the best player at school, and yet I’d made it into the game. I’d done it my own way, outside of the traditional channels, and we were just getting started.

  In Division 4 we would need 15 points for promotion. We upped the difficulty level, just like you would in FIFA, and we started playing some harder teams as we changed the theme to ‘staff teams’. We went straight in at the deep end in our first match, as we took on Manchester City’s staff, a team made up of some social-media and coaching staff and one or two surprise packages.

  To make things trickier still, we were leaving the familiar surroundings of our 3G stadium behind to play at Man City’s incredibly impressive training facilities next to the Etihad Stadium. This was technically our first away game (Wembley is more like a cup final).

  If you work at a football club it usually means you’re pretty decent at football. Added to that, Man City’s staff were able to call upon the services of some ex-pros, and their former striker Paul Dickov captained the side. They were the hardest team we had played so far, and Dickov scored from 40 yards out with an outrageous goal. It was just ridiculous. But we fought back well to draw the game 3–3, and a draw was an excellent away point against a very good team.

  Things didn’t get any easier in the next game, which was a bit of an emotional one for my family. We would be taking on Umbro’s staff team at Upton Park, home of West Ham United, the team we all went to watch together every week now we had season tickets. This was the summer of 2016, and West Ham had already played their last game at the ground, which was an emotional occasion in itself. Saunders, Seb, my dad and I were all there to see them come from behind to beat Manchester United 3–2 in an epic encounter. The club were moving to their new home at the Olympic Stadium the following season.

  Unbelievably, this wasn’t the first time I’d be playing at Upton Park. In fact, I’d played there just a few weeks before in front of 20,000 people, as part of an England Legends XI side that played a German Legends side on the 50th anniversary of the 1966 World Cup final. I wasn’t one of the legends, of course – they made up the starting XI – but I joined a group of non-professional footballers (such as actor Damian Lewis from Homeland and Billions, and comedians Jack Whitehall and Russell Howard) on the bench.

  The Germans have never been famous for their sense of humour, so their bench was packed with ex-pros, including Oliver Neuville. Our manager was actor Ray Winstone, while former German international Michael Ballack led the Germans. That should tell you something about how seriously the respective teams were taking it.

  Having said all that, I was still ticking another lifelong dream off the bucket list. Playing for England in any form was not to be taken lightly, and lining up to sing the national anthem in front of the Upton Park crowd was an amazing moment for me.

  I came on in the second half when we were already 5–0 down. The sight of me and a couple of comedians coming on didn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of the Germans, but I did have one pretty cool moment. When Oliver Neuville raced clear, perhaps a shade slower than he might have been in
his prime, I managed to get back and tackle him. This was my first time playing in front of a proper crowd, and because the West Ham fans knew I was a supporter of the club too, they gave me a big cheer for that one. Adding to that, I played alongside ex-West Ham players such as David James and Rio Ferdinand, which made for an unbelievable experience!

  Apart from the result, of course. The Germans won 7–2 and they were clearly taking it seriously as an opportunity for revenge, especially when you consider that the guy who got both of our goals wasn’t even a footballer. It was former England rugby player Ben Cohen.

  I was hoping for a very different result with the Hashtag boys against Umbro at Upton Park, and I knew that both sides would be taking it very seriously indeed. There was still room for a little sentiment, however – this would be my last memory of this stadium, after all – as Saunders came out from behind the camera to get his Hashtag kit on and take his place on the bench. He was joined by a familiar face in the form of Wembley Cup player Manny, a welcome addition to any team.

  Umbro had TOWIE star Mark Wright, who was a semi-pro player, and his brother Josh, who is a current professional player for Gillingham, in their ranks, so they looked decent. They also had a striker who looked to be about 7ft tall, which would pose its own problems.