The story of Hashtag United and their meteoric rise is well documented. The club started as a YouTube football team and was filled with friends of chairman Spencer Owen, competing in a series that would follow a FIFA-like road to glory, with the aim of attaining the illustrious, albeit imaginary, division one title.
Today, Hashtag aren’t climbing up the ranks of a YouTube series. Now, they find themselves climbing up the very real English football pyramid, sitting at level nine in the Essex Senior Football League – a league which they would have already been promoted to if not for the cancellation of the season through the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.
One part of this ever-evolving story comes from those who walk out onto the pitch in their yellow and blue team colours. Take Farai Tsingano, the team’s 26-year-old central defender. He’s been involved in the Tags journey since the start of the 2018/19 season.
Where It All Started
Tsingano and Spencer would first cross paths during a charity football match, arranged by one of their mutual friends. This chance meeting, during a bitter-sweet moment, is better told by Farai himself, helping us unravel the tail of how he joined the Hashtag family.
“My pal, his brother had cancer and he beat it. He created a charity game for him. His team had a lot of well-known faces. Spencer was on that team.
“I was marking Marlon Harewood, ex-West Ham bully, absolute beast. I was thinking, ‘this is going to be fun.’ My team managed to win 1-0, I kept Marlon in the back of my pocket”.
Keeping out and ‘pocketing’ Harewood is an achievement all in itself, and Spencer, being the West Ham fanatic that he is, would have spotted the talents of Farai straight away, approaching him at the bar after the game to convince Tsingano to sign. But football was the last thing on the defender’s mind – why?
Eight years ago, at the age of 18, Farai would leave the comforts of his home in Brentwood to chase his dream of becoming a professional footballer, receiving a scholarship from Saint Xavier University in Chicago, a drastic change of scenery.
“It was one of them ones where I didn’t know whether to go to university over here, but I wanted to carry on playing football. Then my coaches knew connections in the US. He just created a video of me and sent it to a number of universities in America. I packed my bags and just dipped.”
I asked Tsingano if he ever had the feeling that he was missing home and had doubts about coming back?
“The first two months, it was awful,” he says. “For me, it was more to do with doing things by myself, like cooking by myself. I didn’t really know what to cook. For a good three, four weeks, I was eating spaghetti with ragu, just the puree. I was eating that, and I wasn’t getting full. I said to my mum, ‘I want to come home. I’m losing weight right now.’ Once I got the cooking side sorted, I was sweet. I think that was the main thing for me.”
Farai would stay the course of his four-year long degree in the States, arriving as an adventurous teen chasing his dream of making the MLS and leaving as an independent 22-year-old graduate who had fallen out of love with the game he held closest to his heart: football.
“I was done with football. I didn’t even like it. I was like, ‘Cool, I didn’t achieve what I wanted to do. Let me just focus on my degree.’ I remember coming home, I was just utilising my degree, just applying for jobs left, right and centre, got in a pharmaceutical company called Global Data. I was literally doing 9:00 to 5:00, without football, I was done.”
The lack of support services for thousands of young athletes is a salient reality many have to face after losing their love of the sport in the process.
It was this lack of interest and lack of knowledge about the club that would almost force Farai to turn down Spencer’s offer of joining Hashtag, “I didn’t know who Spencer was. I’d been in America. I didn’t know about Hashtag.”
“We get in the bar and then he approached me, talking about his team. I was like, ‘No, I just play football for fun now. I don’t really want to play like that.’ I was just tired of it. You can imagine, giving it your all for the last four years.”
Luckily, this wouldn’t be the last contact that Owen made with his number one target, asking one of his friends to give him Farai’s number, which he did.
“This Is Hashtag”
“He just messaged me, ‘This is Hashtag,’ sent me a few clips. I was so confused. I was like, ‘wait, these guys are travelling to Spain to play football, why are they getting so many views?’ He replied, ‘How about you just come to pre-season in the summer and you can give it a go?’”.
That’s exactly what Farai would do, joining the squad for pre-season. Three weeks after it started, Spencer had his man.
A chairman so heavily involved with the club is a rarity, but a chairman that does commentary for his team’s games and recruits players at a local boozer? Well, that’s just an anomaly.
Spencer Owen could very well be the catalyst behind a drastic shift in how a modern-day chairman operates after building a lasting core foundation online and having hundreds of thousands viewing games in the ninth tier of English Football.
The Modern Football Club
“He is our chairman, but I don’t look at him as chairman. He goes out with us. He’s just one of the boys, in a sense, which is great because if we need anything, we can just shout him, and he will just look after us.”
Having the owner of the team you play for as a friend may seem far-fetched, yet Spencer has mastered this art, treating his club not as a profit making business but as a well-functioning family, allowing his players to use the Hashtag name and build up their own social media presence.
“Me and my close friends in Hashtag group chat, we’re always getting messages from different gaffers. The money that they’re getting pumped at us, it’s not about that. We don’t play for money. We just enjoy the group of lads that we’re in and team that we play for. If it was about the money, a lot of us would have gone by now.”
So does this mean more club chairman are going to be more involved like One? “I hope so,” Tsingano says. “I reckon maybe in the non-league world, yes. As you go higher, I doubt it. Some chairmen, they just want to sit back and relax and just have a business, make money really. I definitely feel like, in the non-league world, it’s going to grow. Even now, there are a lot of teams that are just picking [up] little bits and bobs that we do. You don’t realise it, but we started that. We are the pioneers with that stuff.”
Media criticism has been a frequent talking point when it comes to Hashtag United, and this became most prevalent during the build up to one of the most monumental days in the club’s history; their first ever televised match on September 21.
Broadcast live on BBC iPlayer, they would take on Soham Town Rangers in the first FA Cup qualification game. After some magic from ex-Spurs academy starlet Jesse Waller Lassen, the team went on to win 4-2 on penalties, causing an uproar in the mainstream media circle.
Negative opinions would start to be broadcasted from football fans – often middle-aged ones – who saw the club as a gimmick; a club representing social media and internet personalities.
“We’re always going to be hated. It’s just normal. Every team wants to beat us. Every game is cup final for us. It’s normal, the whole, ‘It shouldn’t be called Hashtag.’ ‘Why are they getting the BBC rights to be on TV?’ For us, it’s just, ‘Keep it coming’, we don’t mind that. We don’t mind negativity.”
Boasting a subscriber count of over 530,000 on YouTube, Hashtag show no signs of slowing down, with the team now looking to achieve promotion.
What’s Next?
“Something huge that’s going to shock the world,” Farai says mysteriously. “I can’t say too much because I’ll be done.”
Something huge is brewing at Hashtag but what that is, I’m not so sure. One thing’s for certain – for a fifth successive year, I’ll be tuning in.
