It feels like “a reward for how hard we’ve worked”, says AFC Basildon’s captain, Alex Bailess, on the team being taken under the wing of the YouTube sensations Hashtag United. “There was a time when the club was literally hours from folding, with no committee, no funding and loads of players had left. Every year we wonder whether we are going to make it through the next season and what the funding is going to be like. It’s just been quite uncertain.”
For the uninitiated, in 2016 Hashtag United was converted from a ramshackle seven-a-side team to a team that would compete on YouTube for all to see. The founder Spencer Owen would arrange for the matches, played against staff teams of professional clubs and Sunday league and non-league teams, to be filmed and uploaded to the website. Win a certain number of games and there would be promotion in a fictional league. Now, they have almost half a million subscribers on YouTube and Instagram, close to 200,000 followers on Twitter as well as a men’s team playing more formally in the tier-nine Essex Senior League.
The news of their takeover of AFC Basildon, the team Hashtag United Women FC, was met with an outpouring of support on social media. The former England internationals Karen Carney and Sue Smith, Manchester United’s Siobhan Chamberlain, Chelsea’s captain César Azpilicueta and Roma were just a few to express their delight for AFC Basildon, who are in the Women’s National League South East Division 1, the fourth tier of women’s football, and play on Canvey Island.
When Hashtag United decided to tackle the men’s pyramid, they were comfortable starting at the bottom. Stepping into the women’s game is a very different landscape though. “Women’s football and men’s football are in very different places, and this team was in a very different situation,” says Owen. “When I met the guys it was made quite clear to me that without the support of someone like us the club was probably going to fold. The level they’re at, the great players they have got and the work they’ve done, it just seemed mad.”
Why the decision to step into women’s football at all? “I watched the last few Women’s World Cups,” says Owen. “I’m always up for watching any kind of football and I’ve never thought of it in an insular way.” What surprised him was the response to the Lionesses more widely. “Maybe it was partly that it was a nice footballing time for the nation in general, the men had done well the year before them so there was a lot of hope that is usually not necessarily there.
“And people are maybe just a little bit less ignorant about the fact that football isn’t just a load of men running around, it’s about the game and the game can be played in many different ways and by many different people.”
He tweeted out a call for teams nearby the Essex based Hashtag to get in touch. “I knew that the dream scenario for us would be, rather than just sponsoring and giving a club some money, bringing something within our club that we could really offer long-term support to and hopefully allow people to profit from the profile and the fan base we have,” he says.
AFC Basildon “stood out” as they are the highest ranked women’s team in Essex and are in the – now suspended – County Cup final. “You think on the surface, they are going to be the one that’s most protected, the most set up, the least in need of help but that wasn’t the case,” Owen says. “There were four guys running a club that was massively overperforming, and they had done a fantastic job.
“They’ve kept the club going for a year on their own, putting their own money in, all just normal guys with normal jobs, doing it for the love of it. They were struggling financially, [but] not on the pitch. They were doing fantastic on the pitch.”
The aim is to offer stability, exposure and “give our audience different kinds of football heroes”. In AFC Basildon they’ve got plenty. Bailess is one of three players working in the NHS. She is a respiratory physiotherapist working in intensive care. “Everything is very different at the moment and we’re all having to be flexible and adapt to new roles and be pushed out of our comfort zone,” she says.
“It’s really nice to have something to look forward to for when this is all over, especially when you can’t come home from work and have your release: going and playing football and seeing your mates.”
Owen adds: “We’re playing a level where both our men’s and women’s players have still got normal jobs, they’re not professional athletes, they’re real people with real jobs. Three of the women’s team work in healthcare so are super, super critical right now and probably unbelievably snowed under and stressed.
“When we announce new things we’re doing, it can have a genuine impact on people’s lives, it’s really been a cause of positivity. These guys that play in this team, they make it, it’s their passion, it’s called semi-professional football for a reason. They have to treat it like a job even though you don’t get the money to allow you to do it instead of a job. And, in my opinion, that in some ways takes as much commitment as any other level.”