We live in exciting if uncertain times, both on the pitch and online. The internet has rattled the old, established order that once ruled the airwaves and limited access to the press. Now, not only are the social media channels awash with unsanctioned video replays and live reaction clips on a match day, but the power of this digital revolution is opening up space for an entirely new breed of broadcaster, commentator and pundit.
In this brave new world, Twitter has already overtaken the traditional news outlets when it comes to breaking stories at speed. A reporter firing off 140 characters from the scene of the action will always beat the touch typing web-journalist manning the editorial desk, at least for speed. Blogs and message boards have also spawned an underground network of word-of-mouth debate forums and online resources that circumnavigate the mainstream channels or simply even ignores them altogether.
Football’s audience may have already taken one giant leap into this new age of legally dubious instant replays and hyper-shared memes, but it’s taken time for the voice of the match-going supporters to truly penetrate the fog of the Twitter feeds and online discourse. The fans are now exiting through the turnstiles and gates to take control and shape the full-time post-mortems and wider conversations beyond the usual confines of the after-match pint or seat block chatter.
The internet has opened up gaps for a new breed of critical opinionator, whose opportunities are only limited by their ability to find an audience. Established broadcasters and rights holders no longer control the flow of information and opinion. Instead, they’re left struggling to hold back the flood as the world taps into a torrent of ideas, analysis and sound-bites.
Just 12 months ago names and words such as Claude, Bully, Ty, Ray, “Bobbins”, “Technicality”, “Wansum” and Andy Tate would have barely scratched the surface of the casually digitally literate football fan’s attention span. Now, as the nights draw in, and the annual end of year award ceremonies giddy themselves up to compile, review and mark the final weeks of 2014, fan cams and snatched footage from the sidelines threaten to sew up the category for catchphrase of the year.
The Wealdstone Raider’s tipsy, bellowed cries of “you’ve got no fans!” have transcended the game. Gordon Hill, the man behind this year’s most popular, impromptu rant, has gone mainstream, and is now appearing at nightclubs across the South East in place of the usual guest stars and celebrities from shows such as TOWIE and Made In Chelsea. There’s even talk of him being included in the next series of Celebrity Big Brother as well as his now infamous dream to beat the X Factor machine to a Christmas number one.
Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future we would all be famous for at least 15 minutes at some point in our lives, yet he was speaking in an age where the vine remained the primary mode of transport through the jungles of a Tarzan movie. Today the six second looped videos have super-charged the internet’s natural tendency to sample itself to distraction. Wealdstone Raider remix songs appeared soon after his emergence to secure his place in the online zeitgeist. But it’s through Vines that the game now recycles and cannibalizes its goofs, random happenings and word play into something almost resembling a self-referential, self-perpetuating comedy movement. In the world of football Twitter, the Vine reigns supreme.
For better or for worse, 2014 will go down as the year in which the online football fan pundit and their associated channels came of age: the year that—hot on the heels of the widely successful stars of video gaming live Twitch streams and the popstar-lookalike lifestyle vloggers on YouTube—football fans became a cult part of online football content.
In order to dig deeper into this phenomenon, Squawka spoke to some of the year’s most shared and talked about protagonists who have ridden this wave of raw, match-day verbiage, either on purpose or by accident, to become celebrities in their own right. Here is the first of our three part special.
Part 1 – How to go viral: the Andy Tate story
With an unofficial app created in his honour still flying high at the top of the App Store’s free download chart, it only felt natural to start with the man whose personal tale over the last 12 months has summed up this “cult” movement better than most: Andy Tate of Full-Time DEVILS.
In his own words, he was “just an ordinary fan like anybody else, walking past after the Swansea game.”
“I just gave an opinion after losing in the FA Cup. That was it really.” But there was more to it than that. Andy offered up more than just a couple of throwaway lines for the camera. Whether he intended to or not, he was one of the fans whose appearance on the FTD ‘fan cams’ resonated the loudest.
Perhaps it was his unmistakable Mancunian twang, but behind the obvious qualities to his memorable voice, Andy summed up a crystallised account of the complaints and misgivings held by so many of his fellow fans. He wasn’t speaking for them, at least not intentionally, but even then, in January 2014, his first video proved popular and he continued to offer up his thoughts to FTD presenter Adam McKola and his post-match camera crew.
A producer for the channel told Squawka: “We knew at the time that they were great videos but didn’t think anything more of it. We always thought that if you give fans a platform—and that’s what the channel is about, giving fans a platform to get their voices heard—one day, whether things are going well or badly a video like that would happen. Arsenal Fan TV had already had one video go viral, but [Andy Tate's] first video hit 400,000 in a week, which is viral in a sense, but then it died down.
“Then, maybe about six weeks ago, this whole Vine thing started. Whether you’re the rights holder of that footage, or you’re the personality there, if that content becomes viral, whether it’s your doing or not, there is very little you can do to stop it. But at some point [Andy] has got to take hold of it again. Generally, if you asked any football fan—I think it’s transcended club loyalties now—Andy would represent fans, or fans with opinions, in a positive light, if a little bit quirky as a voice.”
Andy Tate’s presence on Vine has since taken on a life of its own. There are Twitter accounts dedicated to curating a constant stream of the newest and best six second clips of the Mancunian edited into ever more obscure and hilarious situations. The original video itself now has over 1.5 million views but our estimates have the number of Vine loops of Andy Tate branded content at well over ten million. The key to his success as a sample source for popular Vine creators such as “Vonstrenginho” wasn’t just his voice but his turn of phrase. We asked Vonstrenginho, who’s Vine profile has now racked up a mind-boggling 38,000,000 loops, about the Andy Tate phenomenon:
“He’s very passionate, he’s got this way with words, and for me he described the desperation that Manchester United fans felt last spring. As a Liverpool fan I found that funny, and he’s just a good symbol for that.”
And yet while the Vines may have brought with them a great deal of attention in his life beyond the camera, Andy is definitely a fan of Vonstrenginho’s work.
“I think they’re fun. Some of them are really fun, the Vines, the way they do the editing with me. The Ian Beale one. I couldn’t stop laughing at that one. And they got me on at Old Trafford. I always wanted to be on the Old Trafford pitch as a kid and they got me on Fergie’s body. I enjoyed that as well.
“They got me rapping with Eminem, Compton, N.W.A. I’ve seen so many. They are funny. I seen one where it’s a little old lady fell down, and she says, ‘I can’t get up’. There’s a camera on her and it switches to me and I say, ‘I don’t care!’ That was funny!
Hearing that Andy enjoys his work was a relief for Vonstrenginho: “That’s great to hear actually. I’ve gotten a lot of s**t for doing them. People were showing up at his workplace and taking his photo, and I felt terrible after that happened. For me, the Tate Vines stopped being funny then and there, and I regretted doing them.
It’s great to hear now that he doesn’t mind and he likes them but I didn’t know at the time when I made them. First of all, I didn’t know it would get him this tremendous attention. I didn’t think anyone would care. I kept doing them but I didn’t know whether he would appreciate that attention or not, so looking back at it I probably should have made sure of that at an earlier stage.”
Writing for The Telegraph, Jonathan Liew recently probed the true nature of Andy Tate’s new-found fame, asking why football thinks it’s ok to laugh at the passionate, match-going fans that the biggest clubs now appear to ignore or take for granted. But dismissing their rise as a sort-of comedy freakshow misses the point. They’re not clowns, and even if some people do ridicule them, we shouldn’t take our cues from those who seek to put a negative spin on the act of amplifying the voices of those who all-too-often go unheard. Fan cams, and the open, democratic nature of the internet as a broadcasting and publishing medium can give potential pundits of every background an equal opportunity to state their cases to the world.While the mainstream media may be able to boast a raft of initiatives designed to encourage candidates to try and break through the white, male and middle class hegemony that still largely reigns over the sector, the internet gives people the tools to outmanoeuvre such obstacles from the very start.
After all, Andy’s highly quotable speech patterns aren’t without substance. Adam McKola told Squawka about being on the other side of the microphone:
“What he said [about Moyes], I thought he was bang on. Bang on the money. People say to me why don’t you laugh? But he’s speaking the truth and he’s speaking about how me and everyone else felt. The way he speaks it’s almost like a rhythm. Remember the ‘blood, passion, sweat, tears’ after Liverpool. All of that. That could have been written by somebody.
For Andy, the meek losses to Liverpool and Manchester City only encouraged him to speak his mind and try to say it how he saw it. He told Squawka: “When you lose to your rivals in Manchester it hurts, and your pride’s wounded. When Moyes said it was like, ‘we aspire to be like them’… No Man United manager would say that. No one.” “I’m a born and bred Mancunian. I love my team and I’m from Manchester. Anybody can support anybody. From wherever you’re from in the UK. If you’re from Manchester, you’re from London, you’re from Leeds, from Liverpool: if you’re a United fan, you’re a United fan. I’m just a local lad who loves my team. That’s it.”
When listening closer, you can hear an almost lyrical quality to the expressiveness of Tate’s ranting, we asked Vonstrenginho about how the sampling in his Vines compares to the audio collage of early hip hop artists and the problems he faces developing his work in the future.
“I think there is something to the comparisons. You had Danger Mouse who made the mash-up of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album and he called it The Grey Album. Usually, the right holders are very aggressive, but this wasn’t taken down and there were no legal repercussions because the work was transformative. For my clips, they are really short, they don’t borrow too heavily from others and Vine is rather low quality. So I hope I’m fine!
“The fan channels are brilliant. There’s definitely some huge potential in that whole thing. People really respond to it. There are new memes popping up from fan TV all the time.”
The Full-Time DEVILS producer just wishes they could get in on the action if only similar obstacles could be overcome.
“The frustrating thing from a producer’s point of view is that we try not to infringe anyone else’s copyright, because we have to do things properly. We haven’t been able to create Vines in the same way. So it’s been quite frustrating sitting there watching these really creative Vines. My favourite ones are the Vonstrenginho ones because he is an artist. I think he’s the one who’s leading this new charge, and it’s fascinating from a producer’s point of view to watch him. But I can’t rip off a Beyonce video or stick [Andy] into an ‘I’m A Celebrity’ clip.”
In this brave new world, Twitter has already overtaken the traditional news outlets when it comes to breaking stories at speed. A reporter firing off 140 characters from the scene of the action will always beat the touch typing web-journalist manning the editorial desk, at least for speed. Blogs and message boards have also spawned an underground network of word-of-mouth debate forums and online resources that circumnavigate the mainstream channels or simply even ignores them altogether.
Football’s audience may have already taken one giant leap into this new age of legally dubious instant replays and hyper-shared memes, but it’s taken time for the voice of the match-going supporters to truly penetrate the fog of the Twitter feeds and online discourse. The fans are now exiting through the turnstiles and gates to take control and shape the full-time post-mortems and wider conversations beyond the usual confines of the after-match pint or seat block chatter.
The internet has opened up gaps for a new breed of critical opinionator, whose opportunities are only limited by their ability to find an audience. Established broadcasters and rights holders no longer control the flow of information and opinion. Instead, they’re left struggling to hold back the flood as the world taps into a torrent of ideas, analysis and sound-bites.
Just 12 months ago names and words such as Claude, Bully, Ty, Ray, “Bobbins”, “Technicality”, “Wansum” and Andy Tate would have barely scratched the surface of the casually digitally literate football fan’s attention span. Now, as the nights draw in, and the annual end of year award ceremonies giddy themselves up to compile, review and mark the final weeks of 2014, fan cams and snatched footage from the sidelines threaten to sew up the category for catchphrase of the year.
The Wealdstone Raider’s tipsy, bellowed cries of “you’ve got no fans!” have transcended the game. Gordon Hill, the man behind this year’s most popular, impromptu rant, has gone mainstream, and is now appearing at nightclubs across the South East in place of the usual guest stars and celebrities from shows such as TOWIE and Made In Chelsea. There’s even talk of him being included in the next series of Celebrity Big Brother as well as his now infamous dream to beat the X Factor machine to a Christmas number one.
Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future we would all be famous for at least 15 minutes at some point in our lives, yet he was speaking in an age where the vine remained the primary mode of transport through the jungles of a Tarzan movie. Today the six second looped videos have super-charged the internet’s natural tendency to sample itself to distraction. Wealdstone Raider remix songs appeared soon after his emergence to secure his place in the online zeitgeist. But it’s through Vines that the game now recycles and cannibalizes its goofs, random happenings and word play into something almost resembling a self-referential, self-perpetuating comedy movement. In the world of football Twitter, the Vine reigns supreme.
For better or for worse, 2014 will go down as the year in which the online football fan pundit and their associated channels came of age: the year that—hot on the heels of the widely successful stars of video gaming live Twitch streams and the popstar-lookalike lifestyle vloggers on YouTube—football fans became a cult part of online football content.
In order to dig deeper into this phenomenon, Squawka spoke to some of the year’s most shared and talked about protagonists who have ridden this wave of raw, match-day verbiage, either on purpose or by accident, to become celebrities in their own right. Here is the first of our three part special.
Part 1 – How to go viral: the Andy Tate story
With an unofficial app created in his honour still flying high at the top of the App Store’s free download chart, it only felt natural to start with the man whose personal tale over the last 12 months has summed up this “cult” movement better than most: Andy Tate of Full-Time DEVILS.
In his own words, he was “just an ordinary fan like anybody else, walking past after the Swansea game.”
“I just gave an opinion after losing in the FA Cup. That was it really.” But there was more to it than that. Andy offered up more than just a couple of throwaway lines for the camera. Whether he intended to or not, he was one of the fans whose appearance on the FTD ‘fan cams’ resonated the loudest.
Perhaps it was his unmistakable Mancunian twang, but behind the obvious qualities to his memorable voice, Andy summed up a crystallised account of the complaints and misgivings held by so many of his fellow fans. He wasn’t speaking for them, at least not intentionally, but even then, in January 2014, his first video proved popular and he continued to offer up his thoughts to FTD presenter Adam McKola and his post-match camera crew.
A producer for the channel told Squawka: “We knew at the time that they were great videos but didn’t think anything more of it. We always thought that if you give fans a platform—and that’s what the channel is about, giving fans a platform to get their voices heard—one day, whether things are going well or badly a video like that would happen. Arsenal Fan TV had already had one video go viral, but [Andy Tate's] first video hit 400,000 in a week, which is viral in a sense, but then it died down.
“Then, maybe about six weeks ago, this whole Vine thing started. Whether you’re the rights holder of that footage, or you’re the personality there, if that content becomes viral, whether it’s your doing or not, there is very little you can do to stop it. But at some point [Andy] has got to take hold of it again. Generally, if you asked any football fan—I think it’s transcended club loyalties now—Andy would represent fans, or fans with opinions, in a positive light, if a little bit quirky as a voice.”
Andy Tate’s presence on Vine has since taken on a life of its own. There are Twitter accounts dedicated to curating a constant stream of the newest and best six second clips of the Mancunian edited into ever more obscure and hilarious situations. The original video itself now has over 1.5 million views but our estimates have the number of Vine loops of Andy Tate branded content at well over ten million. The key to his success as a sample source for popular Vine creators such as “Vonstrenginho” wasn’t just his voice but his turn of phrase. We asked Vonstrenginho, who’s Vine profile has now racked up a mind-boggling 38,000,000 loops, about the Andy Tate phenomenon:
“He’s very passionate, he’s got this way with words, and for me he described the desperation that Manchester United fans felt last spring. As a Liverpool fan I found that funny, and he’s just a good symbol for that.”
And yet while the Vines may have brought with them a great deal of attention in his life beyond the camera, Andy is definitely a fan of Vonstrenginho’s work.
“I think they’re fun. Some of them are really fun, the Vines, the way they do the editing with me. The Ian Beale one. I couldn’t stop laughing at that one. And they got me on at Old Trafford. I always wanted to be on the Old Trafford pitch as a kid and they got me on Fergie’s body. I enjoyed that as well.
“They got me rapping with Eminem, Compton, N.W.A. I’ve seen so many. They are funny. I seen one where it’s a little old lady fell down, and she says, ‘I can’t get up’. There’s a camera on her and it switches to me and I say, ‘I don’t care!’ That was funny!
Hearing that Andy enjoys his work was a relief for Vonstrenginho: “That’s great to hear actually. I’ve gotten a lot of s**t for doing them. People were showing up at his workplace and taking his photo, and I felt terrible after that happened. For me, the Tate Vines stopped being funny then and there, and I regretted doing them.
It’s great to hear now that he doesn’t mind and he likes them but I didn’t know at the time when I made them. First of all, I didn’t know it would get him this tremendous attention. I didn’t think anyone would care. I kept doing them but I didn’t know whether he would appreciate that attention or not, so looking back at it I probably should have made sure of that at an earlier stage.”
Writing for The Telegraph, Jonathan Liew recently probed the true nature of Andy Tate’s new-found fame, asking why football thinks it’s ok to laugh at the passionate, match-going fans that the biggest clubs now appear to ignore or take for granted. But dismissing their rise as a sort-of comedy freakshow misses the point. They’re not clowns, and even if some people do ridicule them, we shouldn’t take our cues from those who seek to put a negative spin on the act of amplifying the voices of those who all-too-often go unheard. Fan cams, and the open, democratic nature of the internet as a broadcasting and publishing medium can give potential pundits of every background an equal opportunity to state their cases to the world.While the mainstream media may be able to boast a raft of initiatives designed to encourage candidates to try and break through the white, male and middle class hegemony that still largely reigns over the sector, the internet gives people the tools to outmanoeuvre such obstacles from the very start.
After all, Andy’s highly quotable speech patterns aren’t without substance. Adam McKola told Squawka about being on the other side of the microphone:
“What he said [about Moyes], I thought he was bang on. Bang on the money. People say to me why don’t you laugh? But he’s speaking the truth and he’s speaking about how me and everyone else felt. The way he speaks it’s almost like a rhythm. Remember the ‘blood, passion, sweat, tears’ after Liverpool. All of that. That could have been written by somebody.
For Andy, the meek losses to Liverpool and Manchester City only encouraged him to speak his mind and try to say it how he saw it. He told Squawka: “When you lose to your rivals in Manchester it hurts, and your pride’s wounded. When Moyes said it was like, ‘we aspire to be like them’… No Man United manager would say that. No one.” “I’m a born and bred Mancunian. I love my team and I’m from Manchester. Anybody can support anybody. From wherever you’re from in the UK. If you’re from Manchester, you’re from London, you’re from Leeds, from Liverpool: if you’re a United fan, you’re a United fan. I’m just a local lad who loves my team. That’s it.”
When listening closer, you can hear an almost lyrical quality to the expressiveness of Tate’s ranting, we asked Vonstrenginho about how the sampling in his Vines compares to the audio collage of early hip hop artists and the problems he faces developing his work in the future.
“I think there is something to the comparisons. You had Danger Mouse who made the mash-up of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album and he called it The Grey Album. Usually, the right holders are very aggressive, but this wasn’t taken down and there were no legal repercussions because the work was transformative. For my clips, they are really short, they don’t borrow too heavily from others and Vine is rather low quality. So I hope I’m fine!
“The fan channels are brilliant. There’s definitely some huge potential in that whole thing. People really respond to it. There are new memes popping up from fan TV all the time.”
The Full-Time DEVILS producer just wishes they could get in on the action if only similar obstacles could be overcome.
“The frustrating thing from a producer’s point of view is that we try not to infringe anyone else’s copyright, because we have to do things properly. We haven’t been able to create Vines in the same way. So it’s been quite frustrating sitting there watching these really creative Vines. My favourite ones are the Vonstrenginho ones because he is an artist. I think he’s the one who’s leading this new charge, and it’s fascinating from a producer’s point of view to watch him. But I can’t rip off a Beyonce video or stick [Andy] into an ‘I’m A Celebrity’ clip.”
he's on loan from Reading at Sheffield Wednesday 
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