He created a world of soccer that mirrors video gameplay by inventing his own leagues, with point totals to reach each “season” in order to move up to the next “division.” Soon Hashtag was playing reserve teams, company teams or any team that didn’t mind playing the role of second fiddle. Every match was watched by tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers — largely 16- to 25-year-olds for whom the video-game homage intuitively makes sense or older, cynical Gen Xers like me who long for the authentic “Englishness” that drew them to the game before it got swallowed up by commercialism and who sit in front of a computer all day at work — again, like me. Their matches rack up 250,000 to 500,000 views (for comparison, just under half a million Americans watch the average Premier League match).

Their popularity catches many adults — but especially Hashtag’s players — off guard. For example, at one Hashtag tournament, according to Seb Carmichael-Brown, the team’s commercial director, “we had Robert Pires, World Cup winner with France, come in to the dressing room with his children — to meet us.”

Last summer, Hashtag leapt into the real-world Eastern Counties League Division One South and hired Mr. Devereux, an experienced manager who speaks in what sounds like a delightful, ear-tickling Essex accent, to lead them.

Hashtag United are a decent team for their level, but their appeal has little to do with winning. While their professional treatment of pretend-league games felt like an elaborate, Andy Kaufman-style stunt, their leap into a real league, still presented with slick production values, now feels more like a tacit critique of modern sports.

After all, these are unpaid players with normal real-world jobs who nonetheless get stopped for selfies on the street or at the supermarket, according to Mr. Carmichael-Brown. The backdrop to their journey is wet, windswept, nondescript fields around greater London, before sparse crowds and signage advertising local rental van companies or radiator dealers. It’s a reprieve from the overwrought, media-driven drama, tribalism and emotional toll that sports takes on a dedicated fan. Hashtag United’s ethos and its success remind us that sports can actually be enjoyed, rather than experienced as a weekly life-or-death ordeal or as a battlefield for a proxy culture war.

But just as any escapist entertainment comes into sharpest relief when contrasted with what it’s an escape from, it seems unlikely you’ll ever see Hashtag United on the big screen at a bar. The small screen — your smartphone — suits them. Hashtag United is the ideal “second team” for its fans, all of whom watch the team the same way I do: alone, and all to ourselves. We each follow our first team of choice every week out of obligation, but we all follow Hashtag United just for fun.

Adam Elder is a writer in San Diego.

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