In a scruffy prefab at West Ham United’s training ground a bunch of unlikely lads are being primped and primed for a glamorous photo shoot. They are trying out three new kits, sponsored by Umbro, in preparation for a tour of the US. Midfielder James Stevens has lost around 50lb over the past year – he’s only 17 stone now.

Skinny balding winger Faisal Manji, who works as an investment adviser, has become something of a sex symbol in recent months. Faisal and James play for a team called Hashtag United, which is basically a bunch of old schoolmates, some of whom couldn’t get in their local Sunday League teams, with a few luxury add-ons (two ageing semi-professionals).

Hashtag United play real football in an imaginary league and their matches are watched on YouTube by upwards of half a million people – figures that most professional teams wouldn’t dare dream of. The YouTube channel that shows their matches has almost two million subscribers. Welcome to the bizarre new world of football.

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Hashtag is a riposte to the decadent certainties of Premier League football, a surreal collision of sweaty tradition and digital technology that represents something very different to the fare on offer from football’s moneyed elite. Football is changing – and not in a way that could have been predicted or in a way that is easily explained. Hashtag is the brainchild of Spencer Owen, a failed standup comic who made his name providing football content on YouTube – to the uninitiated, providing content simply means telling and showing people stuff.

Owen is a likeable, fast-talking, wise-cracker who comes across as a bit more of a geezer than he actually is. He already had one million followers on his YouTube channel, Spencer FC, before he dreamed up Hashtag United. The idea was as ingenious as it was barmy. Owen was convinced that regular people would like to watch regular players (ie roughly of their own ability) play regular games. He believed that we would relate to plumbers, lawyers, bankers and salesmen more easily than we do to today’s cossetted superstars.

So he decided that his new team would play in a decent stadium and be filmed to professional-ish standards, and the match would be edited to a 20-minute highlights package for the world’s delectation. Most of his friends thought he had lost the plot, but it would be a laugh – and they wanted to play football. “Some people were like: ‘What an idiot, why are you paying all that money to film your mates playing average football?’ And I was like: ‘No I’m trying to build something here.’”

His friends hadn’t heard the half of it. Owen then told them that they would play in a virtual league based on the computer game Fifa. Each season would consists of 10 games, in which they would play teams with a common theme – for example, Sunday League teams and staff teams of professional clubs. They would start in division five with the ultimate aim of finishing top of division one. In division five they would need 18 points (ie six wins) to be promoted, while they would need 24 points to win division one.

So far so confusing? To further complicate matters there would be no other teams in their league – the teams they chose to play would not be competing for points, only for the glory of beating Hashtag United and being watched on YouTube. In other words, they would compete in a league of their own – going up and down imaginary divisions depending on their results.

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To those of us used to traditional football, it is hard to get our head around. To most young people (particularly boys) it makes perfect sense. This is just the computer game Fifa brought to life. Even more astonishing than the concept is the fact that it has taken off. And how. Hashtag’s recent tour of America was sponsored by Coca-Cola. Owen insists Hashtag is not making a profit because the costs for each match (hiring the stadium, six cameramen, touring etc) are so high and at the moment they are investing all the revenue back into the club, but he admits that some of the sponsorship deals run into six figures.

Like many football fans, Owen became disillusioned with the elite game. “I have fallen out of love with it in recent years, on the back of the Fifa scandals and Qatar getting the World Cup and Russia getting it and keeping it despite their civil rights violations and homophobic behaviour. I feel the people in charge of our game should be standing up for us more and they don’t.”

He talks about breakaway clubs such as AFC Wimbledon and FC United that were born out of fans’ despair with the clubs they once loved. But Hashtag, he says, wanted to go a stage further. “For me they’ve only done half the job because they’ve just dropped lower down the system which is still run by the guys who only care about money. Why not have a second system, which might not be about elite football but is there because we love the game?”

Even Owen struggles to explain Hashtag’s success. At the beginning of each video he addresses the viewer: “Hello mate!” Perhaps this is the secret. It feels that the show is individually tailored for each of us out there. He tells me a story about when he was interviewing the Real Madrid and Wales star Gareth Bale.

“It was the day after Wales secured qualification for the Euros so Gareth Bale was the king of Wales at this point, everybody wanted to see him. They had invited a few 15- and 16-year-old lads to come down and they came running on to the pitch and I thought: ‘Oh God, Gareth is going to get swamped,’ and they ran straight past Gareth and came to me. This isn’t me telling you this to boast, I was seriously embarrassed by it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spencer Owen, frontman of Hashtag United, poses during an Umbro photoshoot taking images of the side’s new kit. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

“I said: ‘What the heck are you doing? Gareth Bale is here.’ Then one of them said to me: ‘Yeah but Gareth’s a footballer, you’re our mate.’ And I thought I kinda get it. Cos even me when I meet these footballers they are untouchable. No disrespect to Gareth Bale, who’s lovely, but you get five minutes with them, his agent is over your shoulder all the time checking what you’re saying, you’ve got to send the video to them afterwards for approval, and you feel you’re talking to a media-trained machine.” The funny thing is Hashtag United also ask if they can see the video the Guardian is making about them before it is broadcast. We politely decline.

Hashtag United are not the only successful YouTube team. Last month, a charity match between Sidemen FC (a team made up of video-gamers) and YouTube Allstars sold out Charlton Athletic’s 27,000-capacity Valley Stadium. Its usual occupants had barely managed to attract half that figure all season in the EFL.

Fifa 2.0

Fifa, football’s disgraced governing body, accepts that the sport is changing. Last October the new head of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, unveiled his vision for the future of world football. It was called Fifa 2.0. This was Infantino, and Fifa, attempting to wipe the slate clean – forget Sepp Blatter’s regime, forget the World Cups that landed in Russia and Qatar, forget the bribes and corruption that poisoned the bidding processes for the 1998 (France), 2006 (Germany) and 2010 (South Africa) World Cups, we’re starting again. Football under Infantino would be bigger, better and richer than ever before – oh yes, and cleaner. Only Fifa would dare come up with such a hubristic title (the implication being that the reborn Fifa compared in scale with the second-generation internet Web 2.0).

And yet at the same time there was something fitting about the title. Fifa 2.0 acknowledged that digital technology had changed how we watch, support and play football. Nowadays we tend to watch it when we want to, and we interact it with it on our terms. As Web 2.0 became defined by user-generated content and the growth of social media, so has football.

Rather than just watching it and listening to experts pontificate, we’d rather chat among ourselves on Twitter and Facebook, pass on our pearls of footy wisdom on our own YouTube channels, and even inhabit Ronaldo’s and Messi’s boots in digital games that imitate the real thing. The idea of Fifa 2.0 reflects a very real possibility – that football as we know it could be subsumed by the internet, and overtaken by its digital version.

A small section of Fifa 2.0 is dedicated to the expansion of eSports. Fifa is the joint licence holder of the eponymous video game (with its manufacturer EA Sports), played on computers by tens of millions worldwide. Fifa 2.0 talks about the digital game’s success, and suggests this is only the start. Competition in the virtual game is becoming as fierce as in the real game – for status and money.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sean Allen of England celebrates as he vies with Rodrigo Araujo of Brazil during a quarter-final at the Fifa Interactive World Cup in 2016 Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

In 2016, more than 2.3m gamers participated in the Fifa Interactive World Cup, with the winner receiving $25,000 in cash. This figure is likely to mushroom over the next few years. But what Fifa has its eyes on is not so much its own game as the other larger, even more profitable eSports that now attract huge live audiences. It mentions, with a hint of envy, that the 2014 League Of Legends World Championship at the Seoul World Cup Stadium in Korea drew 40,000 people, “more than the typical English Premier League match”. The section on eSports concludes with the promise of ever greater bounty: “As the world of gaming expands, Fifa has a tremendous opportunity to mimic the production of global events on the pitch with enhanced production of virtual Fifa competitions.”

But some professionals see eSports as a threat. When the Premier League’s executive chairman, Richard Scudamore, was asked which league or sport he saw as the main competitor to the Premier League he replied digital gaming. He wondered aloud whether traditional sport could continue to engage young people in the same way interactive eSports were doing.

While Hashtag United have been attracting more than half a million to their matches on YouTube, figures for live football on pay per view have fallen – the numbers watching Premier League matches on Sky Sports were down 11% at the halfway mark of 2016-17 compared with the previous season, and Sky’s figures have fallen 25% since 2010.

Sure, the digital options are having an impact. But there is something else at play, too. Disenchantment – the working man’s game that is no longer accessible to the working man or woman, the cheapest Arsenal season ticket costing £891 (actually a cut of £123 because the club failed to qualify for the Champions League), Paul Pogba being transferred to Manchester United for £93.2m four years after being given a free transfer, Lionel Messi not paying his taxes. As digital technology has given us a voice, the world of elite football has become ever more alien. Football was formed and codified in the 19th century. And it still works on the 19th/20th-century model of giving (a product) and taking (our money). But that does not work for the young generation.

Unsurprisingly, young people do not relate to the lives of footballers. More worrying, many young people do not even relate to the lives of traditional fans who go to football matches. The idea of shelling out a minimum of £30 to watch a Premier League match is every bit as alien as Pogba’s transfer fee. Who needs to go to football or invest in Sky and BT Sport when we can live-stream matches for free, catch up on highlights in real time on our iPhones, and play more interesting simulacres of the real thing on our computers?

‘Don’t Forget To Be Awesome’

Over in South London supporter-owned AFC Wimbledon is thriving. The club was founded 15 years ago by irate fans of Wimbledon FC after the club decided to relocate to Milton Keynes, 56 miles north of Wimbledon. AFC started with people buying season tickets for a club that did not yet exist, made its debut in the ninth tier of football and is now gliding stratospherically in the third tier of English football. More unbelievable, though, is that this scrap of a club, with its old-fashioned fans and old-fashioned values, is at the cutting edge of the digital revolution. Like Hashtag United, AFC Wimbledon is the embodiment of Football 2.0.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The John Green Stand at AFC Wimbledon. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

The club is funded by the American author and Fifa player/commentator John Green. What’s more the digital version of AFC Wimbledon, a team Green created known as the Wimbly Womblys, subsidises the real thing. Ivor Heller, the club’s commercial director, talks about the first time Green made contact with him. AFC fans had brought a huge anti-homophobia banner to the previous home match and it went viral.

The New York Times published a picture of it, which Green saw. He had already clocked AFC Wimbledon, admiring the way it had come into existence as an act of fan solidarity and revolt against corporatism. “He loved the fact that we had started from ground level zero. We had absolutely nothing. We had no ground, no league to play in, but we still raised £80,000 in a week by saying if we get money we’ll start a club.”

Heller is a tiny tough guy, with a hint of Joe Pesci and a sense of the absurd. Which he has needed. “John said he had a way of funding sponsorship by a YouTube channel and I didn’t even know what a YouTube channel was at the time. I certainly didn’t know people were making money out of making films about themselves. Then when he said he was going to play Fifa and change the name to Wimbly Womblys, I was like: ‘OK I know you need an imagination to be an author, but surely this is potty.’” Green took the heart of the AFC Wimbledon team to create the Wimbly Womblys and added a couple of surprises. “He’s got two John Greens in there who are married to each other so all the time he’s thinking about breaking down stereotypes.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The DFTBA logo has been added to AFC Wimbledon’s kit. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

John Green’s fans are called Nerd Fighters. Heller explains that they are genuine nerds, championing fellow nerds and underdogs. Hence the appeal of a club like AFC. Green asked the Nerd Fighters to design a logo for AFC Wimbledon, and they came up with the not entirely catchy Don’t Forget To Be Awesome. The logo was added to their kit, with a DFTBA badge on their shorts. For AFC Wimbledon there is a virtuous circle between the real and virtual worlds. The DFTBA logo has now been incorporated into Green’s digital Wimbly Womblys with its pair of married John Greens.

Priced out

Now the big boys are trying to get in on the act. Many of Europe’s biggest football teams have started to invest in digital teams. Schalke, Ajax and Wolfsburg are a few of the teams who have signed up their own e-footballers. The French Professional Football League, in partnership with EA Sports, announced the first European eSports football league last year — e-Ligue 1. Paris Saint-Germain are leading the way, having signed up a whole squad of e-footballers.

Manchester City, by contrast, have just started to dip a little toe into the world of eSports, with a single signing, Kez Brown. But they are still ahead of the game compared with most other Premier League clubs. Apart from City, only West Ham United have signed an e-footballer.

British football clubs, in particular, are worried about the ageing profile of active supporters. In 2014-15, the average age of adult fans attending a Premier League match was 41. To put this in context, the average age of supporters on the Stretford End at Manchester United’s Old Trafford was 17 in 1968. Not surprisingly, there is a direct correlation between the age of fans attending matches and the astronomical rise in prices. In 1992, the last season of the old First Division, the average ticket price was £7.56, while the average cost of the cheapest Premier League ticket in 2015 was £30.95 (inflation of 401% while the cumulative inflation rate in the UK for the 23 years is 91%).

Going digital

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Diego Gigliani is senior vice-president of media and innovation at City Football Group. Like most people associated with today’s global City, he is smart and urbane. We meet at the top of a glass skycraper in the centre of London. This is the global headquarters of City Football Marketing and it could not be further removed from the back-to-back-terrace houses of Maine Road, which was Manchester City’s home for 80 years. But this is City Football Group, the holding company – not simply Manchester City. City is the brand, and Manchester City are just one of its clubs alongside New York City FC, Melbourne City FC, Japan’s Yokohama F Marinos and Uruguay’s Club Athletico Torque.

Like all people at the business end of football, he worries about where the next generation of fans will come from. He has to find new ways to attract fans – and then engage them. Engagement is the word that everybody returns to, whether at Hashtag United or Manchester City. The obvious way of engaging is through social media – so football clubs encourage players to use social media to create a sense of shared space with fans.

But these interactions are for the already converted. The bigger question is how to attract fans who have never heard of Manchester City. And this is where Kez Brown comes in. “In the US many kids start liking the professional football game by playing the console-based game,” Gigliani says. “We thought a natural next step was to have a player representing Manchester City in competitive gaming tournaments.”

Gigliani hopes that kids playing Fifa will start supporting Manchester City when they see that Brown represents City in major Fifa tournaments. “We see it as an opportunity because we know people engage in Fifa the game and the players and take more interest in the league as a result. It’s a fundamental premise of how fan creation can begin and develop. You may start to follow a club then you become expert on the players and their strengths by interacting with the game every day.”

One of the interesting things about the top Fifa players is that they tend to be media friendly – many like Brown have their own YouTube channels and are more relaxed talking to the public than real footballers. Not surprisingly, they also tend to be more accessible than top Premier League players.

But I have been trying to talk to Brown for months, and each time I ask Manchester City come up with another excuse – he lives in York, he is shy, he is young, he doesn’t like doing media.

I say to Gigliani that it is easier to get an interview with Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola than their eSports star, and ask why this is so. Gigliani is about to answer when the press officer steps in and insists we change the subject.

So I do change the subject – and ask whether Brown would be expected to use Manchester City players when representing City. No, Gigliani says, he is free to use whichever players he likes. In Fifa Ultimate, the players with most value tend to be the great legends such as Pelé. How does he think fans would react if Brown were to sign, say, George Best and Bobby Charlton to head up the attack? Gigliani laughs. “Mmmm. Difficult question …”

Again the press officer intervenes. I appear to have hit a nerve. “This isn’t how the game works right,” he says. But it is exactly how the game works, I say. “He plays in a Manchester City kit as Manchester City. Can we move on?”

Now I am truly bewildered. We are talking about the possibility of avatars of veteran Manchester United players representing Manchester City in a digital game, and I am being closed down because the question is too sensitive. Manchester City is my club, I have enjoyed the success money has brought, but surely this is the kind of corporate control that is driving fans away from elite football?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tassel Rushan, otherwise known as Hashtag Tass, in his bedroom at his parents house. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

I decide to look elsewhere for a top e-footballer to talk to, and a few days later end up in a sleepy west London suburb at the home of Tassal Rushan, better known as Hashtag Tass.

Tass is a bright young man with phenomenally nimble fingers and a gigantic footballing brain. Put the two together, and you get an e-footballer who plays the game how Guardiola would like his Manchester City side to play – fast, intricate, with one-twos and triangles played from goalkeeper to the six-yard box till a forward scores with a tap-in.

Tass plays for Hashtag United. That’s another thing about this topsy-turvy new football world. Hashtag United might be a jumped-up Sunday League team but they have already signed up a number of the world’s best e-footballers to play for them because they understand the digital world so much better than traditional football clubs. Tass is paid £1500 a month to represent Hashtag and they take a share of his winnings. Hashtag United might be all about reclaiming the grassroots when it comes to real football, but when it comes to the digital version this is big business.

Tass’s mother tells me she thinks she has failed because he is playing Fifa instead of going to university. But she also realises that her son is doing remarkably well for himself. In January, he won 119 out of 120 games (“That one defeat still itches at me”), was ranked No1 in the world and was crowned regional champion in Paris, winning $30,000.

Make no mistake, this is a full-time job. Between Friday and Sunday every week he plays 40 league games on his Xbox One – taking up between six and eight hours each day. He takes Mondays off, then practises on the other days.

This is a high-pressured world where you can fall from grace with a single defeat. In May’s Fifa 17 Ultimate Team Championship Final in Berlin, where the top prize rose to $120,000, Tass was beaten in the semi-final. He had one last chance last weekend to qualify for the Fifa Interactive World Cup on home territory in London this August and secured a place, earning an opportunity to win a top prize of $200,000 – the biggest ever prize. Hashtag United get 15% of his winnings.

Tass was a promising young footballer who modelled himself on Thierry Henry. But, like so many of the people I speak to, he became disillusioned with the game – not because of the money and inaccessibility but because of its emphasis on brute strength. “There’s a certain mould of player that Sunday league coaches always want you to fit; being big, being strong, not looking at technical ability first.”

Little wonder he was drawn to Fifa where he could be as technical as he liked. Tass is a typical millennial. Rather than simply consuming football passively as we did in the past, he regards himself as a pro-sumer or co-creator. He doesn’t want to simply watch his favourite footballers on the television, he wants to control them on his console.

As we talk, he plays in his tiny bedroom, providing a running commentary. “Ooh, Gullit’s injured. But that’s standard. This is a goal. Oooooh! I’m making false promises.” And all the time you hear the click-click-clicking of his console. “Ooh! Nice. How’s he got that? Jesus! Not too bad! There we go. That was a driven shot, where the ball gets hit low and hard rather than a normal shot … oh he’s left! He’s rage quit.” Rage quitting is when players stop mid-game because they have had enough.

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Watching him, I begin to realise why eSports is considered by many to be a regular sport – it is all about hand-eye coordination. The speed of his game is astonishing as is the number of things he has to think about simultaneously. Tas, who is 22, says he probably peaked in terms of reaction time at 17 or 18, but his experience gives him the edge over most other players. He gives his life to the game, and is exhausted. “For the past four years I’ve been putting the hours in, trying to be the best and it takes a mental toll on you. It’s a 24/7 mental worry.” Does he get bored? “Yes, I honestly do. Maybe I do miss out on things in life.”

Does he consider himself to be a sportsman? “If other people want to say that I don’t mind that at all.” In one way, he says, he knows he is not a regular sportsman – he has never been less fit. “In recent years, I’ve not really been doing any exercise. It’s not healthy, particularly when you’re sitting still in a position for so long. I’m not happy about it.”

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What he is happy about is the professionalisaion of eSports. Tass says investing in Fifa players makes perfect sense for the top football clubs – potentially huge returns for a tiny investment. “There is a percentage of people who play Fifa who don’t enjoy the real game so it would be bringing them in, saying: ‘Look we’re supporting your game.’ It’s engaging with a younger generation.” Would he be tempted if a top team came in for him? “I can’t comment as I play for Hashtag United,” he says coyly. He focuses on the game. “That was a decent goal! Finally! My opponent was getting a bit dizzy off the build-up, he thought we weren’t going anywhere, then one pass to Messi and Ronaldo finishes it.”

At 22, Hashtag Tass is already thinking of life post-Fifa. “After the age of 25 I’d assume I wouldn’t want to carry on doing it, even if I’m still winning.” I ask him what his ultimate ambition is, expecting him to say that he wants to win the Interactive World Cup. But he’s planning way ahead of that. “Being a successful YouTuber would be the long-term goal.” Tass started his YouTube channel a few months ago, providing tips and commentary on Fifa. He already has more than 100,000 subscribers.

In February it was announced that Fifa matches would be shown on television for the first time, and in April BT Sport began to broadcast the Fifa Ultimate Team Championship Series. Last month Tottenham Hotspur announced that they were investing in eSports – not players this time, facilities. The new Spurs stadium will host major eSports events (everything from Fifa to the regular shoot-em-up events), with the hope that they will attract capacity crowds and earn up to £3m per event.

Simon Chadwick, professor of Sport Enterprise at Salford University, thinks it is inevitable that digital football is going to become a massive spectator sport. “As the 21st century progresses I think the digital version of tournaments is going to be as big as if not bigger than the physical version of the tournaments.”

‘There’s no love’

This new football world is messing with my head – the mix of the real and the virtual, the Sunday League players with the lucrative Coca-Cola sponsorship, the generation of Fifa stars playing for huge sums who never leave their chairs, the Premier League clubs scared to answer questions about the potential lineup of their digital team, the real team funded by their virtual avatars, the young kids who can replicate the best of Messi but have never played in a park themselves.

Back at Hashtag United, Spencer Owen is also thinking of the future – and how to grow his football club. We are now in a gym with a bunch of hopefuls who are competing for the right to join the Hashtag team. This is Hashtag’s Got Talent meets the X-Factor. Incredibly, there were 20,000 applicants – most of them far better than those playing for Hashtag and many signed up to football academies – and now they have whittled the numbers down to the last eight.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hopefuls in the Hashtag Academy listen to instructions from Spencer Owen (left) and his brother Seb Carmichael-Brown (right) Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

When I speak to the boys I can tell they have been handpicked by Owen and his crew – they are nice lads, with a bit of personality and the ambition to become YouTube stars if they don’t make it in football. And like Owen most feel alienated from the elite game.

Seventeen-year-old Jack Durkin says: “There’s no love, no loyalty in professional football. It’s all business based. I do A-level PE so I know about the money side. I’d love to be a professional footballer, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to be portrayed as a bad person – I want to be seen as a role model.” Durkin eventually finishes runner-up and fails to get a place in the Hashtag squad.

There is something so refreshing about watching these kids encourage each other even if they know that ultimately only one of them can win the prize. As an alternative to the cut-throat world of the Premier League, it could not be more appealing.

And yet at the same time there is something else going on – something more knowing. Yes Spencer Owen is reclaiming football’s grassroots, but he is also repackaging it for the digital age. In its own way, the Hashtag brand is every bit as sophisticated as that of Manchester City. Just go to the website to look at the club’s merchandising. Indeed, Owen is often the man the big clubs go to for advice on how to conquer the digital world.

Owen’s brother, Seb Carmichael-Brown, plays in midfield for Hashtag and is the club’s commercial director. He knows exactly why Hashtag has attracted sponsors such as Coca-Cola. “Eyeballs, simple. People are now consuming video format. They are switching off from television. The Wall Street Journal shows even over 18-year-olds are dropping 30% year-by-year on hours watching television. So it would be eyewatering what those figures would be for under-18s. If a brand is looking to target 16-25 year-old males in the UK that’s our core demographic. We have about 15m of them watch the channel every month. Coke gets much better returns investing in people like us than traditional TV.”

As for Hashtag United, the brothers believe this is just the start. They are hoping that Hashtag will be crowned champion of their virtual division one, and then it will be time to move on to bigger and better things. “We now have long-term plans for Hashtag, which may involve moving out of this division structure,” Owen says. There is even a possibility that Hashtag will turn professional and look to join the Football League.

The irony is that grassroots revolutionaries Hashtag United already appear to be trying to emulate the top-flight clubs against which they are reacting. Perhaps there is an inevitability to it as boundaries between the digital and real worlds of football become ever more blurred.