“I have my own personal opinion on AI, which is probably different to what you think it would be,” says Spencer Carmichael-Brown, who you might know as Spencer Owen, the YouTuber turned founder of the semi-professional football club Hashtag United.
We first speak a few weeks after Hashtag United, whose men’s team compete in English football’s seventh tier, completed the sale of two AI footballers, Holly Durango and Harvey Casper, to online chagrin.
“The most embarrassing post I’ve seen a football club post,” read one Instagram comment, liked more than 1,800 times, when Hashtag unveiled Durango and Casper. The equivalent post on X, viewed more than 3.5 million times, drew similar ire.
The ‘footballers’ had social media feeds indistinguishable from that of top-flight players’ — gym selfies, shots from private jets, pictures of Durango in a robotics lab and a caption about her degree in artificial intelligence, presumably a nod to the dual career pathway of many women’s footballers — but there was that telltale glossed sheen that hallmarks most photorealistic AI images. Then Durango’s voice, in a video titled ‘AI have feelings too’, was eerily realistic.
Owen’s opening remarks encapsulate the stereotypes that he comes up against as the public face of a football club that started life as a YouTube channel and boasts half a million Instagram followers, far and away the most for a club in the Isthmian League Premier Division.
🚨 AI PLAYERS CONTRACTED!
We are delighted to announce the double signing of Holly and Harvey who become the world’s first AI professional footballers. We may have to wait a little longer to see their debuts but as soon as technology allows they will be taking to the pitch.… pic.twitter.com/edTMfSIVd3
— Hashtag United (@hashtagutd) October 7, 2025
Hashtag inhabit their space meaningfully — they have pan-disability teams and walking football teams — but also unconventionally. In 2018, for instance, the kit for Hashtag United’s Esports team was available in the Ultimate Team feature of that season’s edition of the FIFA video game. Those who have followed the Hashtag story will have also witnessed the moment they became playable in Football Manager, or wore as a shirt sponsor a QR code linking to a video on its website. They have even done relegation differently, requesting earlier this month that the men’s team drop down a division because football’s “finances are unsustainable at almost every level,” Owen said in a statement.
“We’ll attract plenty of naysayers, I’m sure,” he added. “But fortunately, spending a decade running a football club called Hashtag United has made me fairly comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
On the back of the club’s most recent news, it would be easy to argue what they did in October did not work, just as it would be easy to prejudge Owen as a myopic, uncritical proponent of AI. But, he says: “I’m actually with most people in their opinion on the big-picture AI stuff. I share a lot of fear about what the next 10 years looks like for all industries. Because of those fears, everyone is coming after anything associated with AI. Maybe that is the way to stop it progressing, I don’t know, but I think it’s more nuanced than just saying anyone who is using AI is bad.”
Before we go any further, Owen wants to clarify something. “We have legitimately sold these players,” he says. “It’s not a marketing thing. It’s an actual, contractual sale — money in our bank. That’s quite hard to get across because people think it’s a joke.”
He could not disclose the finer details of the deal for the players because of an NDA, but he jumped on board with this because the “opportunity presented itself” for Hashtag to accomplish what they are confident are world firsts. “We’re not going to be a Premier League team anytime soon, but we can be that level of brand, for want of a better word, in terms of conversation, innovation and reputation in football for pushing the envelope,” Owen says. He adds that “every penny” Hashtag spends is generated through YouTube and social media. ”We have to zig when everyone else zags.”
“Personally, I would love for this stuff to take a massive back step, slow down a little bit,” he continues. “But when you run a club called Hashtag United, which is inherently internet-based, the idea of being scared of this is a bit weird. If anyone’s going to do this, it kind of had to be us.”
“Ultimately, this project was one that achieved a lot of things that are organisational goals for us: create conversation, and be relevant in the zeitgeist, in the conversation of football. Was this conversation being had in football at the moment? Some would say it didn’t need to be. But I would argue someone was going to do this at some time.
“It’s benefited our club financially legitimately. I think if someone else did it, it could be quite clever — if done properly. It could also be awful as well.”
Globally, AI’s dominance is increasing, despite widespread unease. Stats from the book Supremacy predict that the value of the generative AI market will hit $52 billion by 2028, with ‘generative’ an important prefix. A broader definition of artificial intelligence, as technology able to recognise patterns in large datasets and take action, has actually been at work in sport for around two decades. That definition includes Hawk-Eye, the camera-based technology that creates a 3D representation of a ball’s trajectory for officials and analysts, and other ball and player-tracking systems.
Generative AI is what dominates the public imagination, defined in technology writer Madhumita Murgia’s book Code Dependent as “software that can write, create images, audio or video in a way that is largely indistinguishable from human output” and trained using the “entire swell of the English-speaking internet”.
Inevitably, sport already has an early relationship with the technology. In 2024, the Football Association took steps to remove AI-generated videos of then England manager Gareth Southgate making derogatory comments about national team players. Seattle Reign’s Laura Harvey has confessed to consulting ChatGPT for advice on tactics. Among the off-court stories that dominated the 2025 Wimbledon Championships was the AI-generated social media influencer Mia Zelu, whose ‘pictures’ from ‘Wimbledon’ helped build her 250,000 Instagram followers.
Suddenly, the prospect of a Premier League club signing an AI footballer does not feel so outlandish. “Someone will announce this at some point, because there’s a lot of utility there for certain clubs,” Owen says.
Hashtag’s footballing staff are part-time and train twice a week; only its 10-strong content team are full-time. “We do not have access full-time or media days with players. There’s something you could do around sponsorship activation there, which is going to save clubs money. For a club like ours, they [AI footballers] would have made jobs, because you’d have had to hire someone to create this content that doesn’t exist in our organisation currently. Whatever you would use them for is something that we currently do not have the budget to recruit full-time players to do. Maybe it’s something that you’d get rid of when you do have that.”
Owen muses whether Facebook’s Metaverse — the vision for an interconnected virtual universe through augmented reality technology — and Meta Quest’s line of virtual reality headsets could help bring AI footballers to life.
“In China, they’re doing robot football,” he considers. “They’re really, really basic robots, but they are playing football … I don’t even know how it would work — [if] you take the appearance data of a fictional athlete and put it into a much more sophisticated robot. I’m not saying I think humans are going to start watching robot football; I’m saying that what now seems like these people don’t exist, that they’re just on an Instagram picture, wouldn’t necessarily have to stay that way.”
At this point, it is worth noting that the idea of what it means to watch football has expanded more rapidly in the last 10 years than at any other point in history. The thought of following an E-sports team or the six-a-side tournament Baller League feels like an affront to a football purists, but is part of the supporter experience for young people raised online or priced out of live sport and TV subscriptions.
There are ethical issues therein, among them who would oversee the design of and storylines for the players, the images on which AI is trained and what questions this raises about voice, appropriation and identity in digital spaces (due to the NDA signed as part of the transfers, Owen is unable to elaborate on who came up with the designs and backstories for Hashtag’s AI players).
The discourse around AI often focuses on the possibility of future technological disaster over the biases entrenched in software largely controlled by White men. Bloomberg’s analysis of the image generator Stable Defusion was that “it takes racial and gender disparities to extremes — worse than those found in the real world”. Any football club pursuing AI footballers in a meaningful way would have to grapple with a software relying on data sets that reflect the biases and stereotypes of the western internet, and the moral ramifications of a technology now forever associated with the Grok sexual deepfake scandal that broke after Hashtag completed the sale.
Owen has walked his own mental tightrope between the understanding that “AI is not going anywhere” and his reservations at the speed of progress and its misuse. The conversation, he says, is sadly no longer “about whether you like it or not”.
Hashtag’s motivation for the project was never to dive in with AI but to achieve what they are sure were two world-firsts. He expected some negativity but was “surprised” at its intensity. Much of it, he says, was “negativity that was associated with the whole AI movement” and an instinctive revulsion towards and distrust of the technology. His chief concern is what criticism, if “preordained and preconceived before they’ve heard it out”, might mean for clubs whose finances mean that they have to innovate.
Spencer Owen and Seb Carmichael-Brown, co-founder of Hashtag United, pose with the FA Women’s National League Cup trophy after their team’s victory over Newcastle United in 2024 (Ben Hoskins – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
“We’re living in a time of the common language of the internet is outrage,” he continues. “Everyone just wants to be outraged at something, rather than actually judging each individual case on its merits. The word AI is not a catch-all term, any more than the word YouTuber means that every single person who makes videos on YouTube is the same. When it comes to AI in content, it should be judged on its merits.
“The instant hit dislike button is quite damaging to innovation. There’s an opportunity for storytelling here. Someone might not like the idea of following an AI athlete, but there’s plenty of real-life humans on social media I don’t want to follow either.
“The reason I’m fighting that a little bit is not because we love this idea. It’s not because we’re pursuing it. It’s because we are going to keep pushing the envelope as a football team. That’s how we win long-term. If we’ve got any chance for the football club to become professional, we need to be very different. Being different means trying new things. Sometimes, those things will be things that we commit to wholeheartedly. Sometimes, they’ll be little short-term, fun experiments.”
Hashtag may have accelerated the conversation around football and generative AI, but it is hard to dispute Owen’s belief that sport was on that trajectory anyway. It already feels too late to have this discussion when fandom’s youngest generation has lived their childhoods online, fed by algorithms powered by AI. That kind of data, only set to become more detailed, is incredibly valuable to football clubs. How the sport regulates technology that is already so unwieldy will be watched with interest.
“They say there are no bad dogs but only bad owners,” says Owen. “That’s kind of how I feel about AI. It all depends on the usage. It all depends on the intention. To just close the door on it is quite short-sighted when we don’t know what the next few years are going to unfold like.”
