A night at the Baller League, where former England pros and YouTube stars collide

“A new era of football” — that’s what the slogan on the side of the pitch says.

Welcome to the UK version of the Baller League. Or, in the case of Troy Deeney, the Brawler League. It’s week five of its inaugural season, the first match of the evening at the Copper Box Arena in east London, and Deeney, who has been parachuted into Ian Wright and Chloe Kelly’s team as a wildcard, is playing by his own set of rules.

After poleaxing an opponent earlier in the match, the 36-year-old former Premier League striker charges into Tareiq Holmes-Dennis, thrusting his forearm into the defender’s face long after the ball has gone. It’s a ridiculous challenge, born out of frustration that he wasn’t awarded a free kick seconds before, and prompts a furious reaction from Holmes-Dennis, who jumps on Deeney’s back.

Referee Mark Clattenburg — yes, the former FIFA official is involved, too — steps in and pushes Holmes-Dennis away as players from both teams get involved.

A replay of the incident is shown on the arena’s big screens overhead, the crowd gasps (it looks worse a second time), and Deeney ends up receiving a red card, which serves as confirmation, not that we really needed it, that the Baller League isn’t for everyone.

But perhaps the biggest mistake to make is to think that the Baller League isn’t for anyone.

On Monday night, I went along with my 13-year-old son and three of his mates to experience, in the words of the Baller League founder and chief executive Felix Starck, “a brand new way to consume football”.

Already a success in Germany, where it was launched in a disused plane hangar in Cologne two years ago, the Baller League arrived in the UK last month and is also due to be rolled out in the United States this year.

Tickets cost the five of us £15 each to watch 180 minutes of six-a-side football across five hours.

The boys loved it. I was a bit baffled at times and, truth be told, would rather have been in the away end at Queens Park Rangers on the other side of London earlier in the day, supporting Swansea City in a game in the second-tier Championship. Proper football and all that.

But at age 49, it would be fair to say I’m not the target audience for an evening that required a teenage translator at my side.

“Ginge is in his stream box,” my son said five minutes into the opening match, pointing to a small glass-fronted room behind one of the goals and a man sitting at a desk inside it, wearing a waistcoat.

‘Ginge’ is better known as ‘Angry Ginge’, a 23-year-old YouTuber and Twitch streamer whose real name is Morgan Burtwistle. He is also the manager of Yanited, one of the 12 teams competing in the UK’s Baller League. Angry Ginge shouts a lot and wears red Crocs with the Lightning McQueen character from Pixar’s Cars movies on them. At the risk of stating the obvious, he also has ginger hair. Kids think he’s great and queue for ages to get a selfie with him later in the evening.

The player wearing the No 10 shirt for FC Rules the World was more intriguing to me.

With 12 seconds on the clock in the opening game, and before anyone had been Deeney-ed, Josh Harrop stepped forward with the ball and curled a lovely shot into the top corner.

After 10 minutes, Harrop scored again, this one whipped inside the near post from a free kick.

Manchester United fans might remember the name.

Having come through the United academy and represented England at under-20s level, Harrop played alongside Wayne Rooney and Paul Pogba as he made a goalscoring debut, under Jose Mourinho, in a 2-0 Premier League win against Crystal Palace in front of 75,000 fans at Old Trafford in May 2017.

Aged 29 and a year on from his last appearance for Cheltenham Town in League One, the third tier of the English game, he is now being coached by Clint 419, the founder of Corteiz, a London-based streetwear label, and the manager of FC Rules the World. Wright, the former Arsenal, Crystal Palace and England striker turned leading TV pundit, is in the other dugout and ends up having a row with Harrop at the end of the match.

Cue another melee.

It’s the kind of scene — verbals, jostling and a lot of hot air — that is commonplace on six-a-side pitches all over the UK every week. The difference here is that the players are picking up £400 a game rather than paying subscriptions to participate, Sky Sports is broadcasting all the matches live, and KSI, the YouTuber turned boxer, is running the show as the British league’s president.

And, ultimately, that’s what this is: a show.

Half a dozen six-a-side matches will take place every Monday across 11 consecutive weeks and feature an eclectic mix of ex-professionals (this is where Jordon Ibe and Henri Lansbury are now, in case you were wondering), free agents (Harrop among them), players from non-League — level five of the English game and below (Razzaq Coleman De-Graft, who plays in the sixth tier National League South for Hornchurch, caught the eye) and influencers (Harry Cain — not to be confused with England captain Harry Kane) running around on a green carpet under flashing lights.

The celebrities tend to be either in the dugout, where the list of managers includes established names in the world of football (Wright, John Terry, Gary Lineker, Micah Richards, Alan Shearer, Jens Lehmann etc) and also social media influencers (Angry Ginge, Miniminter, TBJZL and Sharky), tucked away in a streaming room with a microphone or walking around the arena undercover.

MVPs United, in purple, take on Deportrio (Ben Montgomery/Getty Images)

“I just got a picture with Scouse Mali from Locked In,” my son says, excitedly. “He’s dressed as a Ninja Turtle.”

Of course he is, I say to myself, while reaching for Google again.

As for the football itself, it was enjoyable. Whether you could describe it as “forward-thinking, aggressive, hyper-exciting football… that’s impossible to ignore” — the language of the promoters — is questionable. But it was certainly fast and physical (something that comes through in person at the arena far more than when watching on TV) and there were moments of individual quality, too.

Fulham and Nigeria forward Alex Iwobi, watching from the side of the pitch, stood to applaud the goal that 19-year-old former Peterborough United forward Tyler Winters scored, after a lovely sole-roll to deceive the ’keeper, to complete a comfortable victory for Yanited over Richards’ Deportrio team (‘My mate does that skill on the six-a-side court at Goals in Sutton every week,’ I hear you say).

The Baller League format comes with a few quirks.

Three corners lead to a 1990s-MLS-style one-on-one penalty, while a ‘game-changer’ element in the final three minutes of each half introduces a new set of rules which, in some cases, contribute to a flurry of goals (any rule that reduces the number of players on the pitch is undoubtedly a good thing) but in others make no discernible difference.

The whole experience evokes rose-tinted memories of indoor football as a kid and — I’m showing my age again here — of the Guinness Soccer Six Championship, which I watched through the 1980s as a teenager and absolutely loved.

Former England captain John Terry manages Baller League team 26ers (Jordan Peck/Getty Images)

Revisiting Bob Wilson’s opening line from the G-Mex Centre in Manchester in 1988 helps set the scene for the type of (mid-season for the professionals involved) competition that would be unthinkable now.

“We have the biggest and best indoor soccer tournament ever held in the British Isles, and not just because there’s £250,000 of prize money available to the winners,” BBC Sportsnight presenter and former Arsenal goalkeeper Wilson said. “But also because we have, for the first time, all 20 first-division clubs (the equivalent of the Premier League now), plus the local interest of Manchester City from the second division.”

Clearly, those days are never returning and, perhaps more importantly, it’s probably not what a lot of the kids would want to see now anyway.

Their world, where YouTube, Twitch and TikTok are the real game-changers, isn’t really my world, and that means the Baller League is right up their street.

(Top photos: Jordon Ibe and John Terry, left, Troy Deeney; by Getty Images)

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