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The Premier League seemed a long way away at the full-time whistle at Enfield Town. There were boos from the few hundred travelling Dagenham & Redbridge supporters who had just watched 90 minutes of drab football at a level in the pyramid they are experiencing for the first time since the very start of this century.
Their club’s new minority owner, the YouTuber KSI, was not there to hear the jeers. He wants to take Dagenham to the top flight. “And I’d like to marry Brad Pitt,” said Suzanne Collier, who has been coming to watch them for 43 years, from the away end.
The supporters have heard this kind of bluster before. “You’re promised the world and you’re just given a ham sandwich,” said Liam Roberts before kick-off in north London.
Dagenham have had a string of underwhelming, and occasionally bizarre, investors in recent times. Club Underdog, an entity of North Sixth Group who specialise in lower-league clubs, oversaw their relegation to the National League South at the end of last season. This time last year, after he invested, the Egyptian social media star Marwan Serry dreamed of taking Dagenham to the Premier League too. “I feel like a child playing Fifa,” he said. Within five days, he announced his complete withdrawal from the club.
His exit came after the discovery of controversial social media posts on the Israel-Gaza conflict by another Egyptian influencer, Salma Mashhour, who was appointed a Dagenham director when Serry joined. Relegation to the sixth tier, a level they last graced in 2000, followed, and the club announced they had been taken over by a private Qatari consortium. That fell through as well.
But optimism has returned with the arrival of KSI, whose real name is Olajide Olatunji, arguably one of the most recognisable people in the country to anyone under the age of 30. “I knew about him because my kids knew him,” said Andrew Denson, 54. “It can only be good for the club, right? Worldwide recognition and a bit of money hopefully to improve the squad and everything else.”
The 32-year-old YouTuber turned rapper turned boxer, also a judge on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent, attended the 1-0 home win against league leaders Dorking last weekend. He sat alongside the former England striker Andy Carroll, another to invest since Happy Fan Group, a consortium headed by the American businessman John Grabowski, bought Dagenham off Club Underdog last month. Carroll is on the books as a player but hasn’t played since December owing to injury.
In the sun on Saturday, there was a sense of two clubs with varying ambitions. Enfield, who boast about being England’s first fully fan-owned club, are losing their fight for survival. Dagenham are now nine points off the playoffs. There is an expectation they will start climbing the ladder, pronto.
The model is Wrexham, who are reaping the rewards of the hands-on approach of Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac. Their journey from non-league to Premier League is perhaps nearing an end. Following the Reynolds-Mac playbook, this week KSI mucked in at the Leisure United training hub, chatting in depth to the manager, Lee Bradbury, and playing table tennis with the players.
Like Wrexham, Dagenham and Redbridge will be the focus of a documentary series, this one titled Race to the Top and running on KSI’s 17m-subscriber YouTube channel. The National League’s broadcast partner, Dazn, showed the Enfield game to a global audience during the UK’s 3pm TV blackout. Misfits Boxing, a sports promotion company founded by KSI, also has a deal with Dazn.
Despite concerns over the circus that celebrity ownership may bring – plus the fact the more senior section of the Dagenham fanbase had not encountered said celebrity before – KSI’s involvement is endorsed by many in the away end at Enfield. “We hopefully will bring in a younger, London-based fanbase,” said Collier. Roberts has noticed the greater attention already: “You can be walking down the street in a Dagenham kit and people go: ‘Oh, I know what that is because KSI’s got that kit.’”
Dagenham dropped out of the Football League in 2016 after a nine-year stay. Anwar Uddin captained the side that reached promotion to League One via the playoffs in 2010 and his return as nonexecutive chair has added to the optimism. “That’s the biggest positive,” says Collier, “having someone who calls Dagenham his own.”
Amid the recent upheaval, Steve Thompson has announced he’s leaving his role as managing director after 45 years at the club, before and after the 1992 merger that put the Redbridge in Dagenham & Redbridge.
KSI is talking of returning the Daggers to “the glory days”. That he made his name on the video game Fifa taking teams from the bottom online leagues to the very top has not been lost on those who watched the videos he recorded as a teenager in his parents’ bedroom. “It feels like the days are getting brighter for Dagenham,” said Roberts. “It’s not all doom and gloom any more.”
