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Many impassioned sports fans watching a game from home may have harbored the secret suspicion that they could do better than the coach. What if they got the chance to prove it?
Nathan Owolabi, a 23-year-old Londoner, is one such fan. He’s obsessed with soccer: watching it, working as a tour guide at Wembley Stadium and playing countless hours of soccer video games. But working for a professional league seemed a far-off goal—until Xbox helped him land his dream job.
Owolabi won a contest sponsored by Xbox to join the staff of Bromley Football Club in south London as a support performance tactician. His task: can he apply the tactical skills he mastered as a gamer to a real-life team and help them become champions?
Xbox and agency McCann London are chronicling Owolabi’s unorthodox path into pro soccer through a new documentary series, The Everyday Tactician, whose first episode premieres today (March 22) on British channel TNT Sports. For the brand, this represents an expansion into long-form sports entertainment, while Bromley FC’s unusual approach to recruitment could help turn its fortunes.
Xbox’s experiment began with a goal to expand beyond the brand’s typical demographic of “pure gamers,” Mohan Gehlot, senior global product manager, told ADWEEK.
As it eyed a bigger audience, the brand was inspired by the growing appetite for sports documentaries. Series such as Netflix’s Beckham documentary or Welcome to Wrexham on FX have been big, populist hits.
To venture into the genre, McCann came up with the idea to bring the skills many gamers have honed through Xbox’s Football Manager—in which players can virtually manage their own teams—into the real world.
Bromley FC was up for the challenge, agreeing to hire a gamer with no professional soccer experience. The team is ideal for this project because “they’re not too big or too small. The gamer can get insight into a professional club, but also be at a place where they can have a real impact,” explained Jim Nilsson, creative director at McCann London.