ENTERTAINMENT | NOSTALGIA
Written by Luke Fisher (he/him) | @lukefish7__ | Contributing Writer
& Henry Lee (he/him) | @sidelineyarnspod | Contributing Writer
There’s a quote from The Office that rings truer with each passing day. “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” As high school fades from our rear-view mirrors and ‘adult things’ hit us head-on, we often find ourselves taking long trips down memory lane. The phrase “good old days” can be traced back to the 18th century, but the past holds a unique grip on Gen Z.
Many of us grew up with the internet, giving us a high-definition look back at the content that helped us through adolescence: breakups, sporting failures, and hours avoiding guests in our darkened bedrooms. And that’s precisely what we, Henry and Luke, did.
We had similar tastes in content growing up. Sports YouTube. We worshipped channels like the Sidemen, ChrisMD, Dude Perfect, and football compilation creators. We wanted to explore the supposed superiority of yesteryear’s content. Are the jokes still funny, or were we just ignorant kids snickering at anything edgy? Perhaps we look back at it all with rose-tinted glasses because they remind us of simpler times.
For this exploration, we chose six videos from 2014 to 2018 to represent each year of ‘prime’ sports YouTube. Let the games begin.
2014: CROSSBAR CHALLENGE!!!!! | KSI
By Henry
2014, eh? Politics was about who I made captain at lunchtime football. The economy revolved around how I could buy a Juicy at lunchtime. Watching YouTube on my $120 school Chromebook was all I could dream of.
This video encapsulates what football lovers around the world would spend hours doing throughout this era. Each Sidemen member steps up to the ball, attempting to hit the crossbar of the goal in front of them. It sounds simple, and for a lot of people, it is. But for some reason, each time the crossbar is struck, there is pandemonium. The difference in reactions for each member's attempt is what intertwines this video into nostalgia for me.
“Do it for the unpaid workers,” Wroetoshaw shouted when Vikkstar123, a football novice, awkwardly stroked the ball at the crossbar. Cultural music was then played in the video, which seems to have stuck with Vikkstar’s public figure ever since. You couldn't say that now. Back then videos could be controversial and racist. YouTube has now evolved, and editing has become polished and professional. PR teams defend channels as if Aunty Cindy is putting us back into lockdown. But somehow, this group of boys had football fans and Sidemen fans chuckling, using inappropriate sexual references. The casual racism also passed the 2014 vibe check.
The video somehow has 58 million views, showcasing the popularity and effective content Sidemen created. Ten-year-old me was oblivious to the casual racism and sexual references used, as I was simply attempting to find a personality trait.
2015: ChrisMD Vs The F2 | The ULTIMATE Sunday League Footballer
By Luke
ChrisMD was living my dream. He showed me it was possible to make money by filming yourself on the pitch with mates. If you scour his channel, almost every video uses the same formula—striking endless balls and scoring impossibly impressive goals. Only the stakes and the guests ever changed. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.
In this creation, Chris collaborates with F2Freestylers, a behemoth of sports YouTube. What made ChrisMD and this genre so popular is its organic combination of relatability, humour, and footballing flair. This video is jam-packed with shared laughter and some incredible dopamine-triggering moments, accentuated by over-the-top editing. Football videos and copyright-free electronic dance music are YouTube's pie and Blue V.
Like most teens, I once dreamt of becoming a YouTube sensation. This dream culminated in a Minecraft BedWars video I made with my friends. It got 91 views, not nearly enough to justify the permanent stain left on my digital footprint.
Rewatching these videos takes me back to the blissful carelessness of my early teens. When I close my eyes, I smell the freshly cut grass and hear the screams of “TOP BINS!!!”. While it turned out that you need personality, production quality, and more than one total upload to make it on YouTube, football challenge videos hold a special place in my heart. But not so much for my parents. They got tired of walking in on me watching “Top 10 Respect Moments in Football” at the most ungodly of hours. Still, there are worse things to catch your teenage son doing during those hours.
2016: Bottle Flip Edition | Dude Perfect
By Luke
Nothing on the internet lasts forever, but the bottle flip challenge, in my mind, is the greatest viral trend of all time. It was exquisite in its accessibility and magical moments. The trend’s major advantage was how effective it was at irritating adults. Schools overseas banned it, and one parent on gearjunkie.com called it a “powerful gateway drug to a lifetime of waste and a disregard for the health of natural habitats.” Settle down. At a regional tournament, my cricket team drove our coach to the brink of insanity by obsessively bottle-flipping on the sideline. We finished dead last.
An 18-year-old American at his high school’s talent show birthed the bottle-flipping trend. He lands one flip in sync with Jorge Quintero’s epic 300 Violin Orchestra. The crowd erupts in a roar. It’s a tangle of limbs. Dude Perfect, famous for their outrageous trick shots and stunts, saw that winning concept and took it to a whole new level. My favourite flip went through a sunroof into a car’s cupholder. An honourable mention goes to ‘FLIP or SMASH’, a two-player game in which a failed bottle flip meant a glass bottle to the head. The skill, the comedic timing, the creativity and the celebrations made this video unstoppable. The celebrations made this trend grow to the size it did. The feeling of landing a bottle flip to the excited prepubescent cries of mates was intoxicating. If I landed a bottle flip and did a dab in 2024, it would rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime. Like all trends, bottle flipping began to lose relevance in 2018. Christopher Luxon attempted the trend on October 3, 2023, officially turning off its life support. If bottle flipping was trendy now, I have no doubt our prime minister would outlaw water bottles in schools.
2017: Little Boy | KSI
By Henry
The KSI vs Wroetoshaw diss track drama was a historic battle. With the Sidemen group being the most popular UK group on YouTube during this time, the beef within the group was content mastery. Many thought some would leave, or at least we were made to believe the beef was “real”. I remember this beef being the easiest one to understand, as it included two of the most popular social figures in the group. KSI and Wroetoshaw.
Diss track season was a chaotic time on YouTube. Every week a new thrilling piece of content would appear on my subscription inbox, for us to enjoy. The childish insults like “You ain’t sidemen you gook” and “Keep playing fifa you ignorant fuck, your girl is a gold digger” that 13-year-old me had no real grasp of. This confused me due to the multi-million dollar mansions they lived in. I envied the bling, but I can’t repeat KSI’s more boorish insults in this piece.With this diss track, it’s KSI, looking out on Beverly Hills, standing there verbally abusing Wroetoshaw’s family. He delivers sharp lyrical jabs to the head. The diss track is a mix of competitive spirit and the desire to go viral within the community. The reaction video to the diss track from Wroetoshaw and his middle-aged mum is superficial. They sit there with cheap dangling earphones, acting like they're not earning millions from this beef.We often get sucked into content that's popular, but I still can’t wrap my head around how this was allowed on YouTube. This era of YouTube brings many questions to the table about where society was at this time. It was clearly easier to get away with things. Diss tracks were universally popular due to their provocative nature, which would garner tens of millions of views. YouTube culture in this era would almost always overlook the bad and accept this controversial content for the attention it brought to the scene.
2018: Logan Paul vs KSI
By Luke
The KSI vs Logan Paul boxing match was nothing more than 18 minutes of two egotists punching each other for money. Logan Paul filmed a suicide victim in a Japanese forest for views eight months prior. I will always remember the first line of the apology video, delivered like a kid caught stealing from the cookie jar: “I have made a severe and continuous lapse in my judgement.” Meanwhile, KSI rose to fame, trivialising sexual assault and harassing women at public events. Nowadays, their energy drink company, Prime Hydration, sells highly caffeinated products to their young and impressionable audience. Both creators have also engaged in cryptocurrency ‘pump and dump’ scams, hyping coins up online before selling them to profit at the viewers’ expense. Money talks.
But back then, it seemed like everyone I knew had a dog in the fight. I spent many of my formative years living under a rock and only learned about the boxing match during cricket training. I listened to my teammates’ conversations intently, deciding that supporting KSI would garner the most approval. I’m nostalgic about the months leading up to the fight, but only because “Logan Paul or KSI?” is far easier to answer than “What are you going to do after uni?”
I often wonder why everyone was so obsessed with this boxing fight. Some of this can be attributed to the need for adolescents to fit in and our infatuation with celebrities. But it ran deeper. For us testosterone-fueled males, physical prowess has historically played an over-inflated role in determining our place in social hierarchies. In primary school, the kid who could run the fastest ruled the playground. In high school, it became about who could beat who in a fight. In modern-day toxic environments, bicep circumference and body count can make or break you as a ‘man’. The novel incongruity of two dudes we ‘knew’ battling it out in a boxing arena felt unmissable. Consuming hours of content from a single creator was parasocial, and there was no way we’d miss seeing our ‘mate’ in a fight. It was too good to be true.
2019: Greatest Sports Moments | WTD Productions
By Henry
I spend a lot of time lounging on the couch, doom-scrolling TikTok trying to find something that will enliven my being. I feel miserable about doing sweet fuck all, so I manage to reach for the TV remote, fire up the Apple TV, and search for a YouTube video to distract me from my phone.I click to re-watch the Greatest Sports Moments. Commentator Sir Martin Tyler delivers a line that gave me goosebumps: “Manchester City are still alive here, Balotelli… AGUEROOOOOOO.” “I swear you’ll never see anything like this ever again, so watch it, drink it in.” If your hairs don’t stand on end while watching this scene of utter pandemonium, I'm convinced sport isn't for you.
The video is filled with the highs and the lows of memorable worldwide sporting performances. There’s something for everyone. It’s captivating how the raw passion and titillating tension are distilled into brief moments of euphoria. You might have only just stumbled across this video, but I promise you won’t be disappointed. The cinematography of each clip hits the spot jumping from quick cuts to slo-mo replays. It’s a delightful couch viewing. The video will be played at my funeral. Twenty-eight minutes of peak sporting pleasure.
I’m not the only fan; my co-writer loves the video, even though his beloved Spurs don’t feature once. If you haven't watched it, I hope I've convinced you to indulge in this remarkable video.
Giroud Awakening
YouTube will always be complex. We explored only one miniscule corner of the platform, and yet there was so much to unpack. Our journey through the 2014 to 2018 sports YouTube era threw up a whirlwind of emotions. It was somewhat soothing to revisit content that made us feel like greasy high schoolers again, even if it brought about an overwhelming urge to douse ourselves in Lynx Africa. But seeing some of the dross that passed as comedy back in the day made us wonder if we should’ve left it in the past where it belonged.
There’s always risk associated with revisiting things we once loved. Often, the memory of something is far more beautiful than the experience itself. We can end up tainting the wonderful feelings associated with a memory if we attempt to relive it.
This era of sports YouTube was ephemeral. It was lightning in a bottle and it’s now time to put the lid back on.
Comments