There is, quite simply, too much football on the internet to watch it all.
It doesn’t matter what your specific tastes are, we have reached landfill levels of internet football video detritus: there’s “Domagoj Vida 2018 — Welcome to Liverpool FC? | Crazy Tackles & Goals | HD”, there’s “Marc Albrighton — Wonderkid ☆HD 1080p☆”, there’s “20 Times Messi Made Offside Trap Foolish ►Inhuman Vision HD” and there’s “Di Stefano vs Puskas” with music by Scooter.
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Many of these compilations — the clips not so much edited together as minced — have little significance beyond their low-res confines: this player was great/terrible and here is a succession of incidents to prove it.
But some become a portal for one’s footballing curiosity, the first step down a rabbit hole.
One such artefact, set to a purposeful but sleazy Belgian New Wave soundtrack, provides a permanent record of every single touch made by Claudio Caniggia for Wembley FC against Langford FC in the extra preliminary round of the 2012-13 FA Cup.
It’s tricky to calibrate your football brain as to how impressive Caniggia is here: on one hand, this is a then 45-year-old Iggy Pop stunt-double who hasn’t kicked a football in a competitive setting for eight years. On the other hand, this is a sprightly veteran of three World Cups up against a defence that would go on to concede 103 goals in the Spartan South Midlands Football League Division One, the 10th tier of English football.
His touches are sure, his movement instinctively sharp and the pace that once enticed half a Cameroon team into grievous bodily harm at the 1990 World Cup has, apparently, aged superbly. With 12 minutes on the clock, that elite muscle memory all comes together: Caniggia scuttles after a ball that bounces over the head of a Langford defender and tucks the ball beyond the goalkeeper. It’s weirdly easy.
And that’s the weird tip of an anomalous footballing iceberg.
Why was the great Claudio Caniggia, Argentina’s “Son of the Wind”, slotting goals beyond 10th-tier goalkeepers in the deepest recesses of the FA Cup? It’s a story of beer, branding, bewilderment and Brian McBride — and one that will surely never be repeated.
A shade over a mile and a half of suburban north west London separates Wembley Stadium, ground zero for the FA Cup’s weathered mythology, and Wembley FC, a mid-table team in the Combined Counties League Premier Division North.
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Founded in 1946, the closest Wembley FC have ever been to the FA Cup final is a solitary appearance in the competition’s first round proper in 1980. Their obligatory Latin club motto of A Posse Ad Esse — “From Possibility To Reality” — looked like an open promise, at best.
June 2 marks the 35th anniversary of their one and only game down the road at the national stadium: a 3-0 defeat to Hendon, featuring a very young Iain Dowie, in front of a crowd of 5,000 in the final of the Middlesex Senior Charity Cup in 1988. The highlights of that game were shot by a pitchside camcorder, revealing a cavernous, barren, pre-rebuild Wembley, save for one prescient flash of identity: a giant Budweiser advertising hoarding behind one of the goals.
On Wembley FC plodded for another quarter of a century, saved from extinction by local business owner Brian Gumm — who remains their owner and chairman to this day — maintaining a solid but unspectacular presence at steps five and six of the non-League system (which are the ninth and 10th tiers of English football).
Their manager — and the unquestionable Mr Wembley FC — is Ian Bates, who first played for the club in 1993, wore the shirt for more than a thousand games and remains their de facto head groundsman, because this is how football works at the bottom of the pyramid. Bates will, by all accounts, never leave Wembley FC — and not just because his long-term partner is the owner’s daughter.
All considered, they are not a remarkable football club. But they have that name.
March 2012: Wembley are meandering to a 10th-place finish in the Combined Counties Premier Division, safely cocooned from both the promotion shake-up and the relegation dogfight.
“It was probably the mid-to-late point of that season and we started to get wind that something was happening,” says Toby Webb, who now lives in New York, where he works as a sales director for a financial data company. Back then, he was a tidy right-back who had joined Wembley soon after moving to London after university.
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“We’d heard there was some interest from Budweiser to do a documentary, but we didn’t really know what it meant.”
The all-American beer giant was almost 12 months into an £8million-a-year deal with the FA to sponsor the FA Cup and, whatever instinctive resistance there might have been from the purists, were keen to emphasise the parallels. “It’s optimism in a bottle,” said Budweiser’s marketing man at the announcement, suggesting that the inherent, democratic, aspirational qualities of the FA Cup matched the company’s own “American values”.
The challenge for Budweiser wasn’t just to cross the cultural divide. The FA Cup was now entering a prolonged era of existential crisis, of weakened teams being fielded and managed priorities. But its scope and spirit were, largely, intact.
Will Humphrey was then a brand strategist at advertising agency Anomaly, who had been tasked with capitalising on Budweiser’s FA Cup deal with a strategy to get the UK football fan’s attention (the same agency was behind the sky-blue “Welcome to Manchester” billboard following Carlos Tevez’s acrimonious 2009 move from Manchester United to Manchester City).
“A very famous line did the rounds in the agency: they wanted to make Budweiser ‘the Coke of beers’. So we said, ‘OK, you can’t just come in and slap your logo on anything’. A lot of big American brands are about democracy — the Bud you drink in Seoul is the same you have in Slough. So we said, ‘OK, you’re about democracy, the FA Cup is about democracy. There’s a market here: if you sponsor grassroots football and you put a bit more money into it than just doing a one-off stunt, we can make this a real thing’.”
Budweiser’s previous attempt to infiltrate UK football had leaned heavily on the old, worn-out cultural transatlantic tensions: the joke, in essence, was that those Americans just don’t get it.
They needed a more authentic approach. And what more authentic English footballing figure could they have called upon than one Terence Frederick Venables? A former Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur and England manager; inheritor of “El Tel”, football’s most efficiently brilliant nickname; the only conceivable individual in British football history who could have released a single through Decca Records and, crucially, someone whose grin could comfortably bridge the chasm between commercial interest and pure football.
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“We got wind that Venables was coming down,” Webb says. “But we didn’t really know what the angle was. I remember watching on Sky Sports News, actually on the ticker at the bottom, ‘Terry Venables appointed director of football at Wembley FC’ and we were like, ‘What the hell is going on?!’”
Venables was, in fact, announced as Wembley FC’s “technical advisor”, with a remit to mentor their 38-year-old player-manager Bates, pass on his footballing wisdom to the squad and help them boldly go where the club had only once been before — the first round proper of the FA Cup.
Oh, and with one extra complication: a full film crew were going to follow their every move.
“It was full-on,” Webb says. “A full-on movie crew, following you around twice a week with big production vehicles, all the food and drink, loads and loads of people about, you’re getting mic’d up and it was completely new to everyone.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is actually like (hit UK reality TV show) The Only Way Is Essex… we’re all going to be celebrities.”
“We met with a psychologist,” team-mate Chris Korten says. “They said, ‘Be prepared for becoming famous’, and we were like, ‘What?!’”
The end result would be Dream On: The Journey Of Wembley FC, an eight-part series of occasionally mindblowing banality peppered with some half-baked set pieces in pursuit of “human interest” storylines.
As the American documentary-makers swung between making a fly-on-the-wall football series (but without the screaming and shouting) and a reality show (without anybody willing to make a complete fool of themselves in the hope of brief TV infamy), what spilled out in the edit was a puzzling compromise.
In between uncomfortably extended, overdramatically soundtracked training drills at jogging pace were scenes such as Webb and Korten going for dinner with their partners and the team’s happily vast goalkeeper Lee Pearce being subjected to bleep tests with a Budweiser-funded personal trainer in a local park.
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Meanwhile, some genuine tension was growing between the cheerfully engaged Venables and the terse player-manager whose team was being slowly reprogrammed before his eyes. But this wasn’t just Bates’ team, it was Bates’ level: he knew these depths of non-League like few others.
Venables’ 4-3-3 system and optimistic instructions to play between the lines and drag opponents out of position to exploit the space left behind caused immediate friction for a manager with intimate knowledge of the limitations of players in the Combined Counties. At one point, as the players digest a day of positional drills on the pitches at Bisham Abbey (the training base for England’s teams for decades before St George’s Park finally dragged the FA into the 21st century), Bates derides the new methods — with a convincing sneer — as “Terry Venables’ book of tricks”.
Korten, a lithe centre-back with a willingness to put his head in where the studs were flying without being an outright bruiser, immediately spotted that Venables and his FA-licensed coaching team were aiming a little too high.
“There was a misalignment between what they were trying to achieve at that level of football with the players, the sessions and also the time and the speed they were trying to get it across,” Korten recalls. “It was purely for the cameras and it’s also not how you would try to win a league like that. There’s no way that having two days working on stuff with Venables was going to turn us into Barcelona.”
The final weeks of Wembley’s 2011-12 season came and went without a hint of a tactical and philosophical overhaul, but Budweiser’s strategy people weren’t giving up.
Over several weeks, in an effort to transmit his ideas to the squad on the training pitch, Venables enlisted the help of some trusted ex-players… and some unexpected names. England Euro 96 hero David Seaman came in to guide the goalkeepers, his old Arsenal team-mate Ray Parlour popped up to muck in with the midfielders (and seemingly attempt a joke about Tottenham approximately once every three minutes) and the forwards were given pointers by the unlikely pair of Caniggia and the recently-retired former Fulham and United States striker McBride.
“We had initially planned for the (ex-pros) not to play,” Humphrey says. “We wanted them to coach the team. Then there was a difference of opinion with Budweiser…”
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The rumour mill cranked into gear, Webb says. “Every day, there was speculation about someone else who may or may not be joining. We didn’t really know anything about the players and most people were really just interested, to be perfectly honest, about whether we were now going to be getting paid.”
“Every day, it would be a new player,” Korten says. “They kind of piecemeal rolled them out.”
Budweiser had applied their foot to the Wembley FC pedal and an official unveiling of their new signings was arranged for that June.
Leading UK broadcaster Mark Chapman compered the event, Venables grinned his universally loved grin, Seaman squeezed himself into one of Wembley’s new branded Umbro polo shirts, former Chelsea and England full-back Graeme Le Saux eloquently played himself down and Caniggia looked like his glam metal band’s first arena tour in 17 years had just happened to coincide with a multi-million-dollar bill from the US tax authorities.
Wembley and Budweiser had gone full gimmick.
At this point, the inherent flaw in putting all these ex-professional eggs in Wembley FC’s FA Cup basket became clear: it had to be all or nothing. In front of a curious press pack at the club’s Vale Farm home, Venables opted for the former:
“Basically, the idea is to get Wembley FC to Wembley Stadium, which you can see from here, by winning the cup.”
Wembley hadn’t just brought in a bit of FA Cup nous — they’d implanted their team with a whole new spine: Martin Keown (45 years old) would be the defensive linchpin, Le Saux (43) would shore up the left side of the back four, Parlour (39) would be the embodiment of Venables’ new passing system and Caniggia would dovetail with McBride in a strike partnership with a combined age of 85.
Three Englishmen, an Argentinian and an American had quite literally walked into Wembley’s club bar (which, as part of their Budweiser deal, had been refurbished under the supervision of Hollywood production designer Majken Larsson, whose previous credits included UFO Hunters, Big Brother: USA and “Superstar Slime Showdown at Super Bowl 2018”), but the punchline was yet to be established.
What a day for Wembley FC! Seaman, Keown, Parlour, Le Saux, McBride and Caniggia sign for the club. More soon.
— Wembley FC (@WembleyFC) June 21, 2012
The uppermost question in many people’s heads — then and now — may well have been: “What are you doing here?”
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“I’d done a big signing event for Budweiser at a Walmart (one of the USA’s biggest supermarket chains), then that relationship sort of grew a little bit,” McBride tells The Athletic. “Then they brought this opportunity to me. I actually was still in pretty good shape, it was close enough after retirement that I hadn’t let myself go too much. So, yeah, it seemed interesting to me!”
Six weeks later, Wembley FC’s FA Cup journey began, alongside 399 other ninth- and 10th-tier hopefuls, in the extra preliminary round, the annual showcase of the nominative glory of English non-League football: Hoker Old Boys, Billingham Synthonia, Norton & Stockton Ancients, no fewer than four clubs ending in “Miners Welfare”, Shepshed Dynamo, Thurnby Nirvana, Pilkington XXX, Stone Dominoes, Coventry Sphinx, Quorn, Burnham Ramblers, Sporting Bengal United, Bemerton Heath Harlequins…
Wembley’s rather more straightforwardly-named opponents were Langford FC, of the Spartan South Midlands Football League Division One.
As they were playing their football one level higher than Langford, Bates’ new-look side were, on paper, the favourites. But, inevitably, Budweiser’s well-publicised involvement in their immediate future had put a target on their backs, says Webb. “Every single team we played hated us because we had nice kits, a minibus… every game was like a cup final for our opponents. So it was actually more difficult for us on the pitch.”
On a baking-hot August afternoon at Vale Farm, which had been transformed into a monument for Budweiser’s branding, Langford’s players trotted out in front of ESPN’s live cameras with “Paul Donald Gas Plumbing Heating” on their shirts.
The broadcaster was giving the occasion the full matchday treatment, the first-ever FA Cup extra preliminary round tie to be shown live on TV. Presenter Rebecca Lowe strode through Vale Farm’s newly-refurbished function room, where the FA Cup itself was perched precariously on the bar (and watched over by two ludicrously stern bouncers), before handing over to commentator Derek Rae for the team news which, for once, did actually warrant the description “all-important”.
Sorry guys, team line up: Pearce, Le saux, Merritt, Hale, Korten, Bates, Parlour, finnigan, Atkins, McBride and Caniggia
— Wembley FC (@WembleyFC) August 11, 2012
Amid the fanfare and curiosity of Wembley’s influx of ex-internationals, there was an awkward flipside: several of their, unpaid, regular starters would have to be dropped for the biggest game of their lives.
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“Yeah, I was one of them!” says lawyer and former Wembley forward Paul McComb, who had rejoined them after a spell working in Brussels to find a club transformed. “I started quite regularly in league games and I ended up on the bench for the cup game — but you just had to accept it.
“You can either take that positively or negatively — there’s very little complaint about Claudio Caniggia getting picked ahead of you!”
Others might have been a little more disgruntled. Wembley’s all-time leading scorer Paul Shelton, who was closing in on 150 goals for the club, found himself replaced as the attacking spearhead by McBride, who admits he was aware of the potential for friction.
“I think everybody that was on the professional side came in with the attitude of, like, ‘Listen, we understand we’re sort of stepping in here. By no means do we want to upset or unbalance the group’,” says McBride.
“I think that it is awkward, especially for the manager and the players that are coming out of the team. The buy-in from those players has to be very high. They were getting some refurbishment to the stadium, so I think it probably outweighed any of the hard conversations they had to have.”
Kristian Hale, Wembley’s long-serving left-back, got shuffled across to the centre of defence to accommodate Le Saux, who “didn’t like getting told off by the assistant manager for not tracking his man!”.
“In all honestly, were those guys dropped unfairly? I don’t think so,” Hale says. “I think Jimmy Bullard (a free agent that summer after leaving Ipswich Town of the second-tier Championship) was meant to be getting involved at one point but his agent told him, ‘I know you want to do this but you’re not going to be as valuable to your next club, because you’ll be cup-tied (if he had already played for Wembley in that season’s competition)’. I think just being part of it was something quite magical.”
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Within 13 minutes, and with his 13th touch, Caniggia gave the brand strategists the moment they had been working towards for months.
“None of the ex-pros have really been able to have an influence so far,” ESPN co-commentator Craig Burley observed just as Diego Maradona’s old mate made it 1-0. “I hope he’s on a goals bonus, because he’s earned himself a few quid.”
Meanwhile, Webb — whose ability in possession Venables had noticed in training and led to him being converted into a ball-playing midfielder — had to watch on from the sidelines having torn the groin muscles in both legs when goalkeeper Pearce landed on top of him during a pre-season game.
“It was a sunny day, at home, the pitch was nice and I remember watching it and just thinking, ‘This is amazing’,” says Webb. “And I actually thought we could do something. But then, after about 20-25 minutes, you started to see Ray Parlour was absolutely blowing (exhausted) in the centre of midfield.
“I don’t know whether they would ever say, but it is tough, right? Just because they were ex-pro footballers, their ability didn’t really stand out. Technically, you look at them in warm-ups and it was brilliant, but the fitness levels you needed to have at any level of football to compete are so high and, actually, fitness levels can probably go beyond technical ability to some degree.
“Parlour had some really nice touches but after about 20, 30 minutes, it was hard for him, like he couldn’t he couldn’t get up and down the pitch.”
As Parlour laboured to track back on a Langford counter-attack, the visitors equalised on the half-hour. Within two minutes, though, two of Wembley’s mere mortals combined to re-establish the lead, Bates curling a superb pass through the Langford defence for 21-year-old striker Daryl Atkins to poke home a Caniggia-esque finish.
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Two minutes into the second half, Caniggia’s perfectly weighted pass released Atkins again. It was 3-1 and Wembley had one Budweiser-branded foot in the preliminary round — five games from round one, where teams from the EFL join the competition. Despite a late Langford rally, the FA Cup curios were through.
Eighth-tier Uxbridge lay in wait, but Wembley’s elite options were already dwindling. Parlour and Le Saux were ruled out with muscle injuries, Keown’s hamstrings again consigned him to the bench and, despite Venables’ right-hand man Ted Buxton compiling a full scouting report on the opposition, Bates’ preparations were thrown into mild disarray.
“It was never explained,” says Korten, who had been restored to Wembley’s starting line-up for the league fixtures. “So that’s why, turning up on that day, Batesy was just like, ‘This is a farce’. To be fair to him, he’s trying to put a team together and a structure together and, at the 11th hour, (Budweiser) were like, ‘Yeah, they’re not coming’.”
Nor was McBride, whose transatlantic schedule got in the way. “I was actually on the way to the airport and they called and said, ‘OK, the next round of the FA Cup is on such-and-such date. At the time I was working for Fox as an analyst and I’m like, ‘Oh, well, unfortunately, I have to be at work!’”
With Hale reverting to left-back, Korten looked likely to play his part in the FA Cup adventure after all… only for another late twist and another England international to be standing in his way.
“He hadn’t been there at all, he hadn’t been involved, and Ugo Ehiogu rocked up in the changing room. Massive guy, like you can’t imagine how big he was. And I got dropped and I was just like, ‘This is the FA Cup!’”
“You’ve been building up to it since March, when Terry arrived, and building it up… then they bring in Ugo. So I think it was my first experience of getting bombed off for the pros and it hurts. I’m still bitter about it 11 years later!
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“I feel like they were just pulling them out of the hat, just phoning up agents and seeing who they could pluck out.”
However, the returning Shelton took his frustrations out on Uxbridge, muscling his way through to open the scoring and Atkins found the top corner to give Wembley a 2-0 half-time lead. Venables, Ehiogu and Keown held court in the cramped dressing room, urging the players not to consider the job done yet.
Within the space of three second-half minutes, Uxbridge scored twice. So it was back to Vale Farm, 72 hours later, for a replay under the floodlights. The ESPN cameras were back, but the documentary crew had long gone — and so had most of Wembley’s star signings. Only Caniggia now remained in the starting line-up, and the sense was that the dream had peaked.
“We were struggling in the replay, we weren’t really in it,” says Hale. “I had to say to Caniggia, ‘Can you try and drop deeper, get on the ball? You’re not in the game’. And it was ridiculous, really, telling someone like him. He said, ‘What, me? Playmaker?!’”
With Venables also absent and Bates continuing to toil in midfield, Keown’s inherent earnestness took over on the touchline — to little effect, Hale recalls.
“I think we went 2-0 down and he said, ‘Let’s go to a back three’. They had three up top and it ended up being 5-0.”
Keown slipped out of the crestfallen dressing room with a “Good luck, lads” and the documentary’s tagline of “Dream On” looked suddenly rather sarcastic. Wembley’s foreseeable legacy was still secured — the Budweiser deal had given them a renovated stadium and a clubhouse that was the envy of the league. The branded minibus remains in the club car park.
“All I can say is that the experience Budweiser gave us was fantastic,” Wembley’s owner Gumm tells The Athletic. “The team loved it and we as a club were so grateful.”
“I don’t think, with the calibre of players they brought in, we were ever going to go much further,” Webb concedes, looking back. “If I’m honest, I didn’t really ever get the sense we were going to get to the third round (when the Premier League sides get involved) or anything like that.”
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But what could Budweiser really have done differently? Korten thinks a more measured approach would have paid off, even at the cost of some fleeting publicity: “What they should have done is brought in a load of players from the level above. Wembley, the football club, missed a trick — they were in a privileged position to push on.”
Eleven years on, Wembley remain a ninth-tier club. They still have that name — but only just.
In a final, unsavoury twist to their brush with football’s commercial tentacles, they were subject to legal action from the FA over their rights to the Wembley trademark, which had passed to them after the expiry of the Budweiser partnership.
“I am not being greedy, I am just trying to get the best deal I can,” said Gumm in 2017, in the midst of the legal battle. “We worked hard for what we got from that (Budweiser) promotion. We are being treated this way because we are a little club. The FA should have a little respect for grassroots football. That’s what they are supposed to be about.”
The FA’s case made some unusual claims, including that Wembley FC’s badge infringed the stadium’s intellectual property on the basis that “the Latin language (of Wembley FC’s club motto) is not commonly understood or spoken by the average English-speaking consumer and, as such, this element cannot be memorable or distinctive in the minds of the public.”
It also claimed the lion on Wembley’s club crest could conceivably be confused with England’s Three Lions.
Wembley FC lost thousands in contesting the FA’s claim but continue to display their branding to the world — even if the world is no longer watching.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
