Hashtag United score ten in the FA Cup preliminary round

On 22 August, in the preliminary round of the Emirates FA Cup, Hashtag United beat Enfield 10-1. It was the biggest score of a round that had 136 ties scheduled across the country, and it came from a club that spent the spring asking to be moved down a division because it could not afford to stay where it was.

That combination — a ten-goal win from a side that volunteered for demotion five months earlier — is the strangest story of the English cup season so far, and it is only two rounds old.

The club a YouTuber built

Hashtag United were formed in March 2016 by Spencer Carmichael-Brown, better known to a few million subscribers as Spencer FC. It began as a team of friends playing filmed matches for an online audience and turned, over a decade, into an actual football club climbing an actual pyramid.

They reached the Isthmian League Premier Division, the seventh tier of English football, which for a club founded inside a decade is a remarkable climb. Getting there turned out to be the easier half.

The season they asked to go down

The 2025-26 campaign ended with Hashtag United twentieth of twenty-two and relegated. Before it finished, the club had already asked to go further: a request for voluntary demotion, with Carmichael-Brown stating publicly that staying at that level had become financially unsustainable.

It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. Clubs fight relegation. They do not normally write to the league asking to be moved down because the travel, the wages and the ground requirements of the seventh tier cost more than the club can carry. Hashtag United did, and said so in plain terms.

They begin 2026-27 in the Isthmian League North Division — Step 4, the eighth tier — playing at Oakside Stadium in Barkingside, Essex.

And then they scored ten

The FA Cup does not care about any of that. The preliminary round paired them with Enfield and they won 10-1.

For context on what that number means at this level: the next biggest wins of the round were Pontefract Collieries 8-0 against Parkgate and Thame United 7-1 against Brislington. Double figures in a competitive cup tie is not something that happens most years, in any round.

Seven divisions below the Premier League

Step 4 is the eighth tier of English football. To put that in the terms most people use, there are seven divisions between Hashtag United and the Premier League: the Isthmian Premier they were just relegated from, then the National League North, the National League, League Two, League One, the Championship and the top flight.

That is the gap the FA Cup is designed to collapse. Not fully — no eighth-tier club is reaching January — but far enough that a side from Barkingside and a side from Manchester are, technically, in the same knockout competition on the same Saturday in May.

One win from their best ever

Here is the part that gives the next fortnight some weight. Hashtag United have reached the second qualifying round three times — in 2020-21, 2023-24 and 2024-25 — and have never gone further. That is the ceiling of their entire FA Cup history.

The first qualifying round is on Saturday 5 September. Win it and they equal a club record they have spent a decade setting. Win the round after and they beat it for the first time.

There is a long way from here to anywhere famous — six more rounds before the competition proper even starts, and the Premier League clubs do not enter until the third round on 9 January 2027. But that is the shape of the FA Cup, and it is why a tie in September between two clubs most people have never heard of is still part of the same competition that finishes at Wembley on 22 May.

Why this is the story of the round

English football spent the last week of August talking about the transfer window and a Premier League table two matches old. Meanwhile, in the eighth tier, a club founded on YouTube that had just asked to be relegated for financial reasons put ten goals past someone in the oldest cup competition in the world.

The FA Cup produces this every year and almost nobody reports it, because the rounds that generate it are played in front of a few hundred people in August and September, months before the cameras arrive.

That is the argument for paying attention now rather than in January. By the time the third round draw is made, the clubs that made the early rounds interesting will mostly be gone — and the ones still standing will have earned it across six matches that almost nobody was watching, in grounds where the tannoy is a man with a microphone and the programme is stapled.