Hashtag United reveals the story behind Breaking The Net doc

Hashtag United media/operations director, Neil Smythe, and producer/director, Danny Sayers, have revealed what went into making four-part documentary, Breaking The Net.

Breaking The Net follows Hashtag United through its Covid-19 hit 2020/21 season, charting, amongst other things, their momentous FA Cup run during that campaign.

However, with the introduction of a women’s side and an academy team, the makers weren’t originally aiming to have results dictate the documentary’s journey.

“Whenever telling a story around a club or football matches I never want to let the results dictate what we’re doing,” Sayers said at the Broadcast Sport Breakfast Club this week. “Because they might not come along.

“However, if it hadn’t then something else might have happened. We might have got knocked out in the first round and then have to deal with the repercussions of that.”

Indeed, the idea for the documentary came before there was any idea of on-field success. An poll of supporters showed that this was what they wanted, and the team went from there.

Smythe added: “We wanted to tell a story about a pretty unique club in a different way. Apart from live games, this sort of content is what they wanted to see.

“Our audience is predominantly young and predominantly male. They watch online but everybody is still watching one hour docs, for example everyone is watching [Amazon Prime Video’s] All or Nothing.

“Non-league football looks quite different, and you’re not able to get those same shots like that so we had to look at it differently. Originally the plan was to show the documentary monthly, and dip into the back story as we went along. Then Covid squeezed it, and it left us less time to do that.”

With the four-part documentary born out of necessity, Sayers was left with an incredibly quick turnaround after completing the first episode. He explained: “When the November lockdown hit, I had one episode in the bag and then suddenly we had three to four weeks more to make three more!

“It wasn’t too bad. Doing this solely as a shooter and an editor, I kind of knew what I wanted as I was going along. I literally turned around episode 4 in the space of four days. I think if you had a shooter separate to the editor it would take more time.”

Going forward, Hashtag want to build on the success of Breaking The Net with more stories built around the characters involved with the club.

Smythe told Breakfast Club attendees: “We wanted to pick out the fans surrounding the club, but that was the element we weren’t able to do as well as we wanted to in just four episodes. So there are plenty of stories we can still go into and want to go into, especially with the players.

“It’s important to tell the human story, which we don’t usually get to do in our matchday videos. We wanted to shed a little bit of light on the kind of people that make these [non-league] clubs exist.”

The next steps could even mean a push into the US market, with the search on for a distributor on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Almost to a man/woman it has been positive from our core audience. It hasn’t maybe performed as well as I wanted on YouTube in terms of attracting a new audience,” Smythe revealed.

“It was a success but I want to see what can be done to find new audiences, so I’m talking to people in the States about distributing it there through Facebook or similar.

“Over here there is still a resistance amongst core football fans about anything new, amongst a certain audience. American soccer fans are slightly less resistant and so I’m really excited to see what happens.”