‘I left my job to play Football Manager full time’

A YouTuber who left his council job to play the hit computer game Football Manager full time says he has doubled his salary since ditching his post.

Tom Kelsey, 26, from Lincoln, started a YouTube channel dedicated to the popular game while he was a student at Nottingham Trent University.

He now posts about three videos a week on average and runs his channel from his bedroom at his parents’ house.

“It’s the freedom that I get from it, that’s what I love,” he said.

Football Manager, which puts the player in charge of running a football club, first grabbed the attention of gamers in 2004.

The series, developed by Sports Interactive, has continued to grow ever since, with the latest edition – Football Manager 2024 – recently released.

“As [the channel] got more popular and more people started watching it, you start to earn money from the adverts that you see,” he Mr Kelsey said.

“Suddenly this became an idea – that I could do this as a job one day.”

Mr Kelsey left his job as a business support assistant at Lincolnshire County Council in August 2022 to devote more time to pursuing his ambition.

“In terms of the money I make now, it’s double what I was earning in my full-time job before I did YouTube,” he said.

“For me to be able to earn that money whilst also being my own boss and having my own choices and not work for someone else is the best part of it.”

His online channel has 118,000 subscribers and gets around one million views per month.

“I can easily spend 50 to 60 hours a week playing Football Manager, which may sound like it would drive some people crazy but it’s a dream for me,” he said.

He told the BBC his family and friends were very supportive about his career as a virtual Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp.

“It’s a very unusual career path when you say you’re going to play video games for my job,” he said.

“It keeps growing year on year, month on month, so I’ll try and do this for as long as I can.”

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