One spark in downtime. One impossible bid. One unstoppable esports revolution.

Forged in Fire – Chapter One: Sparks in the Sand

“You ever build a custom FIFA team at 3AM in the middle of a war zone? No? Well, let me take you back…”

The Desert Dream: FIFA and Fatigue in Iraq

I’m casting my mind back to around June 2018. I was in Iraq, on Op. SHADER, serving with the formidable Chinook Force. Working nights as an armourer, it was about 0300HRS. We’d had a solid shift, grabbed some food from the Feeder, and now found ourselves in that familiar quiet – a lull, just waiting for the aircraft to come back. The RAF was a hundred years old that year, and I swear I felt every single one of them, being four months deep into my deployment. The World Cup was just around the corner; the boys were all cheering for England, but honestly, I was too tired to even care.

It wasn’t that I hated the National team. More accurately, I think I’d hit a perspective wall, where living life through a football result just wasn’t going to dictate my emotional state anymore. The past tragedies of supporting England through the 1996 & 1998 International Finals had probably rendered me quite emotionally numb to them. Still, good luck to the lads who were getting invested!

But my detachment didn’t mean I wasn’t tapping into that shared energy. Earlier in the day, I vividly remember spending around four hours with fellow Armourer Josh Hollings, creating a custom FIFA 17 team comprised entirely of RAF Odiham Armourers on the detachment PS4. This wasn’t some casual flick-through; we undertook painstaking analysis of individual stats for each player, then carefully uploaded them into the game. The sheer, bizarre joy that something so utterly precise and, frankly, a bit boring, brought such a small group of us so much laughter was strange. I put it down to serious fatigue, but we had a ball. Screenshots quickly flew through group chats, sparking further analysis and, of course, plenty of banter as people were ruthlessly ripped for their various scores.

And yes, we absolutely started playing matches with them. The undisputed best player in AEF (Armament Engineering Flight) at RAF Odiham was an Armourer named Joe Roberts. His stats in our custom team were, predictably, through the roof. To truly maximize the chaos, Joe had to be played as a centre-back. If he was on your team, you’d consistently try to jink him up the pitch, attempting to replicate one of his legendary real-life goals where he’d weave past everyone from deep. He was, effectively, the cheat code in the game.

That incredible fun we found on the detachment PS4 truly stemmed from our Monday morning Sports Mornings back at AEF. From 1030 to 1200hrs, the entire section would turn out for 90 minutes of football. Two captains would be appointed, teams picked, and then we’d just play. The sheer amount of laughter was contagious, born from having people of all skill levels sharing the pitch. It was genuinely great fun, and that’s precisely the chaotic enjoyment we tried to translate into the game. We’d even coded in traits from those real-life games: a Tom Hopkins with 99 Pace, Tom Hinchcliffe with 99 Tackles, and a Gav Mason boasting 99 Long Shots – typically reserved for those “next goal wins” moments when it was time to reluctantly head back to work.

It was amidst this blend of real-world camaraderie and digital shenanigans that an idea truly began to form. During that deployment, with the long hours and the unique bond forged through these shared moments, I started seriously thinking about opening the very first Esports club in the RAF, right there at RAF Odiham. To make it happen, I knew I needed two things: a dedicated room and some crucial funding for equipment. So, that very night, fuelled by a mix of ambition and probably that persistent fatigue, I fired off messages to the RAF Central Fund, the RAF Odiham Junior Ranks Welfare Fund, and the Nuffield Trust. I hammered out all four applications in about 90 minutes flat, and then it was simply the waiting game. Simultaneously, I sent out a flurry of emails to various Building Custodians, hoping to secure us a nice little room where we could actually set the club up.

Next time on Forged in Fire…

I’d taken the first step – firing off funding bids from Iraq – but what happened when I got back to the UK? Could I find the right people to help? Would anyone even take the idea seriously?

In Chapter Two: A Walk Down the Waddington Memory Lane, I start to reflect on the origins of this idea… What if I could pull it off!?