Chelcee Grimes explains her story, embracing content creation as a means of blending her love of music and football.
I started hearing the phrase ‘content creator’ increasingly thrown around in 2019 during my first real job in television with the BBC, for the Women’s World Cup in France. I was hungry to do more in entertainment outside of music. After seven years, I had written enough songs to keep me going, but I was bored of being cooped up in a studio 24/7. I wasn’t getting enough sunlight, and my doctor said it’s likely the reason I have a very intense vitamin D deficiency – no windows in basement studios for most of my 20s.
I was being flown to different cities in France for four weeks, doing small bits during half-time at different international games. I would speak to fans about their fashion sense when the main presenter took a break during half-time. It was so much fun! I was out there living, trying my hand at presenting, getting tickets to watch all the games and seeing the women’s game sell out in 60,000+ stadiums. It felt like everyone from the sporting world was there, from brands to TV and radio stations; everyone was ready to send women’s football into the next phase and they were all out there with me. Multiple brands asked me to be a content creator, making content for their socials. I winced, wide-eyed almost because I thought of content creators back then as people desperate to be famous. The people who would post their entire lives on the internet for views. I thought it was a bit tacky, lacked substance and was far from anything I stood for. It was the opposite of what got me to that point in my career.
Then I saw the money they were offering so I took a few days to look online and see what people were creating. At this point, I had accumulated over 30/40 thousand followers on Twitter and Instagram. Not a crazy amount, but it was genuine. I had high engagement and was therefore powerful. My following demographic was a 50/50 male and female split and typically aged 18-30 based in the UK, but I had a global following too. The key here is that they were half music and half football fans – this was golden for the brands. There isn’t another singer/songwriter/footballer that I know of, so I stood out. Brands were trying to tie in culture with sport connecting pop stars with sports and vice versa. For them, it made sense for me to share what was going on with my followers because I had both.
