KSI: 'People do the wildest things to be relevant. But respect is the greatest thing you can have'

I ask global internet superstar KSI to imagine the future.

It’s the opening weekend of the Premier League, sometime in the late 2030s, and the Arsenal team bus is rolling through Barking. They’re here to play a recently promoted Dagenham & Redbridge FC.

The Daggers have made a precipitous climb – non-league to the Premier League in barely a decade, a generational run through six flights of football. It’s a PR victory for part-owner KSI, and a coup for Barking and Dagenham, one of the most deprived boroughs in the country

You can open your eyes. Is it possible? Could the Daggers make it to the Prem?

“Yes,” KSI replies. “We can go all the way up. I don’t know if it’ll be as fast as Wrexham did it. But it’s football. You never know.

“But we’re definitely making sure the foundations are good enough so that when we do eventually get promoted, we don’t just fall right back down.”

From our interview vantage point in the Dagenham & Redbridge stadium – a slightly run-down 6,000-seater at the end of a residential street – it’s tempting to scoff at his optimism. But KSI has spent his career surprising people.

In the nearly 20 years since he started posting meme videos online, KSI – real name Olajide Olatunji – has amassed over 46 million YouTube subscribers and 16 billion video views.

He’s dabbled in boxing and music alongside various business ventures; Prime, the energy drink he launched with Logan Paul in 2022, has sold more than a billion bottles (its early scarcity on shop shelves sparked physical fights between UK teenagers in Aldi, and further brawls worldwide). Since 2025, he’s been a judge on Britain’s Got Talent.

Placed against that track record, KSI’s decision to buy a 20% minority stake in Dagenham & Redbridge FC looks less like a swerve than the latest in a long line of novel ventures. But, sitting inside the club’s nondescript offices, media taping the floor and setting up cameras outside, he seems genuinely stoked to be here.

“I thought I was going to get a load of hate, people being like ‘Oh, this is going to be a clown show,’” he says. “But in the majority, people have been great. Everyone’s excited, it’s been good.”

It’s admittedly an incongruous location for the multi-millionaire content mogul – I’d spotted him half an hour before the interview, his lime green Porsche parked in the station’s tiny car park. But he “loves it”, he says.

“I’m a passionate person, so I’ve come down to as many games as I can just to try and push the boys to perform,” he says. “Now is when we start. Now is when we actually put the work in.”

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One early example came in March, when Dagenham & Redbridge became the first National League club to stream a league match free on YouTube via KSI’s official channel. 

The scale of this channel’s reach is hard to grasp for many people. Indeed, depending on how old you are, you might have no idea who KSI is.

When I told my parents I was interviewing KSI, they shrugged in vague recognition. “Is he a rapper?” my mum said, tentatively.

Days later, I mentioned it to one of my brother’s 20-year-old friends and he spilled his pint, shouting “WHAT!?” so loudly that the barman came over.

For the uninitiated, here’s a potted history. He started posting videos as a teenager, mostly streaming video games or reacting to internet memes. At 20, he joined the YouTube prank crew the Sidemen, and things took off quickly: within just a year he was the fourth most popular personality among American teenagers.

He has maintained that popularity through a constant stream of content, often challenge videos involving members of the public. Recent titles include: Best Celebrity Lookalike Wins, Parents Choose Their Son’s Girlfriend, and Make Us Uncomfortable, Win $1,000.

“I recently recorded a video with my brother being stuck in a box for 24 hours,” he tells me, beaming.

This manner of making a living has attracted a fair number of critics – including, initially, KSI’s parents, immigrants from Nigeria who didn’t understand their son’s hobby.

“They were like, ‘What is this? What’s going on? This makes no sense, why do you keep screaming at this camera?’” he laughs. He laughs a lot. 

“Over time, they started to get it. Now they are very supportive.”

Other critics haven’t come around so easily, dismissing his pranking and “memeing” as immature. But the London-born, Watford-raised 33-year-old is unfazed.

KSI describes himself as “an entertainer” – and if entertaining people means looking stupid sometimes,
so what?

“Look, I’m happy to make fun of myself,” he tells me. “I’ve made a fool of myself several times. I’ve had countless cringe moments. I mean, I get memed daily, but like, I don’t take myself super seriously. So it’s all right.

“I always tell people like, you shouldn’t take yourself super, super seriously. Because you know, you’ve got one life, enjoy it. 

“Always be optimistic and have a smile on your face whenever you can.”

His videos are, generally speaking, good-natured – people try to make him laugh, or impersonate a celebrity, or complete some other challenge, usually with a handsome financial reward on the cards. But it’s not always been such harmless fun.

In early 2010s videos, he joked about his “rape face” and called women “sluts” – misogynistic episodes that have aged very poorly. In our interview, he expresses what appears to be genuine contrition over this content.

When I ask him what he regrets, he shakes his head.

“So many things,” he says. “My old content was just really, just wild and out there.

“I was super young, and I didn’t really understand the internet, so I kind of just did whatever to try and get hits. I was in this bubble where everyone was like, ‘This is great, you’re smashing it’. And then, obviously when I got out of that bubble, into the real world, I was like, ‘Oh, actually, I’m doing more harm than good.’”

The online sexism of the early 2000s was grim – as a teenager at the time, I well remember the ‘make me a sandwich’ jokes that populated nascent social media forums. But that seems relatively mild compared to the virulent brand of sexism offered by today’s manosphere influencers.

KSI is contemptuous of the manosphere crowd – “individuals that thrive off the negativity because it’s easy views, easy clips”.

“A lot of these people, all they care about is being relevant. And they will say and do the wildest things to be relevant. But I’ve been doing this for a very, very, very long time, and respect is the greatest thing you can have, and you have to earn that, and that takes a lot of time.

“Life just goes through trends. The manosphere is a trend, and eventually it will die off. If you’re the frontman of the manosphere, when it dies off, you’re going to be like, Oh snap. Now what?”

A lot of manosphere influencers love combat sports like MMA and boxing. KSI dabbled in the latter for a while, but ultimately rejected it – he didn’t like how it made him feel.

“I’m definitely going to pause the boxing because I felt like it was quite negative,” he reflects, spinning a Daggers football on the desk in front of him. “You know, I was – in quotation marks – ‘the nightmare’. It just brought, like a bad side out of me, and I didn’t like that.

“You go to any boxing event, there’s people fighting in the crowd, people swearing at each other. It’s very aggressive. A lot of people don’t feel safe. So I want to stay away from that.”

KSI’s core audience is teenage boys – many of whom might otherwise, or also, be drawn to manosphere content. He’s not interested in pursuing that kind of video.

“I subliminally show people most of the time, or whenever I can, the right way of thinking,” he says. “When things are super negative, you know, I try to change it into a positive.”

Young people certainly need all the positivity they can get. Almost a million young people are currently not in education, employment or training in the UK. 

Prolonged periods of social isolation during the Covid lockdowns created an epidemic of mental health problems, compounded by a cost of living crisis that is scuppering people’s life chances. Funny videos are obviously not going to fix all that. But positive role models do matter.

A few weeks after I speak to KSI, I call the Barking and Dagenham young mayor, 16-year-old Iannis Bonciu. He’d met KSI the month prior, when the YouTuber joined the council to launch a £2 million youth centre.

Just seeing KSI left him lost for words. “It was a very, very, very exciting moment for me,” he recalls, beaming over a Microsoft Teams call.

“They properly like surprised me by hiding me away from him for a while and then they put me in a room with just him and expected me to be able to say something! I’ve watched him since I was a kid! I was like ‘oh my god, it’s him.’”

Barking and Dagenham has some of the poorest youth outcomes in the country. But for Bonciu, having someone with KSI’s profile show up in his borough is a coup for local young people. “It makes us feel heard… they also made us feel respected,” he said.

“[When] I found out why he was there… I was like, ‘oh my god, that’s so great. Thank god you’re here ’cos you can make such a massive improvement to this borough.’”

Hiwot Ameneshoa, who leads youth participation work at the council, believes that just by showing up, KSI showed young people in Barking that the council is working for them; it lends a stamp of legitimacy to the youth club and encourages them to get involved in council programmes.

“Number one, young people feel heard. They’ve told us they want to see these types of people in their spaces. Secondly, we’re showing them that anything’s possible.”

None of this is measurable yet – there is no data on whether a celebrity visit actually shifts youth engagement, just the sense in the room that it did. And KSI’s ambitions centre less on spending than on exposure. But he hopes that by increasing the football club’s profile, he can bring investment to the borough.

“I’m really trying to get people invested in Daggers and invested in the community,” KSI tells me. He hopes eventually to base a content studio in the borough, creating jobs and encouraging other creators to work there too. 

“For me, it’s all about just doing as much as I can around the area. And things will come… the bigger Dagenham & Redbridge get, the more opportunities will come. I’m all in.”

KSI is not the first celebrity to buy into a football club. Ed Sheeran holds a stake in Ipswich, Stormzy in AFC Croydon Athletic, Snoop Dogg in Swansea City.

How much of an impact this can have on the local community is variable. But there is opportunity. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham in 2020, when the club was languishing in the National League – three promotions later, they narrowly missed out on a play-off spot that could have taken them to the Premier League. 

The associated TV show, Welcome to Wrexham, has attracted broader corporate and visitor spend in the town
of Wrexham, and poured money into youth programmes.

Whether Dagenham & Redbridge can pull off anything close to that – both from a footballing or community interest perspective – is, for now, a matter of faith. But KSI seems excited to get started.

What would 16-year-old Olajide Olatunji make of all this – the club, the Porsche, the Prime empire, the BGT judging panel, all of it?

“Mind would be blown,” he says. “Just couldn’t comprehend. I wouldn’t recognise myself. There’s just no way I can do all of that.

“If anything, I think it might scare me. Might put me off, because I’ll look at everything I’ve achieved, and then, you know, as a 16-year-old, I’d be like, how?? It’d be too daunting. It would scare the living hell out of me.

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