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Alfie Potts Harmer left HITC Sevens after nine years

The soccer creator is moving to long-form documentaries on his personal channel after GRV Media rejected his bids to buy the outlet.

Alfie Potts Harmer has ended a nine-year run at HITC Sevens and plans to publish long-form soccer documentaries on his independent channel, work he said management never let him pursue at the flagship outlet.

Harmer wrote, narrated, edited, and thumbnail-designed alone through 1,941 videos that drew 339 million views across his tenure.

Friction built after a 60-minute documentary he produced was pulled in October over an unspecified legal issue. He was then told to make shorter pieces, stay away from contentious topics, and insert ads for an internal app called Talking Points, a requirement he had long refused.

Harmer submitted two bids to buy the channel from GRV Media. Both were rejected, and GRV Media countered with a price roughly double his final offer, which he declined.

In his final weeks at HITC Sevens, he published a string of deliberately odd listicles, including rankings of the seven worst bald people in soccer and every player named Dembele. Viewers joked he was trying to get himself fired.

"There was the idea that I was making absurd videos because I wanted to be sacked. That was never the case," Harmer said. "It just seemed more fun and interesting to me, to subvert the genre by breaking it down to its core components in order to expose its mechanics, flaws and cliches in a way that I'd never really seen anyone else do before on YouTube."

"I have no personal grievances and bear no ill will towards HITC, the parent company GRV, or anyone there. We just had different interests and priorities which ultimately became insurmountable."