I love a bit of footy. I also love the Dreamcast. When the two collide, I sit up and take notice. Indeed, over the years here at the Dreamcast Junkyard, we've pored over the various digital representations of the beautiful (and not-so-beautiful) game pressed to GD-ROM, as well as the somewhat questionable sponsorship deals SEGA Europe entered into with football clubs across the continent. Hell, we even looked somewhat briefly at the Dreamcast Beach Football Challenge which was held in July 2000 in the exotic environs of...erm...Richmond, Surrey.
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| Richmond was the natural choice for beach football. |
But there was another Dreamcast-themed footy event which preceded the Dreamcast Beach Football Challenge; an event which until very recently had completely passed me by, and an event which is almost impossible to find any real information on, even though photographic evidence confirms it was pretty well publicised, featured quite a few celebrity competitors and was even shown on Sky TV.
Now, this all stems from a listing that recently appeared on eBay for a football shirt listed as a 'genuine rare 1999 Dreamcast Millennium Cup celebrity retro football shirt' (thanks to my eagle-eyed Dreamcast Junkyard colleague Kev Mason for the heads up). Intrigued, and initially a little skeptical of the title of the listing, I looked deeper into the background of this shirt, and I feel I may have inadvertently slipped down yet another Dreamcast rabbit hole of lost media. Buckle up for the tale of the Dreamcast Millennium Cup 5-a-side football tournament.
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| Screenshot in case someone with £50 to spare sees this before I cash my giro. Update: Kev bought the shirt. |
Before I continue, I must warn you that everything I've gleaned about this competition is derived from the scant information I can find online and so there's some guesswork included, but I thought I'd document my insanity search results here for posterity. Where else than the internet's premier repository for useless Dreamcast nonsense that only seven people on Earth care about? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.
Anyhow, here's what I discovered. It appears that the Dreamcast Millennium Cup was a nationwide 5-a-side football tournament held across the UK in 1999 and 2000 which was sponsored by SEGA. It's odd to me that the competition wasn't called the SEGA Millennium Cup or something similar, but I suppose that's in keeping with the company's desire to remove almost any reference to the SEGA name from the Dreamcast's branding in Europe at that time. As mentioned, I had never heard of this tournament prior to seeing the eBay listing, but a cursory Google search (other search engines are available) resulted in a few Getty Images/Alamy results and a brief mention over at Sega Retro.
The Sega Retro entry reads:
Dreamcast Millennium Cup
A British celebrity five-a-side tournament was sponsored by the Sega Dreamcast during 1999 and 2000. Thousands of teams took part, with the last 16 having their matches broadcast on Sky Sports in early 2000.
Heavily armed with that information, I looked at the metadata held for the few snaps which appear on the photo-hosting sites that still have images available and it appears that the vast majority of them were snapped on Sunday 13 August 2000 by a photographer named Tom Hevezi. Now, looking for information on Tom Hevezi will show that he was a sports photographer who covered some major sporting events back in that time period, most notably several FA Cup Final games, along with many Premier League matches. So far, so good.
The curious thing about the photos of the Dreamcast Millennium Cup though, is that there are no images of the actual games being played, only shots of some of the celebrities who took part. These include such titans as members of 2000s pop group 911 (one of them wearing the very shirt listed), Quadrophenia star Phil Daniels, Lily Allen's dad and vindaloo worrier Keith Allen, TV presenters Angus Deayton and Bradley Walsh and even the international heart throb and superstar Dean 'Wellard' Gaffney. Oh, and Borat's ex Isla Fisher was there too. Disclaimer: other than Isla Fisher, I'm aware that many of our international readers will have no fucking idea who any of those late '90s and early 2000s British 'stars' are/were, but trust me. They were well known...ish.
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| Isla Fisher touching some bloke's leg. More importantly, note the Dreamcast logo in the background. [Source]
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The entry on Sega Retro about the tournament being broadcast on Sky Sports particularly intrigued me, and so I set about trying to find any archived TV listings or scans of the Sky TV magazine from July or August 2000. The rationale being that if it was indeed shown on Sky Sports, I could glean more information about this most enigmatic of football tournaments to try to find out more information on the make up of the competition: why were thousands of teams involved yet only celebrities appear at the finals? Was it actually broadcast on Sky Sports, and if it was, why is there no footage to be found on sites like YouTube? Surely, a listing in a TV guide magazine would give some more answers?
Alas, after much digging, it doesn't appear that scans of either edition of that magazine are to be found online, and archived Sky Sports schedules don't go back that far. I even messed around with the Sky Sports football listings website to go back to August 2000 to see if the Dreamcast Millenium Cup - somehow - got a mention in the results pages. Alas, it does not. Granted, this was the same day as the FA Community Shield match between Chelsea and Manchester United, but this really isn't valid a reason to not also list the results of a Dreamcast-sponsored 5-a-side tournament featuring intergalactic swagger king Dean Gaffney.
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| If it's going to be listed anywhere, it's betwixt the pages of this ancient tome. |
So what do we know so far? Well, quite a bit actually. There's a shirt listed (at the time of writing) on eBay that was quite probably worn during a match at the Dreamcast Millennium Cup. The competition is documented in photographs hidden in the depths of the Getty Images and Alamy web archives and on Isla Fisher's own fan site. Sega Retro mentions that the competition took place between 1999 and 2000 and metadata on the aforementioned photos pinpoints Sunday 13 August as the date and Tottenham, London as the location - perhaps at Tottenham Hotspurs' now demolished White Heart Lane ground.
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| Isla Fisher again. There's some actual football pictured in this shot. [Source] |
As a bit of a side note, when questioned by Kev (who originally spotted the 'Dream Team' branded shirt on eBay, and who has since purchased it before I could actually publish this article) the seller 'kirbaldo' stated that the person they initially acquired it from was actually involved in the running of the Dreamcast Millennium Cup and that the shirt was left behind by one of the celebrity teams involved, so there's that too.
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| The smoking gun. Or shirt. Um. |
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| It's literally being worn in this photo... which hasn't been reproduced here for fear of legal action. |
Many lines of inquiry remain unanswered though, at least for now. Who won the tournament? Why were only celebrities pictured at the finals? Was it actually shown on Sky Sports (one photo depicting disgraced football commentator Stuart Hall holding a microphone suggests at least some broadcast activity)?
There are many questions I don't have (and can't find) the answers to at this point, and to be fair looking at the list of ne'er-do-wells involved in the Dreamcast Millennium Cup I'm wondering if that's for the best at this point. That said, this is clearly a forgotten footnote in the long and storied history of the Dreamcast, and now if anyone ever fancies typing the words 'Dreamcast Millennium Cup' into their internet search engine of choice, perhaps this diatribe will shed some dim light upon it. That's how SEO works isn't it?
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| RIP Wellard the dog. Gone too soon. Shared in Walford hun xx. |
What do you think? Do you remember the Dreamcast Millenium Cup 5-a-side tournament? Did you play in it at some stage? Did you watch the broadcast on Sky Sports? Are you Dean Gaffney? If you can answer yes to any of these questions, please let us know in the comments. Apart from you, Dean.
Thanks to Kev for the heads up on the shirt in the first place - I hope you enjoy wearing it and that it was boil washed thoroughly in the gulf of time between it being sweated into by a member of the Hollyoaks cast and your purchase. Also thanks to kirbaldo for the extra info on the origins of the garment. Check out kirbaldo's other retro football shirts here.