World Chase Tag® has always had something special. Twenty seconds of action & impossible athleticism. A format so visually compelling that it stops thumbs mid-scroll.

The league understood this early. WCT built a sport that works for modern audiences. Short bursts of high-stakes drama, clear winners and losers, and athletes whose personalities shine through the chaos. It’s a format tailor-made for the attention economy.

Now, two athletes are proving just how powerful that formula really is. With nothing more than a smartphone and the raw footage from training sessions and local events, Roland Hannigan and Redouan Yagoub have generated numbers that should make the entire Chase Tag® community pay attention.

And in the process, they’ve revealed a blueprint that could accelerate the sport’s growth faster than anyone imagined.

The Roland Hannigan Phenomenon

Roland Hannigan isn’t just posting content. He’s breaking the internet with it.

The Dexterity Depot athlete and Squid Game: The Challenge contestant (Player 418) has been building something remarkable on Instagram and TikTok. Not with a production team. Not with expensive equipment. Just his phone, basic editing, and an understanding of what makes Chase Tag® impossible to look away from.

The results speak for themselves:

One single Instagram video has surpassed 100 million views.

Let that sink in. 100 million. From phone footage of competitive tag.

And it’s not a fluke. Roland has multiple videos exceeding 20 million views. His TikTok compilations regularly pull hundreds of thousands of likes. Single posts generate thousands of comments from people discovering Chase Tag® for the first time.

The formula is almost aggressively simple:

• Single phone footage from training sessions or competitions
• Basic keyframing for zoom-ins, zoom-outs, and action tracking
• Minimal cuts to preserve the raw energy
• Voice-over commentary that adds context and personality

No fancy transitions, no elaborate graphics packages and no team of editors working around the clock.

The comments section tells the real story.

The views prove the format works. The next challenge? Converting those millions of eyeballs into subscribers, followers, and an engaged community. Views are vanity; audience is value. Cracking that conversion piece, turning casual scrollers into people who actively seek out Chase Tag® or athlete content, is what separates viral moments from sustainable growth.

Rooftop Kings

If Roland’s journey demonstrates what an individual athlete can achieve, Redouan Yagoub’s approach shows how gym owners and event organisers can tap into the same flywheel.

Redouan is the team captain and owner of Rooftop Kings, the Rotterdam-based team that operates the second official World Chase Tag® Quad™ in the Netherlands (Rotterdam). In November 2025, he organized the Rotterdam Chase-Off™, bringing together international teams for a local event.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Roland was at the Rotterdam Chase-Off™. And Roland brought his phone.

The footage Roland captured (raw, unpolished, authentic) became fuel for Redouan’s own content strategy. Using clips from the event, Redouan started posting consistently to the Rooftop Kings YouTube channel in early December.

The numbers in the last 30 days alone:

• 17,000 new subscribers (growing from ~3,000 to over 20,000)
• 44 million views
• 1.4 to 3.5 million views per day
• 400 to 1,400 new subscribers daily

The channel now sits at over 20,000 subscribers (as of Jan 11th) with over 50 million total views, and the growth is still accelerating. On January 2nd, the channel gained 1,200 subscribers in a single day. On January 10th, it pulled 3.5 million views in 24 hours.

This model reveals something powerful for gym owners across the community: your local events are content goldmines.

Every Chase-Off™, every local competition, every training session with visiting athletes, it’s all potential material. And if you can partner with content-savvy athletes like Roland to capture it, you’re not just running an event. You’re building a content library that markets your facility 24/7.

For Redouan, the viral Shorts aren’t just building a YouTube following. They’re putting Rooftop Kings on the map as a destination. They’re attracting athletes who want to train at the arena they’ve seen in millions of views. They’re filling seats at future events.

That’s the potential, at least. Like Roland, Redouan has cracked the views game but the real test is whether those 44 million monthly views translate into gym memberships, event attendance, and a loyal community that keeps coming back. The early signs are promising. The conversion work is just beginning.

The Blueprint: What Actually Works

Looking at what Roland and Redouan have accomplished, clear patterns emerge. This isn’t luck. It’s a repeatable strategy that any athlete, gym, or team in the Chase Tag® world can adopt.

1. The Sport Does the Heavy Lifting

This is the crucial insight: Chase Tag® is built for short-form content. The format WCT created: 20 seconds of high-stakes action, clear drama, explosive athleticism is exactly what performs on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

You don’t need to manufacture drama. You don’t need fancy editing to make it exciting. The sport is inherently compelling. Roland and Redouan simply captured it and let the algorithms do the rest.

2. Authenticity Over Production Value

Both creators lean into raw, unpolished content. This isn’t a weakness but a feature. Short-form platforms reward content that feels native to the feed. Over-produced videos can actually hurt performance because they signal « advertisement » to viewers conditioned to scroll past anything that feels like marketing.

A shaky phone video of an incredible evasion will outperform a drone shot with a soundtrack every single time. The sport is dramatic enough. Let it breathe.

3. Volume Beats Perfection

The algorithm rewards consistency. Roland didn’t post one video and wait he posted dozens & used test reels functions. Redouan didn’t spend three weeks editing a masterpiece, he shipped content rapidly and let the platform surface what worked.

Your first ten videos probably won’t hit 100 million views. Your fortieth might. But you won’t get to forty if you’re spending two weeks perfecting video one.

4. Voice and Personality Create Loyalty

Roland’s voiceover commentary isn’t just filler, it’s the hook. It gives viewers context (« This was the finals match where everything was on the line »), creates emotional stakes (« Watch what happens next—nobody saw this coming »), and adds a human element that makes people want to follow him, not just watch Chase Tag.

This is the difference between being a content aggregator and being a creator with a following.

There’s also a practical reason to add commentary and compile footage: monetization. Platforms like TikTok require videos to hit minimum time thresholds (one minute on TikTok, for example) before creators can earn revenue. A single 20-second chase won’t qualify. But compile your best evasions into a « Top 5 » video, narrate a full match breakdown, or string together training fails and bloopers? Now you’re hitting that one-minute mark and unlocking an actual revenue stream.

5. Events Are Content Opportunities

Redouan’s approach reveals an underutilised strategy: treat every event as a content production opportunity. The Rotterdam Chase-Off™ was a competition AND raw material for months of viral content.

Gym owners: invite content creators to your events. Give them access. Let them capture footage. The ROI on that « free admission » could be millions of views driving awareness to your facility.

What This Means for the Sport

World Chase Tag® built something remarkable: a competitive format perfectly suited for the social media age. Short enough to hold attention. Dramatic enough to demand shares. Visual enough to transcend language barriers.

The main WCT YouTube channel has grown to 1.45 million subscribers with over 350 million total views, proof that the audience is there and hungry for this content.

What Roland and Redouan are demonstrating is that the format WCT pioneered works even better when it’s distributed across the ecosystem. When athletes post. When gyms post. When local events generate content that spreads organically. They’ve essentially rediscovered WCT’s original playbook. The short, punchy clips that made the sport blow up in the first place.

The opportunity now is finding the right balance. Long-form content—full matches, event coverage, documentary-style storytelling—builds depth and loyalty. It’s where hardcore fans live. Short-form content is the discovery engine. It’s how new fans find the sport. It’s what stops the scroll and sparks the question: « Wait, what is this? »

Right now, WCT’s content strategy leans heavily toward long-form. That’s valuable for the core audience, but the numbers from Roland and Redouan suggest there’s enormous untapped potential in returning to the short-form roots that originally put Chase Tag® on the map. Not instead of long-form, but alongside it, a constant stream of bite-sized moments feeding the algorithms while flagship content builds the foundation.

The good news? WCT has a proven formula. The sport works. The format is perfectly designed for virality. The league just needs to lean back into what made it successful in the first place, finding that balance between the deep content that rewards loyal fans and the snackable content that creates new ones.

For Athletes

You don’t need permission to build an audience. You have a phone. You have footage. You have stories to tell.

Building a personal following does more than satisfy ego, it makes you valuable. Athletes with audiences attract sponsors. They get invited to exhibitions. They have leverage.

In a sport where most athletes compete for exposure, not prize money, your personal brand is the value.

For Gyms and Training Facilities

If you have a Quad™, you have a content studio. Every session is potential material. Every local event is a chance to create footage that markets your facility for months.

The Redouan model is replicable: host events, capture content (or partner with athletes who can), and distribute it consistently. Short-form content is the cheapest, most effective marketing a gym can do. And unlike a billboard, good content compounds.

For Teams

Every team has storylines. Rivalries. Training montages. Personalities. This is reality TV waiting to happen and the cameras are already in everyone’s pockets.

The teams that document their journey will build fanbases. The teams that don’t will remain anonymous.

The Action Plan

For anyone in the Chase Tag® community ready to start, here’s your checklist:

This Week:

• Download CapCut or a similar free editing app (like Davinci Resolve)
• Film 10 training chases with your phone (vertical!)
• Edit each into a 30-45 second clip with text hooks
• Post to TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts

This Month:

• Commit to posting at least 10-15 Shorts
• Experiment with different hooks (voice-over, text-only, music-driven)
• Study what performs and double down

For Event Organizers:

• Identify content creators in your community
• Invite them to capture footage at your next event
• Create a content-sharing arrangement that benefits both parties
• Plan your posting schedule before the event happens

The Bigger Picture

Chase Tag® is still young. The world championships draw crowds, but most events are grassroots. Sponsorship money exists but isn’t life-changing. Most athletes compete for passion, not paychecks.

That changes when the audience changes. And the audience changes when the entire community becomes part of the content machine.

What Roland and Redouan have proven is that WCT built something special. A format so compelling that phone footage can generate 100 million views. The sport doesn’t need better production. It needs more distribution, and smarter conversion.

Views are step one. The harder work is turning those scrollers into subscribers, those subscribers into fans, and those fans into people who buy tickets, follow athletes, and spread the word.

More athletes hitting record. More gyms posting training sessions. More events treated as content opportunities. More of the community participating in the growth and figuring out together how to convert attention into lasting engagement.

The format works. The audience is there. The algorithms are hungry for exactly what Chase Tag® offers.

The only question is: who’s going to feed them?

Follow Roland Hannigan on TikTok @roland.shenannigans and Instagram @roland.hannigan. Check out Rooftop Kings on YouTube and at rooftopkings.nl.