Explore Mohammad Ali Heydarpour's journey in the Social Media Industry

For me, rootless means coming from nothing, starting from scratch, building something from the roots up. I think that’s the message for me. A lot of people struggle but if they work hard, they’ll make it in life and achieve their goals. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

I grew up in Iran, I was born in a city called Mashhad. When I was around six years old, my family moved to Canada. We had nothing, didn’t know the language. Slowly, I began to have an interest in soccer so when I was eight, I joined the city team. That’s where I started off. I was lucky because I had a great coach who also played for Canada in the World Cup. Moving from Iran to Canada gave me more opportunities. My dad worked at the university in Iran and got a scholarship to come to Canada and I just came along. I didn’t know much about soccer at the time, I just enjoyed playing in the backyard. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

When I first joined the city team, I wasn’t playing as a pro because we were young but it was the highest level of professional soccer team you could join at that age. That’s when I started to learn more and see how I compared to other players. In my first tryouts, I made it to the A team, I was 8 or 9 years old. As a kid, I didn’t know where to go to become a soccer player, didn’t have a guide or anything. Some kid just told me to go to tryouts, I didn’t know what it was. In Iran I was just playing for fun. A tryout is a demonstration where you show up and are tested on different drills that are set up. There are hundreds of kids and coaches who test you, play a game, do drills, do shooting and if you stand out you get picked or get called again for another try out. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

I played there for a few years. When I was 15, there was the Canadian Soccer League. At the time it was the only pro league other than the MLS. They had tryouts again. I went there and did pretty well. I didn’t do my best but nonetheless, I was chosen for the reserve team because I was young. The primary team was composed of 20-35 years old pro players coming from Europe. I played on the reserve team for two years. I was 16 when the reserve team got called up to the first team and my performance was average at the time. We used to train five to six times a week and after every training I kept improving until I got on to the first team. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

I think I was around 17 or 18 when I knew I wanted this to be my job. At that age, we were already playing with pros, players coming from Europe to play in the Canadian League. They would come to make a living after their football peak had passed but would still at the top of their game. Being able to compete against them makes you think you have a chance to make it in Europe. It’s not just the players, the agents, coaches, everyone wants to keep staying in football. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

Well, 99% of players are going to go through hard times. The 1% is the players you see in big teams like Barcelona, Manchester City, Manchester United, etc. If you’re not on those teams, you’re grinding for contracts, fighting for your spot during every training, there are a lot of battles. In soccer everybody is for himself.  You play on a team but everyone is working for their own contract. You have a player making $10 million dollars and another on the same team making $50,000. There are big gaps and that’s one of the challenges. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

A lot of players they have to hold on because they come from nothing and soccer is their whole career and life. Growing up in America you have many options but for a lot of kids in Europe, it’s the only skill they have. If you go through hard times, you have to bear with it. It builds a lot of mental toughness as well because in soccer you’re always going to be struggling and stay mentally fit. You can also experience injuries that can stop you playing for a year. You have to be at the gym training during that time and when you come back, it will be difficult to keep up. There are players going from country to country. If you look at a lot of players’ careers, they might have played in 9 or 10 countries until they became big stars. You have to play in front of coaches, scouts. Sometimes, you may be in a team and not play but it doesn’t mean you’re bad. It depends on the coach, what kind of tactics he likes and whether he wants to use you for that team. You may go to another team and be the star player because they like your style there. I know players that have started their careers in Hungary, have gone to Poland, Germany and have ended up in Spain. Every country is like a stepping stone. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

My first stepping stone was the Canadian League. We won the league at that time and the coach sent me to Slovakia. That was my first time being in Europe. It was the premiere league in Slovakia. It wasn’t like in England or Germany but it was still a Premier League in Europe. However, if you become the winner of the League, you can go to Champions or Europa league. That was huge for me because I learned a lot. Unfortunately, I got injured, came back here and that’s when I started creating content and focused on marketing. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

It was one of those mentally tough moments. In my head I wanted to come back, train and play. My goal was to play professionally until I was forty. Coming back and taking time to recover opened my mind and I started seeing different paths for myself. I was thinking I wasn’t going to be like Messi or Ronaldo so I needed to find something to do that was new to the world. In 2016, I had an idea to train pro players and show their content because at the time there weren’t many people doing that. Stopping was tough. When you’ve played every day of your life, stopping for even one week feels like forever. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

It isn’t all glamour. You’re constantly focused on becoming better. On a normal day, you wake up at 7 o’clock, have breakfast with the team, go to your first training that will last for around two hours. Afterwards, it’s recovery time, you have ice baths, sonar and have lunch with the team. Basically, you’re not your own boss. Your whole schedule depends on the team. You have to do everything with them. After lunch you sit down and watch video analysis, review video tapes, have an hour in between to take a nap, do a second training in the afternoon and recover after. The whole day revolves around soccer during the seasons. You have game days and have probably just one day off in a week. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

When I was in high school, I got inspired by some Youtubers who were making hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was learning about it. At the time It was still new, nobody ever thought about YouTube. People were doing free kicks but there were no professional players showcasing their skills. Coming from the pro level, I wanted to still be around the pros and do this fun stuff too. I found the right mix; it was just trial and testing. The first player I called was an MLS player, I did a video with him. I think you’ve just got to do it. Nowadays you can reach anyone, hit up anyone you want. You may not get an answer but you can at least try. So, my first video was with Kei Camara. He was a pretty good player in the US who had played with 10 or 11 MLS teams. We did something fun and he enjoyed it too. We connected and from there, one player has a lot of other players they can connect you to and it keeps growing like a tree branch. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

Back then, the growth was really organic on Instagram. I think it was similar to TikTok nowadays. I think TikTok has the craziest growth right now. It was quick but not an overnight success. You have to consistently put stuff out there, build a theme. After the first video we filmed with a player people thought it was a one-time thing. After a few months they saw that we are constantly travelling, working with these players, in different leagues and that’s what they find cool. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

There are a lot of skills you need to have like dealing with pressure, with fans. Leadership is important too, learning to lead people on the pitch, motivate them, see what works and what doesn’t. You also need to be good at reading people, you have to see what types of players feel what. There are 20 players and each has his own personality in the team. They are all different. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

Think about the content you’re putting out and try and be as efficient as possible. I think a lot of people want it too perfect. Maybe that time of the day you would’ve posted it, you missed out on a huge blow-up video. It’s always good to be posting, don’t think about it too much. Nowadays, I don’t worry at all. Plan it out, it just doesn’t have to have the perfect editing. It’s good to test it out. You might get surprised when a video you didn’t put much effort in could make more impact than a cinematic video you worked eight hours on and you realize you’ve wasted a lot of time. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

I think that is mostly true. I don’t think that you can get too big and not know what you’re talking about because people will eventually know you’re fake. You can still do it not knowing everything but it depends on what category you’re in. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

Actually, the first thing we did was collaborating with a company which was doing a tour in the US, hosting soccer tournaments in different states. They called and invited us to go on a road trip with them, starting from Miami to L.A. I would hit up players along the way and that was the start of everything. We collaborated with a lot of MLS players. It can be busy. I kept thinking whether I was going back or not. That was the growth phase. I wanted to give it a try. If it failed, I could always go back to playing soccer. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

That probably happened after a year of working. Some deals started to come in and at the time I thought that was really cool. Before getting paid, we would get free shoes and sports apparel. It was good but it wasn’t money. We would get cleats every week. The first deal we agreed upon was with a company who asked us to do a video for $10,000. They asked whether the payment was enough and, in my head, I was just trying to keep my cool because I thought it was amazing. It opens up possibilities because you can reinvest money and make better content. It was helping my goal to get bigger. In Europe I would play one month for $3,000. If this happened after only one year, it realized it can grow much bigger in the future. We hadn’t even worked with big players yet; we were only working in the US. I kept thinking what would happen if we worked with players like Neymar, etc. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

In the beginning I was reaching out to people through Instagram DMs, messaging as many players as possible and then slowly working with more players. The soccer world is small. Every player knows another player who knows another player. Everyone knows everyone in this circle. When you work with one big player, everybody starts to get to know you and you make a name for yourself. The goal was displaying content of pros training, showcasing the skills of different players from different teams. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

In the beginning, you might get one deal and not get another one for two or three months. You’ll have to decide what’s the best content you can film on a tight budget. Here’s what we did: after working in the US for a while, we went to Thailand. It’s cheaper and there are amazing places to shoot. There are also plenty of talented Thai players with a lot of followers and fans. We went to Thailand for a month or two, enjoyed life in nice resorts and worked with the Thai national team players. We worked on showcasing Asian clubs because no one had ever seen that before. It was cool for a lot of people to see and understand how Asian soccer teams work. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

Keep a consistent theme so when people come to your page, they’ll know what you’ll put up and like it. Always try to innovate as well. So, keep a theme but come up with new ideas. If an idea is doing amazing, it’s now going to do amazing after one year. It might but the chances are low. – Mohammad Ali Heydarpour

Try and understand why the numbers are low but don’t worry about it, don’t take it personally. To be honest, no one cares at the end of the day. You won’t remember it a month from now. It’s only in your head. It’s a good idea to test out different content. If something doesn’t work, change it. I think you just have to enjoy what you do even if you’re not getting likes. It’s like in soccer. If you like it, you’ll keep playing even if you didn’t go pro. You have to enjoy it and be patient. It won’t happen overnight. It took me five or six years. I had a lot of failed attempts, seeing what content does well and not. At times, the same content may do amazing if you put it out in a different way. For example, during the pandemic, I could put a video that has text over it because people like text on a video nowadays. If it was the exact same video but didn’t have text over it, it could’ve done worse. It’s important to study videos and understand what’s working or not. Right now, what’s doing well for someone else is going to do well for you too considering the TikTok algorithms, etc.

I think you have to focus on yourself but also listen to your fans, people who give positive feedback. You can ignore bad comments. I think a lot of people are having mental problems and maybe want to release anger. They take their time to watch a video and respond with hate. I think there is something wrong emotionally with them. I feel compassion for them because everyone is dealing with something. No one knows what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes.

It’s been good, I have a lot of freedom. When I was playing professionally, I had less freedom. I can travel where I want, work with who I want, be my own boss. These are some of the benefits. I know everyone in the new generation wants to be an influencer.

I try to wake up at 6:30 or 7am every day. I have a to-do list in the morning I try to get done before 10 am. I have some time in the day when I brainstorm new ideas for future sessions. I spend thirty minutes to an hour trying to come up with new ideas, being positive, trying to see the future vision, what could it be for the game of soccer and staying motivated.

The future looks good. We’ll just keep working. I think you look at numbers more when you’re just starting out and growing but after a while you forget about them. I mean, it’s still nice if you hit 1million, 3 million, etc. It’s definitely satisfying to know people care and spend their time watching your videos. A lot of people say that even if there’s one person watching, it’s amazing. When you have a big audience, you want to put out better content for them and keep growing bigger.

Every soccer player is away from their family. If you have kids, you see them only in the evening mostly. It’s hard for the wives too. Sometimes, players don’t see their spouses for two or three months unless they visit during vacations. It depends on your situation. As you get older, more experienced, you might have more free time and can live with your family. Young players are still trying to make it so they travel a lot. Still, I would pick soccer even after considering this. I think there are a lot of skills you learn in sports that you don’t learn in schools.

No matter how bad things get; they will get better. You can’t appreciate the good days without experiencing the bad ones so just keep working hard. A lot of successful people came from nothing. If I can come from Iran and make it, you can do it too. Just work hard and don’t be lazy.