That’s football as in soccer - association football might be a growing sport in America, but Hollywood hasn’t made many great soccer films to rival the numerous blockbusters built around baseball and American football. Perhaps that will change with Next Goal Wins, director Taika Waititi’s comedy-drama based on the real story of the American Samoa national squad, and their against-the-odds quest to no longer be the worst team in the world. But even without much help from the US, cinema still has plenty of fine stories based on the type of football where the ball is round and stays on the ground.
For a start, there’s Next Goal Wins - not the new comedy but the 2014 documentary it’s based on. It’s just as funny and heartwarming as the fictionalised movie, if not more so. Football is a happy hunting ground for documentarists, the finest example in recent years being Diego Maradona, a vivid journey through the rollercoaster life of perhaps the best player of all time.
As the home of football, the UK naturally leads the way when it comes to telling stories about the game. In the cult classic Mike Bassett: England Manager, Ricky Tomlinson’s turn as a lower-league coach who inexplicably gets the England job is a timeless celebration of the eccentric bunglers who still seem to flourish in the sport to this day. British football movies love to live out fantasies of football success: in When Saturday Comes, Sean Bean is a Sheffield factory worker who wants to play for Sheffield United; in The Bromley Boys, Brenock O’Connor is a teenager who’d be happy managing his local team.
The film in second place in our list takes top-level soccer a lot more seriously. Michael Sheen is brilliant as Brian Clough in The Damned United - a movie that takes major liberties with the real story of Clough’s very short spell as manager of Leeds United, but which captures the emotional intensity generated by the sport’s most charismatic figures.
Usually, though, football is a way into a story about regular people’s lives, with Bend It like Beckham using women’s football to tell a coming-of-age story, Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric deploying visions of Eric Cantona to lighten a tale about working-class struggles, and the underrated Aardman comedy Early Man utilising football as a metaphor for teamwork and community spirit, albeit in the Stone Age.
In our pick of the best football movie ever, football is the background for the victories and agonies of teen romance: Gregory’s Girl starts with a girl joining a boys’ football team, before showing how for Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair), wishing he could play football to a high level and wishing he could date any girl he fancies are equally unlikely ambitions, but ones that a lot of young men share.
Football itself is tricky to capture on film, with even movies that feature real footballers struggling - although the magic of Escape to Victory, an outlandish tale about Second World War prisoners playing a match against the Germans, is in seeing Bobby Moore, Pelé and half the 1981 Ipswich Town squad act alongside Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone.
Movies about football don’t, however, need to feature big football stars, real or fictional. If cinema is about ordinary people’s dreams, so is football - no wonder the two go together so well.
