Cinema's impossible sport

Maybe you can't write it after all

Good morning friends. Welcome to The Lines Man

This post is about football on film. I wrote it before Thursday’s awful news that Liverpool player Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva died in a car crash while travelling back through Spain to catch a ferry to the UK. A gut-punch from nowhere that has taken two brothers, sons, husbands, fathers from their families.

I mention this tragic event because in the piece I talk about how cinema can never really script the things that happen in football authentically, the drama and the chaotic fluency. I was thinking, mainly, of the things that happen on the pitch. But off the pitch, too, the stories of football influence our lives and emotions in ways we never expect - and can never expect cinema to quite capture.

The passing of Diogo - 28 years old, married 11 days ago to his girlfriend of 12 years, with 3 young children, a whole new life as a father and husband awaiting him - and his brother is one of those stories, the grief extending from Liverpool to Portugal, from Wolverhampton to Zamora. Unquantifiable.

Rest in peace, Diogo & Andre.

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Four weeks ago I went to Leeds. I was visiting a friend. On the cards: copious drinking and movie marathons. With panache, we succeeded on both fronts. Since we’re both in a bit of a noir/Western phase at the moment, we watched a bunch of Western and a gloveful of boxing films, including 1949’s The Set-Up and Day of the Fight (2023), Jack Huston’s heart-rending directorial debut.

Both these films are excellent, book-ends in a long lineage of physically raw and emotionally charged boxing flicks. Apart from a lingering hangover and an echoing wallet, the weekend left me pondering a question that has baffled some film fans for decades: why has there never been a truly great film about football?

(For any Americans about to recommend The Waterboy or Remember The Titans, I don’t mean your odd version of rugby. I’m talking about the beautiful game, or soccer, as you call it.)

Then two weeks ago I brought this up with my brother, a fellow writer, film fan and football-head. We kicked around a few theories as to why it’s so hard to create cinema from football. And that was the genesis of this article.

The good, the bad, the completely offside

It’s not like the film biz hasn’t tried.

Football is a global entertainment juggernaut. Its showpiece live events bringing in hundreds of millions of viewers around the world, far in excess of what any individual film could hope to command. It inspires fierce loyalty and near 24/7 news coverage - not just on the proverbial back pages.

It is, as football historian David Goldblatt says, ‘the most global and most popular of popular cultural phenomena in the twenty-first century’. Studios and producers, ever the vultures for a bit of existing IP or a ripe-and-ready fanbase to exploit, have seen the potential to appeal to the sport’s broad audience on a number of occasions, but never quite cracked it.

Taking a look at the line-up of football films from across the years, some examples come closer to hitting the target than others. While films like Goal! (2005) and There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble (2000) take an overly-earnest, saccharine route, others like Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) succeed by not taking themselves too seriously.

Then there are films that would better be described as football-adjacent. Inspired by the sport but not directly concerned with on-field matters, Green Street (2005), Looking for Eric (2009) and Fever Pitch (2004) orbit but rarely land on the pitch, and they’re the better for it. They're fine — some even good — but none manage to bottle the game’s core drama.

And then there are the examples too numerous to recount of films and TV shows that completely butcher the language and visual aesthetic of the game. Films and TV shows with dialogue so toe-curlingly ham-fisted and match scenes so stilted and unrealistic that they can only have been presided over by filmmakers whose last exposure to football was running away from the mean boys who played it in school.

So. To the question of why.

Maybe you couldn’t write it after all…

I’m not the first person to ask this. There are excellent articles on Hollywood’s failure to do football justice in These Football Times, The Guardian, and The Digital Fix, among others. When tasked with answering this conundrum, writers tend to focus on the inability of cinema to recreate the visual aesthetic of football.

For good reason: football as broadcast live is filmed from an elevated perspective, placing viewers in the crowd and ensuring as much of the pitch is visible at any given moment of the game. This also allows for the capture of the dynamic movement of ball and players, and situates individuals in the important physical context of the whole stage. This dynamism is almost always lacking from films about football, because films are by their nature choreographed and scripted.

The way people actually watch football, the perspective from which they consume it, whether on TV or in the stadium, is routinely ignored by football films, which always try to film at pitch-level, either through an inability or an unwillingness to recreate the conditions of authentic spectatorship.

What results if more-often-than-not a disorienting, bland spectacle that makes no sense. As Gregory Wakeman writes in The Guardian piece I linked above, ‘You can never really tell where players are on the pitch, which itself often looks too small. It’s also incredibly difficult for a director to shoot a prolonged sequence of play, while any edits or use of slow-motion immediately makes the game look unnatural.’

Linked to this is the unique flow of football as a sport. Boxing, baseball, tennis, American football and others are more stop-start, meaning that films about these sports can allow for isolated moments with their protagonist in which tension can build. F1: The Movie is a prime current example, using pitstops to build tension in waves and allow for quite but significant character moments. Football, however, has a chaotic fluency to it that is both hard to script and almost impossible to film naturalistically. It’s one thing to get in the ring with two boxers before cutting to the round break, it’s entirely another to attempt to choreograph 22 players moving naturally and unpredictably across a huge playing field.

Also commonly referenced is the trade-off football filmmakers often have to make. Do you hire actors who can’t play football, or footballers who can’t act? Brian Penn’s excellent piece in These Football Times uses Escape to Victory (1981) as the exemplar of this: ‘The actors in non-playing roles were fine. Max Von Sydow and Daniel Massey, for example, were excellent as protagonists in the piece. But the casting of players would swing from sublime to the downright ridiculous. Yes, they recruited Bobby Moore, Mike Summerbee, Ossie Ardiles and the inimitable Pelé, but they could barely string a sentence together on screen. Typically, Mooro’s personality deserted him whenever the cameras rolled. He looked stiff and awkward even during the playing sequences.’

But there is one thing many of these pieces miss: cinema is simply unable to match the sport for the context-laden spontaneity of its drama.

In May 2019, Trent Alexander-Arnold ran to the corner flag to take a corner for Liverpool in their Champions League semi-final against Barcelona. Pitchside cameras captured him as he walked away to take a run-up, looked up and fired an unexpectedly quick corner into an empty space in the penalty area.

None of the Barcelona players were ready. None of the Liverpool players were either, except one: Divock Origi was Johnny-on-the-spot to meet the unexpected corner and score for Liverpool. The goal put Liverpool 4-0 up on the night, 4-3 up over two legs. The stadium erupted. Delirium. Shock. Ecstasy. Mirrored up and down the land and around the world in an explosion of joy at a moment which has gone down in history as one of the most dramatic sporting moments of all time.

A filmmaker could quite easily have scripted and filmed a moment like that, and even the most bow-legged actor could have managed a believable take of it. But without the context - Liverpool losing the first leg, Liverpool about to miss out on the Premier League title despite being boss, Trent being a local lad, Barca having collapsed in a similar fashion a year earlier, Liverpool having agonisingly lost the final a year earlier too - without that context, you can never make the moment mean quite so much or have such a lasting emotive impact.

Sport’s Blood Meridian

This is why football is cinema’s great white whale — its Blood Meridian: rich, aggressive, mythic, and fundamentally unsuited to adaptation. Even if Christopher Nolan built a 70,000-seater stadium set, packed it with PSG ultras, cast actors trained in the Gegenpress and resisted the urge to frame it all as a metaphor for time... it would probably still miss.

Football is too alive, with too many contingencies and too many unruly presences. It does not conform to the narrative arcs you want it to, and it never pauses for dramatic effect.

And that’s the point. That’s the beauty. Football doesn’t need a script. It already has millions of them, exchanged in WhatsApp groups, screamed from the stands, borne in the lifelong dreams of those that follow it. You can’t put that on film (but if any A-List directors want to try, and need a consultant, get on me).

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