Why has Hollywood failed to produce a truly great soccer movie?

Sports movies have been a mainstay of Hollywood throughout history.

Cinema wouldn’t be the same without it Natural by Robert Redford hitting a light bursting home run, Hustler by Paul Newman grinning as he notes his cue, Raging Bull’s operatic boxing, or Rocky flinging himself up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

However, there is one big mistake when it comes to the success of the sports genre. The football movie. The beautiful game has never looked so attractive when it was made for the big screen. Sure, Escape To Victory is an enjoyable romp, Bend It Like Beckham is undeniably feel-good, and Michael Sheen has never been better as Brian Clough in The Damned United.

But even in these films, the shots, passes and tackles are too choreographed. Goalies look like they’re avoiding shots instead of saving them. The pace of the game is too slow. There is a complete absence of technology. You can never really see where players are on the field, which often looks too small in itself. It’s also incredibly difficult for a director to shoot a longer play sequence when any editing or use of slow-motion immediately makes the game look unnatural. It’s worth noting that football looks best on screen when the action is real: like in the recent Netflix David Beckham documentary or Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.

Next Goal Wins, Taika Waititi’s sports comedy biopic about the attempts of the world’s worst national team to finally win a game, suffers from many of the traditional problems. But given how incompetent American Samoa’s players are meant to be, the shortcomings don’t feel nearly as glaring. The poor critical response to Next Goal Wins, which has been described as a “sloppily made and strikingly unfunny attempt to tell an interesting story in an uninteresting way,” proves that cinema is still on the hunt for a great football movie.

So what needs to change to correct this cinematic error?

“You can’t write a movie the same way you write a real football game,” says Kyle Kusz, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Rhode Island. “Baseball and football are more static, they stop and start, and don’t have the flow of football.” This gives filmmakers the chance to build the tension of these isolated moments as the audience waits to see if a quarterback can throw a touchdown, a batter can knock a baseball out of a stadium or a boxer can knock out his opponent .

For Franklin Leonard, a film and television producer and founder of The Black List, “conventional Western, and especially American, narrative styles about a single hero do not fit the nature of football, which is fundamentally community-oriented. It’s never just one person who wins anything. It is a team sport.”

Arguably the most comparable American sport to football is basketball, because the ball is constantly in motion, there is coordinated teamwork, strategic passing and instinctive shooting. Leonard believes that basketball being played in a “controlled indoor environment” and consisting of “short bursts of action” means that filmmakers have been able to make the likes of Hustle, Swagger and Winning Time look more authentic on screen.

These projects were also given big budgets by Netflix, Apple TV+ and HBO to look good. Hollywood doesn’t have enough confidence in America’s interest in soccer, especially in the center of the country, to provide similar funding. But that may be about to change. “An important part of the economic analysis when investing money in an entertainment property is how it will perform in the United States. Until recently it was assumed that the US would be a market where a football project would fail. I don’t know if that’s true anymore,” says Leonard.

The growing popularity of NBC’s Premier League coverage, the success of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ and the Netflix Beckham documentary, the arrival of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami and the upcoming 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico suggest that the foundation Already a studio is slated to take a gamble on a big-budget football movie.

“I suspect we’ll see more football films now because it’s such a universal language,” says Michael Davies, co-host of the football podcast Men In Blazers. “Just look at the interest you get now for an American match against Mexico, especially when you combine American and Spanish language coverage.”

It also helps that football has “become more cinematic” since the launch of the Premier League, says Davies. “Football in Britain in the 1970s and most of the 1980s was played on mud. The fields are so much better now. The coaching is more refined. The condition has improved. Football is now just much better than ever.”

There are also a growing number of stories that seem perfect for adaptation. Leicester City’s astonishing win in the Premier League in 2016 can be told from the perspective of Jamie Vardy’s rise as a non-league player.a biopic of the striker has been discussed in the past) or Claudio Ranieri will be sacked as Greece manager after just one game before being hired, says Leonard.

There is also Sadio Mané’s journey growing up in poverty in Senegal and being excluded from playing football by his father, only to win the Champions League and Premier League with Liverpool. “There are probably several great films to be made about the transfer of (players) from Africa,” says Leonard. “Many of these young players play not just for themselves or their teams, but for their families, cities and literally countries.”

Scriptwriters can also look away from the field. Arguably the best sports movie of the past 15 years, Moneyball focused on Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, and convinced the Oakland A’s management to use sabermetrics to build the team, instead of their outdated methods.

Perhaps there is a story that explores the darker sides of the game by focusing on an agent trying to find emerging talent and arrange transfers, or on the recent scandal involving the Spanish champions at the Women’s World Cup. There’s even the possibility for a Whiplash-style movie about the dedication and ruthlessness it takes to become a professional player.

Whatever story is told, it must ultimately be about more than just football. “Sports films aren’t really about sports anyway,” says Kusz. “They use sports to explore a human story about race, class, gender or whatever.”

The same can be said about football itself. Even though the idea is to watch 22 athletes try to get the ball into a net, the antics of the players, the crowd and even the owners often highlight social issues such as racism, violence and mental health. issues.

“Football is a lens through which you can explain pretty much most of society and human nature,” says Leonard. “It lends itself incredibly well to movies and television because it’s a proxy for a lot of the conflict and drama in our lives. People just don’t know how to tell it yet.”

Leonard wants to be at the forefront of finding that answer. “If there’s one quote you include, it’s my desperate plea for great writers to try to figure out how to write great scripts about the game, why the game matters and the communities they exist in.”

Given the number of stories still unseen and the ever-growing fandom of soccer in the US, it seems the time is close for Hollywood to make its own attempt at telling them.