World cup: The Movie

As the world cup approaches, everyone gets excited: flags are being hung up everywhere and the faces of Ribery and Gourcuff are pasted everywhere. I think about all the great movies that glorify the huge event and the sport and realize there are none. Commonly referred to as the most popular sport in the world(omitting the US), football is an integral part of culture: it is broadcasted on tv constantly, players are paid CEO salaries and no one can avoid watching the world cup, it is inescapable. Then why hasn't there been a good football movie? The film "Goal" came close depicting the rise of a young star but it was more about fame then anything else.movies like Bend it like Beckham and Shoalin soccer are less concerned with football, concentrating on themes of female empowerment and whatever Shoalin Soccer was about. There are lists of good movies that glorify other sports : Ice hockey has "Mighty Ducks", American football has "Any Given Sunday", and even bobsledding has "Cool Runnings". Hollywood studios make most if not all of the uplifting sport movies, which explains why there are no good football movies. The only one they made was 1981's Escape to victory directed by John Huston which was a poor mashup of "The Longest Yard" and "The Great Escape".

Good sports movies are formulaic movies, so all you need to do is apply the formula to football: a team in desperate need of a win, an unlikely candidate steps up and helps them(Elijah Wood,Romain Duris), they have to face an ultimate opponent, somber and menacing, (Nazis or Russians) and then they somehow overcome their evil rivals.I think it will have to be produced by an independent source because Big studios don't really care but at least the film would be truer to football instead of making it into a romantic comedy or kungfu. It would be more of a rise and fall of a promising,young player, showing the beauty of the game and at the same time exposing its ugly side like "Any Given Sunday", that's what "Goal" tried to achieve. But if a Hollywood studio made a football movie it would be rejected in europe and other places for being formulaic and disingenuous, so the film needs to combine the melodrama of a hollywood sports movie with the realism of an independent film. So here's to "World cup:The movie" being made before the next world cup.