With apologies to those who don’t like football, the Euros have been a godsend. With little new on telly, the competition has provided us with searing highs and lows, from the excellence of the Italians to the melodrama of England vs Germany, from the bizarre penalty fest as Portugal took on France, to Christian Eriksen’s horrifying on-field collapse and his side’s emotional comeback to qualify for the quarter-finals. At its best, football is theatre, an emotional rollercoaster that leaves audiences reeling. Odd, then, that the sport has signally failed to inspire any great movies. Horse racing has Seabiscuit, boxing Raging Bull to name but one, baseball The Pride of the Yankees — even ice-skating, for Christ’s sake, has the excellent I, Tonya. And footie? Escape to Victory. OK, so that 1981 romp is not the best drama ever made about the beautiful game, but even the decent ones — The Damned United, say, or Bend It Like Beckham — are hardly good enough to get excited about. For some reason, soccer has not translated well to the screen, perhaps partly because it’s a team game rather than an individual pursuit, and partly because actors look so absurd trying to pretend they can play it. It’s all a bit of a mystery really, and yet when it comes to documentaries, the story is very different. And more on those in a moment. One football drama that is often praised, and by no less a cinephile than Martin Scorsese, is The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, a mildly entertaining 1939 crime caper set in Highbury, the north London club’s now long-demolished spiritual home. The Gunners are playing a friendly with a fictional club called Trojans when one of the visiting players keels over at half-time. He’s been poisoned by one of the sliced oranges, and suspicions point to an embittered mistress — footballers were always a classy bunch. It’s a slight but entertaining period piece, complete with Brylcreemed hair and ankle-length shorts, and while The Arsenal Stadium Mystery might seem a bit hokey to the modern eye, it’s a cut above most football films. Escape to Victory perfectly illustrates the problems that footie-themed dramas face. Made in 1981 by John Huston of all people, it starred Michael Caine as Captain John Colby, a former professional footballer with West Ham United and now a prisoner in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He is forced to help organise a match between the cream of the Third Reich and a rag-tag team of underfed prisoners. The game will be rigged to ensure German success, but as Colby’s team includes the likes of Pelé, Bobby Moore, Mike Summerbee, Ossie Ardiles and Ipswich legend John Wark, that may not be so easy. An escape plot was tagged on, as was Sylvester Stallone in a kind of Steve McQueen/Great Escape role as a mouthy American who insists he can play in goal. Bit short for a keeper, I would have thought. The result is watchable, but hamstrung by this simple fact: the actors can’t kick a ball, and the footballers can’t act. Escape to Victory is about to be remade, and was itself a remake, of a 1961 Hungarian film called Two Half Times in Hell. Directed by Zoltán Fábri​, it was based on a real wartime incident in which German soldiers challenged their Ukrainian prisoners to a high-stakes game. High stakes indeed in the film, because the hastily assembled team of Hungarian forced labourers are warned that they’ll all be shot if they have the temerity to win. Ah, ref!

Dodgy keeper
Wim Wenders’ 1972 feature The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick is without doubt the most sinister football film ever made. Based on Peter Handke’s novel, it stars Arthur Brauss as Bloch, a keeper who takes it badly when he’s sent off during a game. Afterwards, he picks up a cinema cashier, spends the night with her and then kills her. Later, while a suspicious policeman closes in, Bloch attends a match and explains to a stranger exactly what goes through a goalkeeper’s mind in the moments before a penalty kick. Talk about a dodgy keeper.
The Miracle of Bern (2003) movingly caught perhaps the most significant moment in Germany’s rich footballing history — their unexpected victory at the 1954 World Cup. The country was left decimated and divided by Nazi rule and Hitler’s defeat, but a turning point came during the tournament in Switzerland. West Germany overcame a dodgy passage through the group stages to defeat tournament favourites Hungary in the final. As a footballing nation, they never looked back.

I’m not sure if you can call Gregory’s Girl a football film, but it’s definitely footie-themed, and its low-budget charm has stood the test of time. John Gordon Sinclair played the hapless centre forward on his school team whose pride is hurt when he’s replaced by a girl. She’s a lot better than him too, but Gregory doesn’t care as he falls head over heels in love with Dorothy (Dee Hepburn). Gregory’s Girl clearly influenced the makers of Bend It Like Beckham, a modestly entertaining 2002 film starring Parminder Nagra as a football-loving Sikh teenager whose conservative parents won’t allow her to play because she’s a girl.
The Football Factory (2004) is not about football per se, but fighting, an infinitely more cinematic pastime. In the 1980s, Chelsea and Millwall earned the dubious honour of boasting England’s most notorious hooligans, and Danny Dyer starred as a member of a particularly vicious Chelsea ‘firm’ whose sins are about to catch up with him. The film culminated in a pitched battle between the rival London gangs. Edifying stuff.

Though it was not perfect, I did very much enjoy The Damned United, Tom Hooper’s 2009 dramatisation of David Peace’s novel about Brian Clough and his brief but disastrous tenure as manager of Leeds United. Brilliantly played by Michael Sheen, Clough is not exactly coming down with modesty. “I wouldn’t say I’m the best manager in the business,” he once said, “but I’m in the top one.”
At Nottingham Forest, he would prove that time and again, but the Leeds team of the 1970s is full of tough stars such as Billy Bremner who decide to take him down a peg or two.
The Damned United showed us the drudgery and physical endurance involved in being a professional footballer, and in terms of footie dramas is about the best of a bad lot. The documentaries, though, are another matter entirely.
In the last few years alone we’ve had a couple of gems, including Diego Maradona, Asif Kapadia’s fascinating documentary about the rise and fall of arguably the greatest footballer who ever lived. Through interviews and archive footage, we follow his rags-to-riches journey, his travails at Barcelona, his glory days with Napoli, his World Cup successes and his difficulty in coping with the pressures of fame.
This year Netflix released Pelé, which told the story of the other greatest footballer who ever lived, a genius who became a marked man after leading Brazil to their first World Cup win in 1958. Again there’s great footage, particularly of his glorious return from international retirement at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
The free-flowing beauty that football can attain is memorably captured in the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. Cameras followed French legend Zinedine Zidane throughout the course of a La Liga match between Real Madrid and Villareal. During it, we watch the maestro spin and turn as he eases his way silkily past opponents. Somewhat typically, we also see him get sent off.
I really enjoyed the 2018 documentary Kaiser, about the colourful Carlos ‘Kaiser’ Raposo, a Brazilian player who may not have been very good at football at all. Despite being signed for a string of Brazilian clubs, he faked injuries and staged various calamities in order to make sure he wasn’t found out on the field. And he was forever fending off imaginary offers from rival clubs on his mobile phone.
Probably my favourite football documentary, though, is Once in a Lifetime, John Dower and Paul Crowder’s 2006 film about when soccer gripped the US. In the summer of 1977, when Manhattan was plagued by heatwaves, rising crime and a power blackout, the New York Cosmos’ star-studded team provided some much-needed glamour and diversion. The club’s canny owners had splashed the cash buying some of the world’s greatest players, from Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto to the imperious Pelé himself, who was paid $2.8m to play for two seasons.
Though things were not exactly disciplined off the pitch, as limousines armed with Chivas Regal and female escorts ferried players to and from games, on the pitch the champagne football flowed. Soon the Cosmos were dominating the North American Soccer League and attracting crowds of up to 70,000 to the Giants Stadium. But it was all too mad to last.