The six worst football films of all time
As you’ll know all too well if you stayed up until stupid o’clock in the morning to watch England hang on for dear life against Mexico at this summer’s World Cup, football is a game that can often have every ingredient you could possibly wish for in a great movie.
There’s emotion, twists and turns, surprises, action, and sometimes tragedy. There’s confrontation, last-second triumphs, terrible mistakes and moments of great togetherness. It’s everything you could want in a big-screen script, so why on earth do filmmakers seem so completely incapable of making a decent football movie?
This is not a new development either. For some reason, movie makers have struggled badly to replicate real-life football on cinema screens for decades now. It seems an almost impossible challenge to have people pretending to play a competitive game, or even a kickabout for that matter, and do it convincingly, and traditionally it has been even more difficult once you throw some professional actors into the mix.
Time and again, we’ve seen some woeful renditions of the beautiful game emerge and below are the most egregious examples. They’re basically the complete opposite of watching France in this year’s tournament.
The six worst football movies ever made:
The Match (1999)
When it comes to things I would never ever watch, right down at the bottom, next to Irreversible (for a second time) and A Serbian Film, is ‘anything at all starring Neil Morrissey’, which is why nobody should ever waste 90 minutes of their life sitting through this ill-thought out, end of the millennium nonsense about two warring pub teams that also bizarrely features Pierce Brosnan and Richard E Grant.
It’s exactly like most British low-budget films that were made in the late 1990s, like The Full Monty, only with a worse soundtrack, terrible title graphics, ‘funny’ (not-London) accents, and boring, slow- motion football scenes, plus some kind of romantic element shoehorned in that nobody cares about.
Mean Machine (2001)
As you go through this list, you will discover that the 2000s were a dark, dark time for football films. They began while Guy Ritchie was busy trying to make Vinnie Jones into a film star, which should never have happened, and thanks to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, we got this: a piss-poor ‘lads in jail’ remake of Burt Reynolds’ prison sports comedy The Longest Yard from 1974.
There are very few redeeming features, other than an early role for Jason Statham as ‘The Monk’, who inexplicably does kung fu stuff in goal making, and the fact that they did at least cast former professional footballers as extras. And yet, somehow the football scenes are still ridiculously bad.
Goal III: Taking on the World (2009)
The first two Goal movies had been good enough that a fanbase had built up following the rise to fame of Santiago Munez, the young Mexican immigrant who makes it to the top of the game. Some of that was no doubt thanks to the involvement of Adidas, who were able to inject lots of cash and get actual famous footballers to give up their time to appear.
But the final film in the trilogy did not live up to expectations. Central star Kuno Becker was apparently a nightmare to work with, and this time, due to Real Madrid feeling that filming was detracting from their season, no famous players were involved, with poor stock footage and green screens replacing them. Incredibly, it ends with a funeral scene at which the universally unpopular Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley turns up. Horrendous.
She’s the Man (2006)
While we British people are more than capable of making a complete big pig’s ear of a film of a sport we invented, nothing quite compares to the eye-gougingly cringey experience of Americans doing their version of ‘soccer’, as the next two movies proved all too well. Bizarrely based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, She’s the Man features Amanda Bynes, Channing Tatum and Vinnie bloody Jones (again) in the story of a girl pretending to be a boy with a dream to play for a professional side.
The football scenes are as bad as you might imagine they’d be, complete with people doing cartwheels before throw-ins (why?!), overhead kicks that defy the laws of gravity and goalkeepers deliberately diving past the ball. Plus lots of ‘Let’s go, blah blah blah’ American crowd chanting with big foam fingers being waved about. Ugh.
Kicking and Screaming (2005)
Will Ferrell was bang in the middle of his very good and very funny period when he made this film, which was probably for kids, but wasn’t really marketed that way, and so it’s on this list. For the duration of it, despite him being a Chelsea fan, he says lots of stuff that makes him seem like he has no idea about football whatsoever and has possibly never seen it. Robert Duvall is also in it, which is a hell of a fall from grace.
In terms of football action, it is at least somewhat realistic, as Ferrell tries to get a bunch of under-eights to play the game, but finds they all ignore him and just run around after the ball or wander off to look at butterflies. Americans shouldn’t make football films; I’m sorry, but they shouldn’t.
United Passions (2014)
There could only be one winner on the list of worst football films of all time, and that honour goes to the movie that the most corrupt organisation on the face of the planet decided to make about itself and fund itself. All of the actors involved in this should be absolutely ashamed; I’m looking at you, Sam Neill and Tim Roth, shame on you indeed.
Both actors, and Gerard Depardieu, happily signed away their legacies in exchange for massive cheques in order to tell the story of Fifa, an outfit who have shown itself to be utterly riddled with crooks for several decades, and if this year’s World Cup is anything to go by, are somehow getting even worse. Despicable, unwatchable nonsense, it rightly had the worst opening box office results of any film ever released, a whacking $918.
