The top 11 best football films

As 4 Zeros arrives in cinemas, Première has selected the eleven type of films on football.

The legend according to which there are no good films about football is partly true: football is a live sport where the attack-defense phases are experienced in apnea by viewers. How to reproduce that in cinema without distorting it, without appearing fake ?
Unlike boxing, where the space of the ring favors close-ups and punchy cut editing (and where it is only a matter of filming two highly trained actors hitting each other on the face, tragedy assured!), football is to be understood in its entirety, with players scattered around the four corners of the pitch who generally do nothing extraordinary, other than pressing and tackling – classy actions are rare. Nothing very cinematic about it. However, there are some cinematic exceptions. Here is our typical team.

11. Looking for Eric (Ken Loach, 2009)

Eric Cantona as a spiritual guide to one of his biggest fans, a postman from Manchester at the heart of a bad patch in his life… Initiated by King Eric himself, ten years after his departure from Manchester United where, in every match , he made the Marseillaise resonate in Old Trafford, this project was taken up immediately by Ken Loach, supporter (and shareholder) of the very small semi-professional club Bath City. After two hard films (The wind rises And It's a Free World), the English filmmaker thus offered himself a little bubble of humor and poetry, boosted by the self-mockery of Cantona playing with his verbal outbursts which made his legend. With as symbol, a line passed down to posterity: “I’m not a man. I’m Cantona!”

10. The Two Escobars (Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, 2010)

To understand the fervor that reigns around football, and understand why the World Cup is so much more than watching millionaires kick a ball, it is useful to watch The Two Escobars. An edifying documentary which traces the improbable crossed destiny of Pablo Escobar, the famous drug trafficker, and Andres Escobar, the Colombian international footballer, who were not related. A football madman, Pablo Escobar used his immense fortune to make Colombia a great nation in the sport, first lifting the Atletico Nacional club to the top of the South American continent, then propelling the national team among the favorites of the 1994 World Cup. With an own goal against the United States, the virtuous Andres unfortunately precipitated the elimination of his selection, and was assassinated by bullets on his return to the country. A few months after Pablo. It looks a lot like a crazy spin-off of the series Narcos.

9. Play it like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002)

The mythical figure of Beckham crystallizes a comedy about family, roots, immigrants, lesbians, the power of English football… Everything swirls and everything works wonderfully. A little miracle, indeed. But how do the English manage to put so much stuff in a single dish without it being overloaded or greasy?

8. Hooligans (Lexi Alexander, 2005)

The filmmakers have sometimes observed the supporters with a tender eye (the adaptation of Yellow card by Nick Hornby with Colin Firth as an Arsenal fanatic), but most often it is with the crowbar tackle (Michel Serrault illuminated chasing the man in black played by Eddy Mitchell in Death to the referee! by Mocky). Here Elijah Wood is a young American wrongly expelled from Harvard who finds himself at the heart of these English hooligans ready to do anything to defend the image and reputation of their club, with great blows of exhibited and exacerbated virility. Ex-karate world champion, Lexi Alexander succeeds in her way of showing dry violence without ever adding to it. She understood that nothing could surpass reality on this subject.

7. The penalty area (Christophe Regin, 2017)

We said all the good things we thought of this drama which focuses on the unflattering side of football, embodied by the shadowy men of the clubs responsible for watching over the players – particularly their relationships. Franck Gastambide plays one of these guards, a former professional paid handsomely underhand by a manager indifferent to his pretensions as a youth coach. A rather desperate film which testifies to the cynicism at work within the boards of directors of professional clubs and the immaturity of the players, pitiful spoiled children of the system.

6. Didier (Alain Chabat, 1997)

We're not going to remind you to what extent Chabat's first feature is a hilarious comedy, are we? But it turns out that Didier is not just the story of a labrador who changes into a man, it's the story of a labrador who changes into a man AND who becomes a football god. And from this point of view the end of the film (where Dieudonné and Serge Hazanavicius, brother and Michel and co-writer of Delphine 1, Yvan 0 which could have appeared in this list) comment on the football match where all the players have key names (like “Cureless”) is also an x-ray of a certain Canal+/football spirit of the end of the twentieth century.

5. The Damned United (Tom Hooper, 2009)

Before getting lost in the pastry at Oscars (A King's Speech, Les Miserables, The Danish Girl…), Tom Hooper had signed a big coup: the adaptation of David Peace's book which recounts in a very fictionalized way the journey of the (violent) Leeds team in 1974 under the direction of legendary coach Brian Clough . It is the meeting of two universes: that of David Peace (author of very violent proletarian noir novels set in the English North) and that of Peter Morgan (star screenwriter of the British elite). A meeting as impactful as it is bloody, where football is seen from the sidelines and the locker room, where we drag ourselves through the mud of shenanigans and corruption. It is also the film that revealed Michael Sheen to the astonished world.

4. Headbutt (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1979)

We are in 1979, just after the Greens' epic European Cup. Jean-Jacques Annaud makes Patrick Dewaere a brilliant but uncontrollable player, a sort of provincial semi-pro Cantona, brought in to save his team after being ousted from it. Hypocrisy and opportunism of notables, changing and imbecile fervor of supporters, heroization of footballers, excesses of football business… In a premonitory way, Annaud discerns in football its societal dimension that the doctoral students only discovered in 1998.

3. New York Cosmos (Paul Crowder, John Dower, 2006)

Much more than a simple immersion into a football club, this documentary paints a portrait of New York in the heart of the 70s, with its madness and its excesses. And tells a success story like no other, born from the desire of the boss of Warner Communications to import football (not American but the other) to the USA and, to do this, to bring together the best players in the world (Pelé , Beckenbauer, Cruyff…) in New York. However, nothing will really prove to live up to his great ambitions and the story of this club founding finds itself populated with anecdotes that a fiction director would never have dared to invent (Kissinger's intervention to bring Pelé from Brazil in the USA, decision to paint green the rotten field in which this club started to make the Brazilian believe that he has fallen into a real professional club…). New York Cosmos also relies on real supporting roles, incredible faces like Georgio Chinaglia, star player of the team hated by everyone, who managed to get a coach fired so that everyone plays for only one goal: to make him mark. An episode of The Sopranos. A real one.

2. Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow, 2001)

A group of broken arms set out to win a football championship: except that these broken arms are masters in martial arts who will play football using their super combat techniques. Immensely funny and exhilarating, full of dizzying effects. A true kung fu film taken to the extreme, mixing animated and video game inspirations in a fatal combo. Even if Stephen Chow's masterpiece will be his Crazy Kung Fu made after, Shaolin Soccer is a crazy film that explodes rules and genres.

1. Eyes in the Blues (Stéphane Meunier, 1998)

OK, you are going to tell us that it is not a film but a document made for television. Certainly. But what film on football, what documentary even, has ever rivaled the impact of the images taken on the spot, in the privacy of the locker room, by Stéphane Meunier? At a time when the internet and cell phones barely existed, Eyes in the Blues (what a title!) offered a unique immersive experience, a new look behind the scenes of the king of sport (practically devoid of actual football images), whose emotional power remains intact twenty years later. In the same way as the “Mohamed Ali movies” (Muhammad Ali the Greatest by William Klein and When we were kings by Leon Gast), Eyes in the Blues is the stainless paragon of the sports film.

Where were the football sequences for 4 Zeros filmed?