THE BECKER BUGLE

Sports movies are generally crap. There are a few exceptions, of course. 'Raging Bull', 'Seabiscuit', 'Rocky', 'Kid Galahad', eh, 'Dodgeball', but, by and large, cinema has always struggled to capture the thrill of the real thing. In movies, the underdog invariably wins. And just before the credits, too.

Of all the sports to make the uneasy leap to the big screen, the one that’s suffered most is probably football, unarguably the world’s most popular sport. Can you name one great football movie? Not even Pele could save 'Escape To Victory', which boasted the surreal and downright disturbing image of striker Bobby Moore and goalie Sylvester Stallone high-fiving?

More recently, we’ve had 'There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble', 'Mike Bassett: England Manager', 'When Saturday Comes', that oddball outing with Alan Shearer and Robert Duvall (currently in a bargain bin near you), 'The Football Factory' and 'Green Street'. All were, for different reasons, and on different levels, crap. When football has worked on screen — 'Gregory’s Girl', 'Bend It Like Beckham' - it’s been more about what happens off the pitch rather than on.

Nonetheless, Hollywood has decided that football is going to be the next big craze at your local multiplex. Arsenal fan Spike Lee is producing 'The Goal', in which US sitcom star Mario Lopez plays a footballer who escapes the slums of Rio to become the world’s best player. Walter Salles is currently setting up Linha de Pasne, telling the tale of four Brazilian brothers who attempt to become football stars. There’s also an untitled German portmanteau centred on football, and directed by Kenneth Branagh, Emir Kusturica, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Werner Herzog, whilst Michael Apted ('49 Up') is currently trekking through eight countries shooting a documentary about football and globalization.

In America, the highpoint for football came when the US team beat England 1-0 at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, and that fateful meeting was recently the subject of a teary-eyed retelling, 'Game of Their Lives', which featured real-life star Freddy Adu. The rise of football in the US was reflected in the recent Will Ferrell comedy, 'Kicking And Screaming', which tapped into the rise of Little League amongst America’s young. The term ‘soccer mum’ is very much part of everyday vocabulary in the US these days.

It was the Top 5 success of 'Bend It Like Beckham' in the US (where the low-budget movie took $32million) that sparked cinema’s current craze for all things football. And the biggest gamble of them all is about to hit our screens at the end of this month. With a budget of just over $100million, the highly ambitious 'Goal!' is a trilogy following a young Mexican, Santiago Munez, (Kuno Becker) the Mexico-U.S. border to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. For the first installment, Santiago makes it as far as playing for Newcastle United. Lord Of The Pitch, anyone? "Yeah, it did strike me as a particularly bizarre and ambitious movie when I first heard about it," smiles the 27-year old Becker. "But you realized pretty early on that these people were serious, that they were aiming high right from the start. I wouldn’t have signed on otherwise."

Aiming high is something producer Mike Jeffries — a dotcom millionaire who was once linked to a takeover bid of his favourite team, Liverpool FC — knew he had to do after sitting down with Oliver Stone to talk sports and the director’s American football drama, 'Any Given Sunday'. Stone made it clear that having to come up with a fictitious team — The Miami Sharks — and a fictitious league competition meant audiences were never going to buy into his movie. And so Jeffries went straight to Fifa president Sapp Blatter, and let him know that his trilogy would be designed to stimulate an appetite for football in emerging markets, particularly Asia and the US. Unsurprisingly, Blatter liked what he heard and soon Jeffries had the involvement of both Fifa and Uefa, the Premiership and Football Association, and clubs such as Newcastle United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and AC Milan.

With sponsors also including Adidas, Major League Soccer and Coca-Cola as well, 'Goal!' has taken product placement to new heights. It’s the first time that Hollywood production values have come together with the football establishment and corporate marketing clout. Which means the resulting trilogy could turn out to be three 90-minute commercials masquerading as entertainment, something everyone involved was certainly aware of, including Alessandro Nivola ('Face/Off'), who plays blond-haired, smoothtalking agent Gavin Harris. "I wasn’t sure what to make of it all at first," he says, "but then I went along to a few matches and realized that everything is covered in logos. So you’re certainly being authentic by having all these big-name brands all over the place. It’s not like it looks false. Which reflects more on the world of football than it does on this movie."

The makers’ intentions for 'Goal!' were made clear early on when original director Michael Winterbottom was replaced after five weeks with the Hollywood-raised Danny Cannon. So, rather than have the man who brought us 'Welcome To Sarajevo', 'Jude', '24-Hour Party People', 'In This World' and 'Nine Songs', the producers opted instead for the man who brought us 'Judge Dredd'...and 'I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.' "I think it was a mutual decision, you know," says Becker. "I wasn’t involved yet with the movie when this happened, but I get the impression that Michael had one vision for the movie and the producers had another. Simple as that."

With the second installment currently been shot at Real Madrid’s stomping ground, Jeffries managed to be the first to take a camera inside the team’s dressing room at the Bernabeu. The final installment will, naturally enough, be shot around the 2006 World Cup in Germany. "I actually thought, when I signed up for this first movie, the other two were merely listed to impress us," finishes Nivola, "but I quickly realized they were serious. Hey, I’m a football fan. I’m having a ball. Hopefully, that will come across…"