Film and football have never been a winning combination. But now a massive new production, featuring top teams and superstars like Beckham and Ronaldo, aims to change all that. Can it work? Paul Kelso reports.
Football and Hollywood should be made for each other. Aside from similarities between the personnel - both industries are populated by overpaid principals who spend most of their time working out, shopping or being pursued by the paparazzi - they share a fiscal and sentimental interest in peddling dreams. Hollywood loves nothing more than a simple story with easily identifiable heroes and villains, ideally one that takes around 90 minutes to tell, and there are few narratives less complex than a football match. The details are subject to infinite variation, but the outcome of the tale is fixed. Someone will win, someone else will lose, and, thanks to the advent of penalties, no one needs to draw any more - not in the movies at any rate.
For all this, however, the world's favourite game is yet to receive a treatment that does it justice. Sport is problematic territory for film-makers because the drama inherent in the real thing is so compelling. It is a stiff task for any football fiction to match the drama produced by Liverpool and AC Milan in this season's Champions League final, for example, when the English side recovered from 3-0 down to win a shoot-out. Likewise, anyone who has followed England's biennial forays in World Cups and European Championships will know that the set-piece torture of penalty shoot-outs is rarely replicated at the multiplex.
Yet other disciplines have their grand celluloid moments. Boxing has several, which is not surprising given that no sport exposes more rawly the frailties of its protagonists. Rocky and Raging Bull are not only great sports movies, but great cinema, too. Seabiscuit, like the latter a dramatisation of a true story, is a marvellous rendering of a racing tale. Against these, the best football can offer is a couple of quirky comedies (Gregory's Girl and Bend It Like Beckham), celebrations of hooliganism (last year's Football Factory and the forthcoming Green Street) and the second world war PoW pastiche Escape to Victory, a cult classic in which the only thing less convincing than the acting from Bobby Moore and Pele is Sly Stallone's impersonation of a goalkeeper.
The latest attempt to provide the beautiful game with a movie to match is Goal!, the first part of a trilogy its makers hope will prove that it is possible to produce a credible tale of football at the very highest level. For once, a lack of money and access will not be a problem. Goal! is unlikely to receive critical acclaim, but it is precisely the film the football industry would like you to see. Wholesome, harmless and awash with Premiership stars, Goal! marks the coming together of Hollywood production values, the football establishment and corporate marketing clout. An independent production with heavyweight backing - think Leyton Orient funded by Roman Abramovich - Goal! has serious support. Distribution will be handled by Disney and its subsidiaries, merchandising by Warner Brothers, and a budget of £30m has given British director Danny Cannon (Judge Dredd, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, TV series CSI) the ammunition to produce a movie that will be smiled upon in the boardrooms of clubs and governing bodies across Europe.
The most marked difference between Goal! and its predecessors is the support it has received from inside football. Where previous movies have been undermined by a lack of access, Goal! has been welcomed literally and figuratively into the dressing rooms of some of the world's biggest clubs. The world and European governing bodies Fifa and Uefa, the Premiership and the Football Association, and clubs including Newcastle United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and AC Milan, have cooperated with producer Mike Jefferies and his team.
Jefferies says he made access a priority after discussing the difficulties of making a sporting movie with Oliver Stone, whose American football movie Any Given Sunday featured a fictional team. "We had been looking at this for a while and I just could not understand how the world's favourite game had not been celebrated in the way that other sports have," said Jefferies, speaking during a break from filming Goal 2 at Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabéu stadium.
"I sat down with Stone and asked him about the experience of making Any Given Sunday. His main point was that he made that movie in spite of the NFL [American football's governing body] rather than with their help, so he had to make up the competitions and the teams, all of which he felt detracted from the movie. When your team is called the Miami Sharks and everyone knows the real team is the Miami Dolphins, you have a problem."
Stone's advice led Jefferies to seek the approval of Fifa president Sepp Blatter. His pitch was simple: you help us to get access to players and teams, and we will help you try and break new markets in the USA and Asia. "I asked Blatter if he was interested in supporting a trilogy of football movies that would celebrate the game and stimulate an appetite in emerging markets, particularly Asia and the United States. We felt we could really help the game there, and all we really required of Fifa was to provide access, to make the problems go away, to introduce us where they could and help us to feature real teams, real competitions and real players."
Blatter's response could not have been more positive and, with doors opening as a result of Fifa's blessing, Jefferies set about planning a trilogy that tracks the odyssey of Santiago Munez (enthusiastically played by the likable and not uncute Kuno Becker), a Mexican emigré from a Los Angeles barrio. Goal! takes him to Newcastle United and the backdrop of the Premiership, while Goal 2 will see him tackling the Champions League with Real Madrid - a club whose predilection for collecting star players has caused them to be dubbed Hollywood FC. The concluding part will be filmed at next summer's World Cup, where we can predict young Santiago will have a decent tournament.
With such extensive support from inside the game, major commercial partners clamoured to back Goal!, most notably Adidas, the sportswear company that sponsors all the above-named clubs. The company's logo appears on screen almost as often as Becker, and most of the high-profile players lined up for cameo appearances - including three names straight from football's A list, David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane and Raúl - are contracted to the firm.
The production team have exploited their access to the full. In Goal! we see Becker training with the Newcastle first team, sitting alongside Alan Shearer, Kieron Dyer and the rest of the squad in the dressing room, and later chatting with Beckham in a bar packed with football luminaries including Sven-Goran Eriksson. Beckham's brief speaking role has reportedly drawn gasps at pre-release screenings (though it is not clear whether pure celebrity or surprise at his eloquence was the cause), and his presence in the first two films will be a major draw when Goal! opens in Asia, a key market in which brand Beckham has already cleaned up.
The extent of football's embrace of Goal! was clear as Jefferies and his team shot scenes at the Bernabéu. In the past two months the production team have trailed Real Madrid, filming the actors arriving at Japanese airports to delirious crowds, working with the players in training and warming up before friendly matches. At an exhibition match last week featuring all of Madrid's "galacticos", they filmed inside the dressing room at the Bernabéu, an inner sanctum that until now the club had prevented even being photographed. Jefferies and his crew could barely contain their delight at capturing the pre-match ritual of captain Raúl, during which he kisses each player on the forehead Becker, sat between Beckham and Brazilian superstar Ronaldo in front of a mocked-up locker with his name and photograph on it, was among those being kissed.
The result of this unprecedented access is a sporting authenticity that other football films have lacked. The action sequences, always the Achilles heel of sporting drama, are passable - though judging from his warm-ups at the Bernabeu, Becker is far from a natural. Footage taken at several of Newcastle's Premiership games last year has been spliced with passages that were rechoreographed using actors, with crowds painted in using CGI.
Jefferies, while comfortable with the authenticity of the action sequences, makes it clear that the primary objective was attracting new audiences with a human story rather than appeasing existing football fans. "The trilogy is a series of movies that take place against the backdrop of the football landscape, rather than a football movie," he says. "If we had made a football movie, I think our audience would have been narrowed rather than crossing over boundaries, gender, territories and demographics. To reach a wider audience you have to make a drama, and ours is this kid's odyssey told in three acts against the landscape of world football."
Goal! cannot be knocked for a lack of authenticity, but nor is it likely to trouble the American Academy when they hand out the end-of-season gongs. Like the average football commentary, few cliches are omitted as Santiago follows a path that begins at a hole in a fence on the Mexico-US border and ends with an implausible winning goal at St James's Park. Disney's involvement is appropriate. Were Santiago a cartoon deer rather than a doe-eyed footballer, the story could not proceed more sweetly. He defies his disapproving single-parent father to follow his football dream, gets spotted by a washed-up former player on holiday in LA and turns up penniless in Newcastle, only to flop in his early trials. Given a second chance, he resists the temptations of a pantomime world of fast cars, large watches, nightclubs, easy women and tabloid infamy to overcome adversity and triumph, pausing only to phone his gran from the touchline after each success.
Jefferies denies that the unashamed feelgood factor of the movie was a condition of the corporate support, though he admits that, had his central character owed more to George Best than Gary Lineker, he might have struggled. "Being honest about it, if we had wanted to weave into the story a positive take on some of the things that the governing bodies frown upon, then we would have faced some challenges, there's no doubt about that.
"But we have not been hampered creatively by our partners. There is darkness in there, but we wanted to create a film that would inspire kids. They are our target audience. There are countless success stories of kids in the ghettos of Sao Paulo or wherever for whom football is a ticket out. In that respect, the story is not fanciful."
Jefferies says he enjoyed working with the players, many of whom have profiles that match Hollywood's biggest stars and spend a considerable amount of time in front of the camera, be it playing or filming commercials. "Every guy that is a football fan has been tickled by this, and most of the footballers have enjoyed it. There is a little bit of glamour associated with the movie, which attracted them. The players at Real are world brands and they realise the movie will amplify their brand. The clubs, meanwhile, wanted to be involved because it will help them gain new fans across the world. As film-makers we are still pinching ourselves when we see things like Ronaldo spitting water in Kuno's face on camera. It is fabulous for us."
For all its predictability and commerciality, Goal! is difficult to dislike. Newcastle has probably not looked better for years, and it is safe to assume that Whitley Bay never has. A screenplay by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais guarantees some cheery dialogue, most of it placed in the mouths of an impressive supporting cast of established British actors including Sean Pertwee as a scheming agent, Stephen Dillane as Santiago's mentor, and Anna Friel in the role of an NHS nurse and love interest of Becker.
A soundtrack featuring original songs by Oasis and the Happy Mondays will also guarantee that extracts make their way on to Top of the Pops and MTV. Such crossover marketing will be the key to success, particularly when the film is released in the US, a country notoriously ambivalent about a sport that the rest of the world adores.
Should audiences in the US remain unmoved, however, Hollywood will be reluctant to tackle its most problematic game again in a hurry. It would be hard to make football more palatable and penetrable than this. Goodness knows what they would make of a film that showed them what it is really like.
· Goal! goes on general release on September 30.
