football goes to hollywood
There is a major Hollywood blockbuster, with football as its theme, in the making. Actually not one, but three blockbusters.
It’s titled Goal!, an epic trilogy that tells the story of a ragged kid from a poor corner of the world making it to the top of the heap in the world’s biggest game, a Rocky tale without the gloves but with a round ball at a pair of nimble feet.
Episode one is already in the can and is due to premiere in London in August. Its Australian release will come in September and it will finally hit the US screens early next year.
The brainchild of Mark Jefferies and Matt Barrelle, two football-bent English businessmen, who hit upon the idea of filling a void in a cinema world that has so far left the global football market inexplicably untapped, the film has a budget of over $US100 million and is backed by the Disney-owned distribution giant Buena Vista. It is no small potatoes production.
The story is of a barefoot hispanic kid from Los Angeles’ poor east side who gets spotted and signed by an EPL club and by the end of Episode One he is the hero of an unlikely championship triumph in the world’s highest profile league (with all the human twists and turns, the exploitation, the greed, the chicanery, the women, the romance and the rest of what such an adventure entails).
Naturally, in Episode Two of this leather-scented answer to Lord of the Rings, the kid is carried to his next height, a contract with Real Madrid where he strikes mateships with Raul, Beckham and Zidane (all of whom make appearances in the film). There, need I say it, he triumphs again as a conqueror, leading the Galacticos back into the elusive stratosphere of European kingship. Florentino Perez will be impressed by the thought.
But Episode Three is the coup de gras. There the boy discovers his roots and, as an Argentine by parentage, he embarks on a mission to conquer football’s ultimate peak, the World Cup, in the name of his black and sky-blue genes.
It is here that the human story of the Goal! trilogy rightly hits its peak.
Jeffries and Barrelle have concocted a lead character who, travelling swiftly from rags to riches, is battered and bruised by the monster that is football at its elite club level: greed, ambition, vanity, ego, opportunism, and exploitation.
In the last episode of the trilogy the boy rediscovers the reasons for his football being and the things that made him so in the first place: the pleasure of playing and of winning, not for the money, but for the honour of it.
Called up by Argentina, a country and not a finance-driven club, he is inspired to play again for a cause other than money and fame. National teams, after all, do not sign players according to their marketability and price and the players rarely have a choice in the flag under which they will play.
National team football, as the film implies, is perhaps the only source of honour left in the game. It is only there that player loyalty is chosen for them rather than by them, where they cannot switch and switch back from team to team according to contract offers, and where loyalty and adherence to the emblem is governed by the call-up and the cause, not self-interest and salary.
It is this message that governs the climax of the Goal! trilogy. The central character, through the three films, is taken on a long and tempestuous journey of temptation and fallibility, only to reach an end to the cycle that takes him back to the spirit of what made him a footballer in the first place.
The film stars Kuno Becker, a handsome young superstar of Mexican cinema. It is directed by Danny Cannon, an Englishman responsible for TV’s immensely successful CSI detective series. A congenital football fan, Cannon was recruited for his instinctive understanding of the subject.
Having seen the trailers, I can only attest that it will be quality, explosive cinema.
There has never been, before this, a try by the big studios of Hollywood to take on the considerable challenge of exploiting a market that is global but essentially foreign to the lucrative bazaar of American theatre-goers.
Honours must already go to Jeffries and Barrelle for trying.
In the meantime we football fans hold our breaths that the trilogy will be a success. There is no doubt that the game, for its international status, deserves it.
The marketing strategy of the project is geared towards a conquest of the world first before it is launched on the insular, unsuspecting, though massive, American market. The strategy is smart pre-supposing that, once the world is conquered, America will be tempted to fall into line. And it might.
If it does, a bold, expensive and ambitious cinema venture might just become a significant vehicle in truly globalising football.
For more on the Goal! trilogy, there is a website: www.goalthemovie.com.
