Ranking the 10 greatest football films in history ahead of Saipan’s release | OneFootball

Saipan, the highly anticipated film about Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy’s infamous bust-up at the 2002 World Cup, is finally here. But where will it rank among the great football films?

We’ve been thinking, and we’ve put together our top 10 favourites. Not counting documentaries, of which there are tons and worthy of their own distinction.

Here’s our ranking of the 10 greatest football films of all time.

10. Purely Belter

Edging out There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble for our regional heartwarming early-noughties entry, think of this like Billy Elliot‘s footballing cousin from the next county along.

Directed by Mark Herman, better known for Brassed Off and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Purely Belter is an underrated entry into the football film canon.

The story of two down-on-their-luck Gateshead lads dreaming of a Newcastle United season ticket, there’s an obligatory cameo from Alan Shearer, great performances and some genuinely funny moments.

It’s occasionally a bit hackneyed, but show us a football film that isn’t.

9. Green Street

Hackneyed, you say?

The early Barclays era had the likes of Steven Gerrard, Thierry Henry, Didier Drogba and Wayne Rooney thrilling supporters week in week out, but forget the actual football.

Go on a European weekender, anywhere east of Germany, and any thirty-something will tell you about how Green Street was what really got them hooked on the English game.

It’s a profoundly silly portrayal of London hooligan culture, and all the better for it. That world already felt a bit outdated on the film’s 2005 release, yet 20 years later there’s a bafflingly enduring legacy.

We can only salute it for that, and give props to Charlie Hunnam for the funniest attempt at a cockney accent this side of Don Cheadle in Ocean’s Eleven.

8. When Saturday Comes

Goal! for the Britpop generation.

How many other football films can boast actors of the calibre of Sean Bean and Pete Postlethwaite? And there aren’t many that feel as authentic as When Saturday Comes. 

“Football films are often guilty of trying to capture to beauty of the game and the glory of victory,” argues film critic Greg Evans in Little White Lies.

“When Saturday Comes does that too, but it’s far more invested in the sport’s working-class roots than the simple desire to lift silverware and drive flash sports cars.”

7. Looking For Eric

File under ‘only tangentially a football film’, but get lost – we’re having it.

Being a Ken Loach film, Looking For Eric carries a level of craft – though not without a familiar dose of Loachian heavy-handedness – that most of the other entries here simply do not possess.

There’s also a genuine warmth and heart to this film that make it eminently rewatchable.

Bonus points for it being one of the more memorable forays of Cantona’s eclectic post-playing career. We’ll take his acting over his crooning. He might not be Scott Walker, but he is a charismatic screen presence.

6. Fever Pitch

High Fidelity remains the high watermark for Nick Hornby adaptations. Fever Pitch isn’t a bad effort, though.

The Colin Firth flick isn’t quite an era-defining piece of work, unlike Hornby’s original 1992 autobiographical essay, but it was never going to be.

Football has rarely delivered a moment more dramatic than Michael Thomas’ title-clinching goal in 1988–89, a moment the film utilised perfectly in its closing act.

We’ve never seen the American remake, switched to be about baseball and starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, but we can only imagine the horrors within.

5. Goal!

As with Green Street, this one could also easily feature in a ‘worst football films’ ranking. Watch out for that one.

But there’s an endearing naffness that sort of feels like a prerequisite for noughties football films. And they don’t get more endearingly naff than Goal!

The story of Santiago Munez and his rise at Newcastle United has gained a cult-like following. The memes alone are worth the price of admission.

4. Bend It Like Beckham

The film that catapulted a young Kiera Knightley into the mainstream, Bend It Like Beckham was a massive hit, going straight in at No.1 on the UK film charts a couple of months before the 2002 World Cup.

It grossed over $76.8million globally – a colossal return on its modest $5million budget, and even made a splash across the Atlantic.

Kicking & Screaming (nope, us neither) and She’s the Man are the only football-themed films to make more money in the United States. Spoiler alert: neither of those films feature in this list.

A rare box office phenomenon that actually had something to say, Bend It Like Beckham was quietly groundbreaking in how it explored themes of gender and British-South Asian identity.

“It was also about speaking out, camaraderie and going out there and not always doing as you’re expected,” writer and director Gurinder Chadha told The Athletic years later.

“It was a game-changer in so many ways.”

3. Mike Bassett: England Manager

Inspired by the similarly hilarious The Impossible Job documentary on Graham Taylor, Mike Bassett disproves the notion that “you couldn’t write it”.

Ricky Tomlinson does his best work outside of The Royle Family in a brilliantly observed skewering of English football culture as it was at the time.

Released a couple of months after The Office first aired, long before the mockumentary format became tired, this felt like football’s answer to This Is Spinal Tap.

A sequel was reportedly in the works back in 2016, but that appears to have been quietly shelved. Probably for the best – they’re not bettering the original.

2. The Damned United

As with David Peace’s original novel, Brian Clough’s family weren’t best pleased about this portrayal of the legendary manager’s infamously fraught 44 days in charge of Leeds United.

Leeds legends, including Johnny Giles and Peter Lorimer, also quibbled with the details.

We expect such a debate about poetic license to be rehashed when it comes to Saipan, but leaving aside any historical inaccuracies, there’s no denying that The Damned United works in its own right as a compelling piece of cinema. Michael Sheen is superb as Clough.

Even the legendarily discerning film critic Robert Ebert was impressed, awarding it 3.5/4 and praising its avoidance of the usual cliches, asking: “Is this the first sports movie where the hero comes from ahead and loses?”

1. Escape To Victory

We couldn’t choose anything else, could we?

Picture the scene. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon. International break weekend. You’re visiting your family, and your octogenarian uncle snoozes away in his armchair in the corner. Post-roast. Is there anything you’d rather appear on ITV2?

Escape To Victory might not feature alongside the works of auteurs like David Lynch or Ingmar Bergman in any list feature published in Sight & Sound magazine, but pushing artistic boundaries is not what we’re looking for in a football film.

What it does have is Sly Stallone, Michael Caine and Max von Sydow. It has Pele scoring a slo-mo overhead bicycle kick past some b*stard Nazis. What more could you ask for?