As the World Cup’s late-night fixtures wreck sleep schedules, this guide offers a lineup of football films to fill off days and rain delays.
The World Cup is officially here, and oh lord, I can’t remember the last time my household went to bed before 2 a.m. I mean, the world cup has started on a banger start, hasn’t it?
Messi opened his tournament with a hat-trick. Ronaldo, 41 and visibly mortal, got swarmed by a DR Congo side playing their first-ever match and walked off with a draw. England put four past Croatia. And I think we need a whole different article on Cape Verde’s goalkeeper Vozinha.
It's the biggest tournament ever staged — 48 teams, 104 matches, three host countries — and it's glorious!
There's just one problem if you're watching from India: the matches are scattered across the United States, Canada and Mexico, which means most of the good ones land somewhere between "should be asleep" and "definitely should be asleep." So what do you do on the off days, the rain delays, the hours you've already replayed the highlights five times? You watch football about football.
Here's where to start.
This is the most relatable film on this list if you've ever tried to find an empty patch of ground in an Indian city. Milind Dhaimade's gem follows a group of thirty-something Mumbai men whose entire emotional lives hinge on their weekly kickabout on Juhu beach — until the cops, the crowds and adulthood keep interferring. It's less about the sport than the people who need it to stay sane. A classic feel-good movie.
Jafar Panahi shot this guerrilla-style outside a real World Cup qualifier, and it shows. The premise: a group of Iranian girls disguise themselves as boys to sneak into a stadium they're legally banned from entering. What follows is funny, furious and quietly radical, all without ever showing you a single minute of actual play. Twenty years on, with Iran back at the World Cup, it hits differently.
Three World Cups, a military dictatorship, and the most famous athlete the planet had ever seen. This Netflix documentary doesn't fully interrogate its subject — Pelé was always better at scoring than at politics — but as a portrait of how one man became a national religion, it's compelling stuff.
Michael Sheen plays Brian Clough through his catastrophic 44-day reign as manager of Leeds United, and it's one of the great performances in any sports film. Equal ego, grudge and slow-motion self-sabotage, it's proof that football's best stories happen in the dugout, not on the pitch. You don't need to know a thing about 1970s English football to get completely sucked in.
Park Seo-joon and IU headline this Korean dramedy about a disgraced footballer roped into coaching a ragtag team for the Homeless World Cup — which, yes, is a real tournament. It's sentimental and it knows it, but it earns every tear. The K-drama crowd will devour it; everyone else will be quietly wiping their eyes by the end too.
The platonic ideal of the football fantasy: a kid from Los Angeles gets plucked from obscurity to trial for Newcastle United, complete with cameos from Beckham, Zidane and Raúl playing themselves. Is it cheesy? Profoundly. Will you still want to sprint out and find a five-a-side game the second it ends? Absolutely.
Amanda Bynes at the peak of her powers, Channing Tatum before he was Channing Tatum, and a plot lifted wholesale from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Viola poses as her own twin brother to make the boys' soccer team, and chaos predictably follows. Football is mostly the excuse here — but as far as 2000s comfort-watches go, it's still undefeated.
This is the one that started it for an entire generation of desi kids who just wanted to play. Gurinder Chadha's 2002 classic about a Punjabi girl in London choosing the pitch over the future her parents had mapped out still lands two decades on. Non-negotiable viewing.