- US sports lend themselves better to film and television but that’s no excuse for so many match-winning overhead kicks
- New Netflix show The English Game reinforces the point – can football on film ever be fixed?
Isolation is giving people a lot of time on their hands and in between constantly refreshing the news for the next heartbreaking update, they need entertained, if not distracted.
Football fans are no different. The creators of football management simulation Football Manager made the game free, while Fifa has opened up the archives. Clubs are getting behind Fifa 20 tournaments, websites are doing minute-by-minute reports of old games and some are even getting referees to go through all the action of Shaolin Soccer to look for bad calls.
Which brings us to another of modern life's most reliable distractions: Netflix.
The streaming site has tried to jump in where real-life football has left off with The English Game, a period piece on the origins of football from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. Fans of his series might be pleased with the class division between the men in charge of the game and the common man fighting to play for it, but fans of football will be bitterly disappointed with the action.
That's nothing new. In one sense The English Game has lived up to everything that has gone before it. Football on film and television is always and without exception awful.
Perhaps there is too much drama in the game itself, the game that commentators so often say you could not script. Well, a professional script writer should be able to.
Perhaps the sport is too complicated, despite what everyone in the pub after a game would tell you? That filming the interconnected actions of 22 athletes and a ball are hard to choreograph in any meaningfully natural way.
The US sports that have made for the best of sports films tend to be high-scoring, played in short, choreographed set plays, or both. That's why American football and basketball always looks so good on celluloid and the world game so often looks nothing like what we watch week in, week out.
There's also the temptation to make sure a low-scoring game is defined by a memorable action, a winning goal deserving of the denouement of a blockbuster. That is almost always an overhead kick, which is fine in Escape To Victory when it is scored by Pele, a man who still considers himself to be better than Ronaldo and Messi.
It is another thing like when in She's The Man, where of two goals scored by the winning team in the final, one is an overhead kick by Channing Tatum and the winner itself by Amanda Bynes, on her ex-boyfriend shortly after she has revealed herself to be a girl and not a boy.
That particular film is based on William Shakespeare's Twelfth Knight but it feels like it should be based on Craig Shakespeare's time at Leicester City " it's hard to watch.
The play makes no sense, the angles make less, and the cuts are worse " shots dribbling along the ground are suddenly saved in the top corner. It's almost insulting.
What is insulting is how the sport is still defined by dribbling. All football films head down this avenue and unlike real life, where a player tries to dribble past a whole team of opponents, it ends in success.
The original Goal was particularly guilty in this regard, but it was worse when its right-footed hero scored the film's winning goal with a left-footed free kick.
People have got round all of this with films based on football that do not let their protagonists anywhere near a ball. Fever Pitch concentrates on the action of Arsenal's 1989 title win, The Damned United on Brian Clough's ill-fated 44 days at Leeds United, and Looking For Eric focuses more on what an imaginary Eric Cantona might do for a Manchester postman.
Then there are the hooligan films, a surprisingly storied sub-genre that peaked in popularity around the early 2000s and are largely best forgotten.
Football is secondary in all of them and if they ever do play it is more cringy than the dialogue.
Even when football films turn to animals, as all sporting titles must, it feels off. Somehow, Soccer Dog (and its sequels) and Air Bud: World Pup did not turn into the canine Messi and Ronaldo with rabid fans on either side.
Both have claim to the worst football recorded on film, but only one has a male dog inexplicably going in goal for the US Women's National team in their World Cup penalty shootout.
Not all football films are bad, but football on film is bad in the end.
The action in When Saturday Comes looks absolutely brilliant when it is Sunday league or non-league.
It's entirely believable " as is a 36-year-old Sean Bean as our hard-drinking hero Jimmy Muir " but not when his Sheffield United side take on their Manchester counterparts in the cup. It really is a film of two halves.
Maybe that's where the answer lies. Football's filmmakers should be pointing their lens at the grass roots game.
Now that's solved, we can spend our isolation writing the scripts as there will be plenty of people ready to be filmed when we're allowed out.
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