Where Are The Great British Sports Movies?

Where Are The Great British Sports Movies?

Posted on Friday July 20, 2012, 12:25 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States

We've just put together a list of the Greatest Sports Movies Ever Made, and Blighty does not come out of it well. I've just gone through and counted the number of British films on the list and, if we're talking films about sport in the UK there are six (possibly seven if you count Escape To Victory as British, which most people seem to want to). For contrast there are eight baseball films. And what I'm wondering is, why the heck is this?

Now obviously we didn't include every British sports movie - Bend It Like Beckham didn't make the cut, nor When Saturday Comes or the co-British Goal! trilogy. But even if you make the case that those or others should have been on the list somewhere, I'm going to point and laugh at you if you think we missed any British films that would have made the top ten. The UK is a country where people are nuts about sport and where - more importantly - we don't actually require our sporting heroes to be particularly heroic in order to admire them (as anyone who's flown in to Belfast's George Best Airport can attest), so there's no reason we couldn't make a film about an iconoclast.

There are big personalities in British sports; there have been scandals and miracle stories and underdogs so spectacularly low they were subterranean. The British have a peculiar fondness for losers who tried their best - which makes for a good film, as Rocky can confirm - and should be better positioned to make great sports stories without the vainglorious emphasis on victory that we so often associate with our American brethren. So is it that desire to win that gives the Yanks their edge? Do the British have such a great sense of perspective that we can't rustle up the enthusiasm for a sports movie? Then why was Chariots Of Fire such a success? And if the British have no insane desire to win how do you explain the way that TV pundits and red top papers talk about the English soccer team in every international tournament?

What's more, a sports movie doesn't require a massive budget or even a massive star - so it's not like the superhero blockbuster genre, where we're always going to languish behind. Yet they're the ones making almost all the great movies about also-rans and coulda-been-contenders as well as the ones about champions, and I find it odd.

Is the sports movie somehow quintessentially an American phenomenon? We had a good root through our foreign film files looking for great sporting achievements and couldn't find much; it's hard to imagine the French getting behind anything that requires so much effort* and while we'd love to see the Italians try to distill their attitude to football in an Any Given Sunday style, it doesn't appear to have been done brilliantly (or have I missed one?).

Or is there some other reason that the British can't do it? Is it because only boxing and baseball lead to reliably great movies and we seem to pay less attention to those than we do football (soccer), which would appear to be more-or-less unfilmable (at least in a good way)? Why has American football sparked so many great movies while rugby's given us one film on this list (This Sporting Life) and the less-than-perfect Invictus? Do those pads help in some way after all?

I'm not expert in this; I've watched far more sports movies than I have sports. But surely, surely, there's more scope for greatness out there than we've seen so far, whether comedy or drama. Right?

* No disrespect to French sports people, who are self-evidently pretty darn skilled and could snap me like a twig. But for French filmmakers, the subject doesn't seem to have a wild appeal.