Soccer (Not) in Film

Let’s begin last weekend as I sauntered around Vegas on my Christmas vacation.  I went to the Aria sportsbook where I decided to investigate if the Vegas casinos actually cared about soccer betting.  The employee (Aria) was kind enough and printed up a list of the Premiere League games for Saturday.  After further review I realized they were just being needy because I was maybe one of five people the entire night who had asked about soccer.  To emphasize my point when I was asking about the lines (ie +350, -700, +200) one of the casinos just told me point blank “Take a zero off and think of betting in tens of dollars”.  And I would’ve bet the HUGE amount of ten dollars but it turned out that the only game I would’ve bet on was Manchester United and their odds of “-800” meant that I had to bet 80 dollars to receive a 10 dollar gain.  Every other game also had options for draws (compared to just W’s and L’s for the NFL) and I had better things to do like gaining 35lbs at a random buffet.

At the Wynn sportsbook the employee ignored me and pointed to an area with games pre-printed out.  I didn’t know whether she ignored me because I was asking about soccer or if she ignored everybody.  The good news for soccer gamblers is that the Wynn’s lines were better bets than at Aria: The odds were 1 to 5 of Manchester United winning, better than the 1 to 8 option.

My point is that when I asked for soccer match information the casinos still considered the request strange (College football and the NFL dominated the big screens, although Barca vs Real Madrid did make a couple of appearances).  It seems to me that American soccer fans obsess over soccers imminent growth, your humble author included, but are years (decades?) away from having soccer as popular as the NBA or the NFL.  A friend of mine from Los Angeles expressed this state of  being:

Me: The Galaxy just won the title, did anyone care?

Him: No. No one cares.

Me: Do you even watch soccer?

Him: No (awkward laughter).

The girl he was with: Sorry, nobody cares about soccer (more laughter).

Me: Oh, okay, I watch it every once in a while (friendly laughter as a part of my soul was taken away).

On that note let’s look at an area that glorifies sports as well as marketing them: Film.  If you’re a die hard fan of a certain sport then if you watch a film about it your feelings of attachment are intensified.  The following list is simple: these are sports films that millions of Americans enjoyed and talked about.

Boxing: Rocky (there were a lot of them), Ali (it had a couple of Oscar Nominations), Million Dollar Baby (I didn’t see it, though it did win an Oscar) and Raging Bull.  It’s interesting to note that in researching this there were a boatload of boxing films before 1960, then they trickle down going into the 90s.  Right now not a lot of people follow boxing enough for Hollywood to put out more films.

Basketball: Hoop Dreams (Required watching for any college basketball fan), White Men Can’t Jump (One of Wesley Snipe’s best roles), Hoosiers (Before my time but everyone calls it a classic) … a few others …. and Teen Wolf (I figured no one cared about this mid-80s classic but ESPN.com included it too, and I DID think it was cool when I was six).

Baseball: I just googled “best baseball movies” and a ton popped up like Major League, The Natural, The Bad News Bears, Field of Dreams, The Sand Lot. 

Football: Rudy, Any Given Sunday, Jerry Maguire, Friday Night Lights.  I thought there’d be more NFL related films, perhaps the league discourages Hollywood from making them.

And without further ado ……….. I present …………. GREAT SOCCER FILMS:

Bend It Like Beckham (I didn’t see it.)

Shaolin Soccer (Maybe Steven Chow’s best film, and I only watched it because I had a free DVD.)

Green Street Hooligans (Elijah Wood turns into a violent soccer hooligan and American viewers were oblivious to the film.)

The Cup (Why did I only read about this film five seconds ago? It’s about a group of Himilayan monks who become obsessed with watching the World Cup despite being forbidden by their teacher.  And it’s a true story).

What do all of these films have in common?  Foreign directors, foreign locations and foreign actors.  Although these films have high ratings across the board not a lot of Americans know they exist.  Americans might even know more about kid films like Ladybugs or Kicking and Screaming then they do with actual competent soccer films like the ones above.  When will Americans have a soccer film that can deliver a Hollywood endling like this one?