UEFA at the movies: producing space in the 21^st century football film

Abstract

This article focuses on the Goal! series of films (2005-2008), with a particular focus on the first two instalments arguing for the role they perform in football’s shaping of space and identity in the early twenty-first century. Focussing especially on the importance of the UEFA Champions League competition to these films, I argue that the films serve as part of the competition’s wider status as a sports-media ‘mega-event’. I show in turn how, like the Champions League itself, the films are part of an economic and mediatic project central to the European Union project during this same period, and the importance of specific cities and clubs within these terms. The article concludes with some reflections on how the Goal! series both anticipates and helps usher in the more recent emergence of ‘global cities’ within the European, and indeed world, football ecology.

Keywords:

• Champions League
• football film
• Europe
• EU
• global cities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While I discuss it briefly, I have chosen not to focus in specific detail on the third film, Goal III: Taking on the World (2008), mainly because it departs significantly from the narrative focus of the first two films. As I will also touch on, this is partly as a consequence of its reduced budget and lack of theatrical release (the film was released straight to DVD).

2 The second film, while not produced by them, still received distribution deals from the same companies. The third installment’s lack of such investment, as I note at a later point, is perhaps reflected in its more retracted focus.

3 Five clubs, for example – Real Madrid, AC Milan, Liverpool, Barcelona and Bayern Munich – have between them won the European Cup/Champions League a total of thirty-seven times.

4 Mike Ashley, Newcastle FC’s controversial owner from 2007, actually had a small cameo role in Goal III. Given that its production precedes his ownership of the club, though, it is not evident that he had any influence on the first film’s eventual setting.

5 Glasgow’s Celtic, in 1967, became the first British club to win the European Cup.

6 As noted previously, Marseille won the first iteration of the Champions League in 1993, but neither it, Naples nor any Roman club have won it since. By contrast, in the Champions League era alone, Madrid, Barcelona and Milan have won the competition a combined fourteen times.