2023-05-18 17:02:21
BarcelonaThe indisputable success of Winning timethe HBO series about the Los Angeles Lakers dynasty, added to the obvious wear and tear of Ted Lasso after three seasons, it reopens a surprising question without a clear answer: how is it that football series never end up working? Not only are there few of them, it’s also that big bets have not been made for fictions that aspire to mark a quality canon. It is true that Ted Lasso it has an international star, Jason Sudeikis, but the success of the product is based on an audience that is not particularly a fan of football, since the plots related to the king sport are, to put it mildly, crazy.
Carlos Torres, screenwriter of non-fiction spaces like now crimes i black braceletmagazine podcast Doll, believes that part of the lack of fictional products about this sport can be explained through the ease with which football can generate its own narratives, more powerful and credible than any production could be: “If you have a Messi-Cristiano every Sunday , a Mou-Pep or the crazy script applied by Madrid in the Champions League, why do we need to emulate it?”, he asks. In addition, there is a cultural issue: the industry is in the United States, a country where football does not attract enough attention to bet decisively. “We have great fictions about baseball or American football, but the fact that football is the fourth or fifth sport there makes it more expensive to develop projects about an activity that is culturally more distant to them”, justifies Torres, who gives as an example the same Ted Lasso: “It is the best definition of this fact, since it comes from a Yankee who lands in a sport in which everything seems Martian.”
In any case, there are few series and those that exist have not gone down in history. Ted Lasso aside, there are several that have dealt with the world of football with more or less success, such as now Las Bravas, The English game o crows club. None of them are particularly popular here and the only exceptions are found in the world of Japanese animation, with Oliver i Benji o Inazuma Eleven as featured titles. The umpteenth attempt to make successful real action on the king sport is headless chickensone of the bets of the season on HBO Max.
Despite not being particularly pretentious, the names involved dazzle the visitor from the credits. It was created by Carolina Bang and Álex de la Iglesia, who are also producers; Jorge Valdano Sáenz (son of the Madrid legend) is the screenwriter, and Hugo Silva, Dafne Fernández, Gorka Otxoa and Kira Miró are in the cast. Without a doubt, the angle of vision is interesting: a former player who, once retired, is dedicated to representing footballers. From here on, comedy is used, in more or less good taste depending on the moment, to portray everything that remains outside the playing field. The key? Common places and situations that are familiar to us: soccer players with short legs, homophobes, half drug addicts and without any kind of values in an environment – managers, representatives, sponsors – just as or more toxic than them.
The result is irregular but distracting, and helps to desacralize this world by showing the dark side of the players, a kind of The Boys brought to football, although goals, in this series, you don’t see many. Whether it has better or worse reviews, the production company has confirmed that there will be a second season.
The triumph of the documentary
In contrast to fictional series, the opposite has happened to the antonymous genre: it has grown excessively. Documentaries and reality products have been an inexhaustible source of football-related titles. The proliferation of inside (which bring the cameras into the changing rooms) or documentaries about athletes has been a constant to the point of saturating the market. Practically every football move has been worth an audiovisual product, as in the case of Alella footballer Marc Cucurella, who turned his signing for Brighton & Hove Albion FC into a non-fiction film that was widely parodied on social media for his little interest. “The format voyeur it attracted us when it appeared, but as one suspects that it is actually quite an artifice, the documentary product that tells stories has been imposed. I don’t know if it’s a bubble already burst, but the saturation of non-fiction leads us to a competition in which there is no small rival”, explains Carlos Torres.
In this context of oversupply, the success of new additions focuses on the popularity of the protagonists or, as the screenwriter says, on having a good story. In this way, Welcome to Wrexham it has both: heavy names and things to explain.
The new Disney+ title begins in a very eloquent way. A news anchor looks into the camera and exclaims, “It must be a Twitter joke.” And it really seems like it, but no. It’s the brilliant non-fiction series that follows the purchase and resurrection of Wrexham, the oldest football club in Wales and the third professional in the world, by two people who live thousands of miles away, who wouldn’t be able to place on a map this small town in north-east Wales of 65,000 inhabitants and who know practically nothing about football. The action becomes even more surreal when it is discovered who the two new owners are: actors Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) and Rob Mcelhenney, protagonist of Mythic Questamong other Hollywood productions.
In an environment of a rough and suffering town, of the working class, around a mine and always affected by crises (between Thatcherism and covid, all the possible ones), the arrival of these two handsome, successful young men, millionaires and fans of American football is viewed with a mixture of suspicion and spirit of Welcome, Mister Marshall. The weight of history collides with modernity in a docuseries that sticks, just as a T-shirt sticks to the skin in the middle of the desert.
Time will tell if the trends reverse and fiction begins to gain weight over documentary. For now, you need to know how to choose very well to find products that are really worth it.
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