Back in 1994, Ken McGill’s tragicomic An Impossible Dream peeped behind the curtain of international football management. It introduced the nation to the phrase “do I not like that?” and it destroyed England manager Graham Taylor’s reputation forever.
It also changed the face of sports documentaries. Old-fashioned hagiographies helmed by fans with a camera are still around (Sir Alex Ferguson controlled almost every aspect of his supposedly revealing Never Give In, which his son directed; the BBC’s Serena could have been an application for canonisation), but the ground has shifted.
These days, the focus is deeper and the scope often narrower, be it via an all-seeing biography or a seemingly-forgotten incident that may not have even registered at the time or an unashamed bask in nostalgia, whether reassuring (anything about darts) or unsettling (anything about racism).
2022’s groundbreaking Citizen Ashe brilliantly ticked every box. The story of Arthur Ashe, the only black man to win Wimbledon, was a nuanced portrait of a magnificent tennis player who rose against seemingly unsurmountable odds, but who – much to the disappointment of the civil rights movement – kept his own counsel during the racially tumultuous years. Yet he would emerge as an effective, frequently arrested activist and, after contracting Aids through a blood transfusion, a fearless campaigner for fellow sufferers. Like all of us, Ashe was both more and less than what he will be remembered for.
Last year’s Cold War Hockey focused on the long-forgotten story of Scotland Women’s hockey team, who travelled to Berlin in 1961 at the height of the Cold War. Meanwhile, 2002’s When Snooker Ruled the World is a sepia-tinted reminder of when snooker ruled the BBC schedules at least.
With Netflix and Amazon Prime unafraid to pitch for niche, today is the golden era of sports documentaries. Here, in this unquestionably great summer of sport, is the pick.
Athlete A (2020)
For 18 grisly years until 2014, Larry Nassar was team doctor for the United States women’s gymnastics team. After being convicted of sexually abusing more than 100 girls (the true figure remains understandably elusive) including Maggie Nichols, aka Athlete A, he will spend the rest of his life in jail. The cover-ups were legion and, among the many abused women featured, is Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of them all, whose Simone Biles Rising premieres on Netflix on Wednesday.
Streaming on Netflix
Pele, Argentina and the Dictators (2020)
Apart from the dark stuff, there’s nothing a despotic regime loves more than nation-binding, legitimacy-bestowing sporting success and, when Brazil won the World Cup in 1970, followed by Argentina eight years later, nobody was more delighted than the countries’ military dictatorships. As we discover here, those triumphs did not happen by accident. The army helped to train Brazil’s footballers using Nasa techniques and few serious observers regard Argentina’s triumph as wholly above board. Nothing is ever quite what it seems.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Johnny Football (2023)
American football quarterback Johnny Manziel had it all. When the humble Texan starred at college, he became a household name, was drafted into the NFL and a glorious career beckoned. Yet, as the cautionary Johnny Football (his childhood nickname) details, the seeds of implosion were already sown and, as a Cleveland Browns player, his career was derailed by his lack of application and party lifestyle. After he was dropped, Manziel spent $5m on good times that weren’t especially good and a suicide attempt was thwarted only when his gun malfunctioned.
Streaming on Netflix
Copa ’71: The Lost Lionesses (2024)
Even during the rise of women’s football, the 1971 World Cup remained forgotten, partly because it was so unlikely. As England’s Janice Barton remembers a time when it was difficult to find a pitch to play on at home, the six-team tournament in Mexico was “a parallel universe” of hysterical 100,000 crowds, police escorts, live television, skin-melting heat and altitude. England’s women loved it so much they stayed on, opening shops, visiting embassies and touring the country before returning home to half a century of obscurity and ridicule.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Football’s Coming Out (2022)
We can debate forever about what percentage of men are gay. However, it certainly isn’t zero, the number that seems to apply to top level professional football. Football’s Coming Out establishes why gay players don’t come out (fear of crowds, fear of being the only one to dare, fear of being unsupported, fear of dressing room culture) and constructs a roadmap for how it might happen in a business not always noted for its tolerance. As enlightened manager Ian Holloway sighs: “Football is homophobic.”
Streaming on Channel 4
Andy Murray: Will to Win (2024)
Andy Murray’s less than glorious last lap shouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s Britain’s finest tennis player since Fred Perry. Will to Win features Murray himself, his formidable mother Judy and more elusive father William, and so if there is dirt it won’t be dug for. But it does reflect Murray’s journey from brattish youth with potential, one who wore a hat with a ponytail so he could look like Andre Agassi, into a rounded human being and a tennis great.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Mark Cavendish: Never Enough (2023)
Earlier this month, at the ripe old age of 39, Sir Mark Cavendish won a record 35th Tour de France stage. As ever with cycling, doping is the injectable elephant in the room, but Never Enough – which features, of all people, Lance Armstrong – instead traces Cavendish’s rise and fall and rise. At its best, it takes a deep dark dive into Cavendish’s obsessive nature and his clinical depression following a debilitating bout of career-stalling Epstein-Barr virus.
Streaming on Netflix
Alex Higgins: The People’s Champion (2010)
It’s hard to imagine a greater and more thrilling natural snooker talent than Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. It’s hard to imagine, too, a man with a greater self-destructive streak that involved addictions to drink (he would turn violent) and consistently unsuccessful gambling, both underpinned by a maverick anti-authoritarianism (“shove your snooker up your jacksie,” he slurs at his retirement announcement). Packed with contributions from family and rivals, The People’s Champion pulls no punches and details his harrowing decline unyieldingly, without forgetting his other-worldly cue skills.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Fixed: A Football Comedy (2021)
With the best will in the world, a 2010 football friendly between Bahrain and Togo ranks low on the pulse-stimulator front. Bahrain won 3-0 against their highly rated visitors and had five further goals disallowed against opponents so unfit they could barely raise a trot. The fallout back in football-loving Togo? Surprise mainly, since Togo hadn’t actually sent a team. It’s international football’s most surreal story and Fixed tells it with a mix of wry bewilderment and shark-eyed forensic scrutiny.
Streaming on Prime Video
Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024)
Twelve Final Days was originally conceived as a home video for Roger Federer and his descendants, but in the hands of co-director Asif Kapadia of Amy, Senna and Maradona fame, it is an insight into the personal side of the man who has won more matches and titles at Wimbledon than any other. It is exactly what it promises (it details Federer’s final 12 days as a tennis professional), but it’s more, too, as it trawls through a 24-year career at the top of his sport with warmth and intimacy.
Streaming on Prime Video
1966: Who Stole the World Cup? (2022)
Shortly before they won the 1966 World Cup, England lost it. On display at a stamp exhibition at Westminster Central Hall, the actual trophy was stolen from a poorly secured, lackadaisically guarded room. Narrated by EastEnders’ Alan Ford with earthy relish and featuring a panicked FA, a fake substitute trophy, a devious Flying Squad, Christine Keeler’s lawyer, hopelessly incompetent thieves and a mongrel dog called Pickles, this is almost an old-fashioned caper film. What larks.
Streaming on Channel 4
King Otto and His Greek Gods (2024)
Even before Sunday, the Euros tended to be won by the most likely. In 1992, Denmark’s unlikely victory startled a continent, but when 150-1 outsiders Greece won in 2004, European football had never seen anything quite like it. They did it under an ageing coach, Otto Rehhagel, who could barely speak Greek, against a backdrop of national indifference, internal bickering and an attritional style of football that makes Gareth Southgate’s England look like Brazil 1970. Twenty years on, the players – if not the feisty pragmatist Rehhagel – still can’t quite believe they did it.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Building Jerusalem (2014)
Winning the 2003 World Cup remains England’s rugby union peak but, in the hands of James Erskine – director of Copa ’71 and the eyebrow-raising tennis saga The Battle of the Sexes – Building Jerusalem is much more than a “how-did-they-do-that?”. It focuses on Jonny Wilkinson, scorer of the last-seconds drop-kick winner, who, it turns out, is far from the archetypal elite sportsman. He’s articulate but free of swagger and rather more reflective and self-aware than the rugger lad template suggests. All of which makes for an absorbing watch.
Streaming on Prime Video
The Footballer, His Wife and the Car Crash (2002)
Jlloyd Samuel played more than 200 Premier League games and apparently died in a horrific 2018 car crash in 2018. If that wasn’t enough for Emma, his grieving widow and the mother of their three children, a “fortune teller” (in fact fashion designer Helia Sahimi) to whom Samuel had introduced her in Dubai re-emerged with proof that Sahimi and Samuel had married in Iran and he had converted to Islam. Oh, and Wife Number Two (Sahimi) and Samuel’s sister believe Wife Number One (Emma) faked the car crash and the former footballer is still alive…
Streaming on Netflix