For the next four weeks, that big section of the planet obsessed with the round-ball form of football, i.e. soccer, will be spending most of their waking hours watching, discussing and debating — loudly on social media and beyond — the 2022 World Cup. The globe’s No. 1 sporting event runs Nov. 20 through Dec. 18 in the tiny Middle East emirate of Qatar. The controversy surrounding Qatar’s human rights record has taken the shine off this year’s tournament, but some 5 billion people — that’s a billion with a B — are still expected to tune in. 

Given soccer’s phenomenal popularity — even the U.S. is catching football fever, thanks to a resurgent national team and, well, Ted Lasso — it’s no surprise that filmmakers have for years tried to distill on celluloid the essence of the sport. Results, to put it mildly, have been mixed. But for every by-the-numbers Brit hooligan gangster drama — we’re looking at you, Football Factory, Green Street Hooligans and Rise of the Footsoldier — there have been touching rom-coms, powerful social dramas, insightful documentaries and even charming animated features that use the on-pitch action as a jump-off point to explore the passions the sport evokes. 

So if the World Cup has you itching for more on-screen soccer, here are the 22 best-ever movies on the beautiful game.  

• ‘The Arsenal Stadium Mystery’ (1939)

  Death stalks the pitch in this fast-paced whodunit set and shot at the Highbury home of north London giants Arsenal (recently victorious in this year’s FA Cup). Directed by Martin Scorsese favorite Thorold Dickinson, it features the club’s trophy-laden manager George Allison as himself, expounding what would later become the cagey outfit’s notorious philosophy: “one-nil to the Arsenal, and that’s the way we like it!”

• ‘The Golden Vision’ (1968)

  Bath City regular Ken Loach has often woven the beautiful game into his pictures, most notably the gloriously chaotic schoolboy match in his 1970 masterpiece Kes, not to mention his Cantona collaboration, Looking For Eric. But this 75-minute BBC-produced docu-drama about English football club Everton FC and its diehard supporters is the one most cherished by the director’s own band of faithful fans. 

• 'The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick' (1972)

  World cinema’s biggest soccer-fanatic, Bayern Munich nut Rainer Werner Fassbinder, never tackled the sport head-on — maybe because his German New Wave compatriot Wim Wenders had beaten him to the ball with this compellingly dour adaptation of Peter Handke’s classic existential novel about a homicidal Austrian goalkeeper.

• ‘Victory’ (1981)

  

  Teaming genuine, world cup-winning soccer stars (Pele! Bobby Moore! Ossie Ardiles!) with a host of big Hollywood names (Michael Caine! Max von Sydow! Sylvester Stallone!), in an enjoyably ridiculous plot about a life-or-death WWII match between allied prisoners of war and the Nazis, there’s good reason why this cult classic often tops list of soccer films. 

• 'Gregory’s Girl' (1981)

  

  Bill Forsyth’s much-loved Scottish charmer shows how lasses can run rings around lads both on and off the pitch via the wry tale of a gawky teenager and his bungling romantic pursuit of a beautiful blonde striker. The mysteries of attraction, he learns, can make the off-side rule look like a model of simplicity. 

• ‘The Firm’ (1989)

  As well as being one of Britain’s leading TV dramatists, Alan Clarke was also an inveterate supporter of Everton FC — his experiences at Goodison Park and away grounds informing this penetrating study of football hooliganism in the Thatcher era. Gary Oldman, as buzz-seeking ring-leader Bex, has never been so coiled-snake alarming.

• ‘Shaolin Soccer’ (2001)

  

  The pitch: association football as one of the martial arts. The formation: melodrama, comedy, western and war genres, running amok in a Hong Kong free-for-all. The result: sensational box-office returns at home and a more than respectable showing away for Stephen Chow’s delirious and hysterical high-kick extravaganza, surely the funniest of all footy pictures.

• ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ (2002)

  

  Gurinder Chadha’s uplifting British comedy — which offered a very early career break to a teenage Kiera Knightley — celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. A surprise smash hit in both the U.K. and U.S. its charming story of a Sikh girl (Perminder Nagra, another breakout performance) and a tomboy (Knightley) battling parental expectations and social norms to play the sport they love was hugely well received. Worth a viewing purely for Juliet Stevenson’s portrayal of an overbearing and comically confused mother. And yes, Beckham does enjoy a (very brief) cameo.
   

• ‘The Wonder of Bern’ (2003)

  Sönke Wortmann’s re-telling of Germany’s 1954 World Cup victory — against the heavily-favored Hungarian team — is a classic sports underdog tale given extra poignancy through the director’s evocation of the country’s struggle to rebuild after the destruction of WW2. The on-pitch action is some of the best-ever captured on cinema and evokes the true feel of mid-20th-century soccer. 

• ‘Goal!’ (2005)

  

  A comically cheesy guilty pleasure too often shunned by more discerning types, Goal! should be relished not for its far-fetched plot about a Mexican immigrant in LA who’s whisked off to play for Newcastle United in England’s cold, rainy north after being spotted by a talent scout, but for its sheer number of big-name cameos (including many Newcastle players of the day), Alessandro Nivola’s slovenly underachieving star Gavin Harris, and a scene in which David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane and Raul compete to be the most wooden. An equally nonsensical sequel — 2007’s Goal II: Living the Dream — would follow, taking our hero (and Harris) to Real Madrid, while 2009’s Goal III: Taking on the World, in which the previous lead characters are bizarrely sidelined in a completely unrelated plot, was so badly received many fans campaigned for it be remade. 

• ‘Offside’ (2006)

  

  A welcome antidote to this century’s slew of testosterone-soaked British hooligan quickies, this international arthouse hit from the now-imprisoned Jafar Panahi, chronicles the efforts of indefatigable female fans to see Iran play Bahrain at Tehran’s men-only stadium. The protests on the streets of Iran right now — with the government violently cracking down on demonstrators and women’s rights protestors — makes this playful but provocative film feels of another era. 

• ‘The Great Match’ (2006) 

  This comedy, about footie fans in the most remote areas — Mongolian nomads in the Altai mountains, Sanema Indians in the Amazon jungles of Brazil, and Tuareg tribesmen in a Niger desert caravan — all trying to find a way to watch the 2002 World Cup final live on TV, is a perfect evocation of how, for a month during the tournament, soccer truly brings the world. Just look past the occasional The Gods Must be Crazy-style exotic culture humor from Spanish director Gerardo Olivares. 

• 'Zidane — A 21st Century Portrait' (2006)

  

  Inspired by an experimental German film from 1970 which concentrated cameras on George Best for the entirety of a game, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Pareno repeated the experiment on French maestro Zinedine Zidane, adding the doom-laden stylings of Scottish band Mogwai to create a claustrophobic sense of immersion. A milestone in sport cinema.

• ‘Looking for Eric’ (2009)

  

  Arguably Ken Loach’s sweetest film, this tale of a postman in a mid-life crisis who gets some life coaching from a fantasy vision of his sporting hero — the famously philosophical Manchester United legend Eric Cantona — is a perfect encapsulation of soccer fandom as an emotional support group.

• ‘The Damned United’ (2009)

  

  Michael Sheen has become the unofficial hype man for Welsh soccer after his rousing, off-the-cuff speech to inspire his home nation’s squad in their 2022 World Cup campaign went viral. But the Frost/Nixon and Good Omens star is just as convincing as visionary English coach Brian Clough in Oscar-winner Tom Hooper’s football drama. The very funny, and surprisingly touching biopic, from The Crown writer Peter Morgan, breaks the cliché of sports films by depicting a sporting genius at his moment of greatest failure: in Clough’s case his 44-day reign as the coach of the English football club Leeds United. 

• ‘The Two Escobars’(2010)

  

  The shock assassination of Colombian soccer star Andres Escobar after World Cup 1994 — he was gunned down in retaliation for scoring an own goal in the team’s match-up with the U.S.— sent American documentaries Jeff and Michael Zimbalist to South America to explore the connections between Colombian soccer and the drug trade. Their award-winning doc follows the lives of Andres and “the other Escobar,” drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (the two are not related), who plowed some of his phenomenal wealth into local clubs, creating Colombia’s “narco soccer” boom of the 1980s and 90s. 

• ‘Underdogs’ (2013) 

  

  Few expected Juan José Campanella to follow up his dark, Oscar-winning crime drama The Secret in Their Eyes with a 3D animated film about an Argentine kid whose football players come to life, but Underdogs is a delight for cinema and soccer fanatics alike. Campanella packs his tale with rapid-fire movie references — 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, The Seventh Seal and spaghetti westerns, among them — while still delivering on the pitch. And the Pixar-style animation (at the time Underdogs was the most expensive Argentine film ever made) is top-notch. 

• ‘The World Cup in Recife’ (2015)

  Shorts and soccer are a logical pairing, and Kleber Mendonca Filho’s 14-minute dispatch from his Brazilian home city is a punchily economic, pressingly topical and admirably clear-eyed look at how “the working man’s ballet” can wreak havoc on ordinary lives when a big tournament comes to town.

• ‘Diego Maradona’ (2019)

  

  Asif Kapadia complied his documentary portrait of the GOAT of international soccer — the most-loved, most-hated, most-controversial player of all time, the late, eternally-great Diego Maradona — from more than 500 hours of never-before-seen footage. Much of it is salvaged from Maradona’s time at Italian squad S.S.C. Napoli in the 1980s, when he was at the peak of his powers, and the place where everything fell apart. A perfect introduction into the myths and magic of international soccer for the football neophyte. 

• ‘Fever Pitch’ (1997)

  

  The second Arsenal-related film on this list, Fever Pitch is a loose adaptation of Nick Hornby’s best-selling memoir and an all-too-accurate dramatization of the toll that obsessive soccer fandom can have on a relationship. This charming rom-com starred post-Mr Darcy Colin Firth as a fanatical Gooner whose relationship with his girlfriend tracks the dizzying highs, terrifying lows and oh-so-creamy middles of Arsenal’s dramatic and ultimately successful 1988-89 English league season. A tepid 2005 American remake switched the sport to baseball and starred IRL Yankees fan Jimmy Fallon playing an obsessive Red Sox addict tormenting his girlfriend played by Drew Barrymore.

• 'Kicking & Screaming' (2005)

  

  Kicking & Screaming is a criminally underrated entry in Will Ferrell’s sports tetralogy, overlooked by the more commercially successful Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory and the gem that is Semi-Pro. This Jesse Dylan film is the perfect showcase of the irreverent silliness Ferrell is famous for but in the genius setting of little-league soccer as his strait-laced character takes on the rigors of management and slowly but surely unravels. There’s a simply wonderful running gag about a pair of Italian ringers on the team and there are soccer jokes aplenty. Incredibly, Ferrell was nominated for a Razzie for worst actor for this film, but like a bottle of Château Lafite this has aged rather well.

• ‘When Saturday Comes’ (1996)

  

  The first thing to mention is that this is a Sean Bean movie in which he doesn’t die. When Saturday Comes is a Sheffield-set story, released a year before the English city became globally famous for a film about male strippers. The film’s plot isn’t all that complicated: a working-class, hard-drinking lad has dreams of playing for his hometown team Sheffield United but is toiling in the amateur leagues until he’s scouted and with the help of his girlfriend sorts his life out and makes it to the big leagues. What elevates this soccer drama is Bean’s performance as the likable Jimmy “12 pints” Muir and the fact that the supposedly improbable story has played out in real life with the meteoric rise of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy — who naturally has a Hollywood film in the works. Think American Underdog, but fictional and with more swearing and lots of drinking.

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