For the next four weeks, a significant portion of soccer (also known as football) fans will spend most of their time watching, arguing, and talking about the 2022 World Cup on social media. The Middle Eastern emirate of Qatar is hosting the biggest sporting event FIFA World Cup 2022 from November 20 through December 18. There have been controversies surrounding this year’s event due to Qatar’s human rights record. 

But with soccer’s phenomenal popularity among people let’s look at some of the films that you can watch during the FIFA World Cup season:

1. When Saturday Comes

When Saturday Comes is a 1996 British film directed by Maria Giese and starring Sean Bean and Emily Lloyd. The film revolves around a working-class, hard-drinking young man who aspires to play for his hometown side Sheffield United. He has to toil in the amateur levels until he is discovered, and with the aid of his fiancée, turns his life out and succeeds in the major leagues.

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2. Kicking & Screaming

Kicking & Screaming is a 2005 film directed by Jesse Dylan. Phil Weston, a family guy and lifelong sufferer of his father’s competitiveness decide to coach a youth soccer team and quickly realizes that he is also adopting his father’s destructive interpersonal style. 

The film stars Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall as the father, son duo.

3. Fever Pitch

Fever Pitch is an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s best-selling memoir and the film revolves around the portrayal of the negative effects that intense soccer devotion can have on a relationship. Colin Firth has starred as a devoted Arsenal supporter whose romance with his fiancée follows the exhilarating highs, terrible lows, and oh-so-creamy middles of Arsenal’s turbulent and eventually successful 1988–89 English league season. In the 2005 American adaptation, baseball was substituted for the original sport, and IRL Yankees devotee Jimmy Fallon played an obsessive Red Sox junkie harassing Drew Barrymore, his girlfriend.

4. Diego Maradona

Asif Kapadia assembled the documentary biography of Diego Maradona, a prominent international soccer, from more than 500 hours of previously unreleased video. Maradona was the most adored, despised, and contentious player in history. Maradona spent the 1980s with the Italian team S.S.C. Napoli, where he was at the height of his abilities. An ideal introduction for a football novice to the legends and glamour of international soccer.

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5. The Two Escobars

The film is based on the shocking murder of Columbian soccer player Andres Escobar following the World Cup in 1994. He was shot dead in retaliation for an own goal he had scored during the team’s game against the United States. American documentary filmmakers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist were sent to South America to investigate the links between Columbian soccer and the drug trade. The lives of Andres and drug lord Pablo Escobar, are followed in their award-winning documentary. Pablo Escobar invested some of his enormous money in local clubs, sparking the  “narco soccer” boom in Columbia in the 1980s and 1990s.

6. The Damned United

The biopic, written by Peter Morgan of The Crown, defies sports movie conventions by showing a sporting genius during his worst moment. The film also portrays Brian Clough’s 44-day tenure as coach of the English football team Leeds United.

7. Looking for Eric

This film follows the story of a postman going through a midlife crisis who receives some life advice from a fantasy version of his sporting hero, the eminently philosophical Manchester United legend Eric Cantona. This film is arguably Ken Loach’s sweetest film and a perfect representation of soccer fandom as an emotional support group.

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8. Offside

This international arthouse smash from the currently imprisoned Jafar Panahi depicts the efforts of tenacious female fans to watch Iran play Bahrain at Tehran’s men’s only stadium. This fun yet the controversial movie seems out of place given the current rallies taking place in Iran, where the government is ruthlessly suppressing protesters and women’s rights activists.

9. Shaolin Soccer

Shaolin Soccer is a 2001 Hong Kong sports comedy movie that features Stephen Chow the lead and the director. Years after their master’s passing, a former Shaolin monk brings his five brothers together to use their superhuman martial arts skills to play soccer and brings Shaolin kung fu to the general masses.

10. Bend It Like Beckham

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Gurinder Chadha’s uplifting British comedy, which gave a young Kiera Knightley a major start in her career. A delightful tale of a Sikh girl (Perminder Nagra) and a tomboy (Knightley) defying social conventions and their parents to play the sport they love was a big success in both the U.K. and the U.S. Simply for Juliet Stevenson’s portrayal of a domineering and hilariously befuddled mother, the movie is worth seeing.