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Won’t someone think of the streaming platforms? Wayne Rooney’s departure from Plymouth Argyle, after seven months and a winless run that left the club bottom of the Championship, not only suggests the former England star’s managerial career has reached its end – it’s also a signal of how contentious the fly-on-the-wall documentary has become in modern football. Rooney was the driving force behind Plymouth’s announcement last November that it would produce a behind-the-scenes documentary about the club’s battle to stay in the Championship. This was a scheme cooked up in the fires of the post-Welcome to Wrexham content jamboree, which has made seemingly every sub-top flight club across England eager to spin its struggles to stay afloat – amid deindustrialization, post-Brexit economic malaise, the stresses and joys of small-city life, and the slog of the English Football League – into streaming gold. The plan was to sell the finished product to a streaming service like Amazon or Netflix, thereby boosting the club’s coffers and stamping Plymouth Argyle on the cultural map with a force that games away to Preston and Oxford United alone can’t quite muster. Now, however, the plan is dead: with Rooney dispatched, the club has scrapped the documentary, which it feared could become a distraction as the team fights relegation. Neither decision has been lamented by the club’s fans, who never warmed to Rooney and reviled the idea of the documentary from its inception.
Plymouth’s abandonment of this sweaty content “play” points, perhaps, to a broader indecision among professional teams across Europe about the benefits of flinging open the training ground gates to the corporate documentarian’s camera. Amazon’s All or Nothing is the series most emblematic of the modern soccer club’s need to “tell its story”, but it appears to have lost much of the momentum it had a few years ago, after the success of its seasons featuring Tottenham and Arsenal. This may have something to do with the overwhelmingly negative perception of these documentaries among players: former Spurs captain Hugo Lloris, for instance, was withering about the Amazon series in his recent autobiography, describing it as a muzzle on the players’ freedom of speech and movement (“We had to be careful all the time,” he wrote). It may also be the product of simple cost-benefit analysis: Spurs and Arsenal each reportedly hauled in around £10m for their respective stints on the All or Nothing merry go round, and while that sum is nothing to be sneezed at (it’s good enough for a decent back-up defender, say, or an under-the-radar prospect from the lower reaches of Ligue 1), it’s perhaps not quite enough to justify the disruptions and reputational risks involved.
Finally there’s the question of what, exactly, these types of documentaries, which always claim to “tell all”, are supposed to achieve: by now viewers have realized that these shows are exercises in corporate PR rather than documentaries in any true sense of the term, which rather dilutes their appeal and pretensions to revelation. The only way this type of material can rise above the mundane is if it offers fresh perspective on a misunderstood protagonist (such as the Arsenal All or Nothing season, which did much to humanize Mikel Arteta for many of the club’s fans), or if events on the pitch do not go according to plan and the club suddenly descends into chaos. In some ways it’s a shame that Plymouth, careering towards near-certain relegation, did not follow through on Rooney’s plan since the best of the streaming era’s productions – the first season of Netflix’s Sunderland ’Til I Die – gets all its juice from a calamitous and unexpected downturn in on-field fortunes.
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And yet, despite the slight cooling in clubs’ ardor for the tell-nothing documentary, the streaming platforms’ thirst for soccer content remains insatiable. Open up Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock, and the rest, and you’ll immediately be struck by both the size and sheer tedium of the streamers’ football-related libraries. In sport, the age of perpetual content is upon us, and it is viciously uninteresting. On Netflix, to take the biggest and most influential of these platforms as an example, recent highlights include Saudi Pro League Kickoff, a six-part series that introduces the Saudi domestic league to outsiders while doubling as a four-hour advertorial for the shopping malls and car parks of Riyadh and Jeddah; La Liga: All Access, which makes good on its promise of access but uses it to produce a startlingly sunny, uncritical snapshot of Barcelona’s financial woes and the Spanish top flight’s gentle decline; Together: Treble Winners, a heart-stoppingly dreary trudge through the B-roll and highlights of Manchester City’s treble-winning 2022-23 season; Captains of the World, a recap of the 2022 World Cup that neutralizes the burning issue of that tournament (migrant worker deaths and the serial human rights abuses of the host nation) by emphasizing how tough it is for professional footballers to have to think about politics; Anelka: Misunderstood, which departs from the defensible premise that Nicolas Anelka was one of the most enigmatic and difficult talents of his generation then proceeds to do nothing with it, reducing episodes like Anelka’s famous confrontation with Raymond Domenech at the 2010 World Cup to a series of platitudes like, “It was a moment I’ll never forget”; and Neymar: The Perfect Chaos, a look at the Brazilian supernova so fittingly half-assed it gives up after three episodes.
Even the widely praised Beckham, despite the documentary’s undeniable nostalgic appeal and meme-generating power, is designed as a publicity vehicle to keep its subject couple in the public eye, to ensure the Beckhams stay relevant. Perhaps the sole exception to this torrent of banality on Netflix is The Final: Attack on Wembley, which offers a riveting, if analytically superficial, tick-tock of the chaos that engulfed Wembley on the day of the Euro 2020 final.
That so few of these documentaries produce anything worth paying attention to comes as no real surprise when you consider the entities behind them. More often that not, the subjects of these series are also their creators, which violates, of course, every principle of independence governing traditional documentary filmmaking: Together: Treble Winners was produced by City Studios, Manchester City’s in-house branded content agency; Fifa+, Fifa’s streaming and content platform, made Captains of the World; David Beckham’s Studio 99 co-produced the Netflix series about his life; and so on. Neymar himself may not have been responsible for the crime against cinema that is Neymar: The Perfect Chaos, but Uninterrupted, the LeBron James-backed content studio formed with the promise of cutting out the journalistic intermediary and giving fans access to the unfiltered athlete’s voice, was, so the result does not deviate from the fare produced via more straightforward narrative conflicts of interest.
These productions don’t inform or enlighten the viewer about anything other than their makers’ gargantuan sense of their own importance; they are pure commercial products, contributing nothing to culture or human knowledge. Stylistically, they mostly follow the same template: a series of controversy-free interviews with talking heads on a couch, interspersed with footage from games (a big emphasis on crowd reaction shots, slow-motion, and closeups of players’ legs), archival clips of contemporaneous TV news hits about the “exciting” bits in the story, and bland tracking shots of cities (young people playing volleyball on a beach, promenades with cafes, non-conversational old men drinking coffee in groups). At some point a chunk of text should appear on screen with words along the lines of “The reaction was not what they had been hoping for”, “Fans did not hide their feelings”, or “It was the penalty the world would never forget.”
How is it that such shockingly boring material keeps getting shoveled through the side door of the streaming platforms? The subjects’ motivation – for money, for attention – is of course part of the story, but the real answer lies in the priorities of the platforms themselves. The streamers understand that these films, like many of the others they host, are uninteresting – hence Netflix’s notorious “Are you still watching?” prompt after 90 minutes of unagitated viewing – but they don’t care. Their sole goal is to stuff their platforms with as much content as possible, turning them into the technological-cultural equivalent of ducks fattened by gavage.
As a revealing recent piece by the film writer Will Tavlin notes, Netflix’s real concern is scale rather than standards: sports documentaries, like all the other productions hosted on its platform, are merely a means to the company’s real end, which is acquiring ever-more subscribers. The streaming service’s priority is to have enough of everything to satisfy everyone. Under the dominion of the platforms, filmmakers cede the terrain to unquestioning, zombie-like “content producers”; cinematic ambition gives way to simple calculations of length (the longer the series, the better); and artistic and journalistic values take a back seat to volume, which is the coin of the realm. If there’s one thing sport is good at, it’s generating endless amounts of content; indeed, much of it already exists in the form of game footage, which makes the modern streaming sports documentarian’s work a stress-free exercise in rearrangement, light contextualization and packaging.
For the streaming platforms, professional sport has become the perfect partner, an unending source of primary and secondary material with a need for exposure as deep as the streamers’ own hunger for fresh televisual meat. The marriage between the two rests on a perfect balance of interests: the sporting entities get money and attention, the platforms get content, and both leave the scene with only quality left on the floor as evidence of their collaborative crime. These documentaries won’t win awards or huge followings; but there are enough people out there obsessed with Neymar, say – or passingly interested in him, or just plain bored – for Netflix to justify splashing some cash on a three-episode splodge of nothing about the Brazilian’s footballing career. Those viewers who do walk through the door of Netflix’s “ta-dum” intro won’t ascend to televisual heaven, but they’ll spend just enough time with Neymar: The Perfect Chaos to continue forking out $15.49 a month to keep their subscription. And that, ultimately, is all these productions are designed to do: help platforms maintain and grow their user numbers. Meanwhile, as the streamers’ economic arrangements – in particular, payment for sources and access – become the norm, ambitious documentaries with a less partial connection to their subjects get squeezed to the margins.
This mortifying stew of boredom, pablum, and money is good for the platforms, but terrible for sports fans. Football content producers and the organizations that pay them are not only failing to tell interesting stories; they’re also, in a way, killing the very institution of the sports documentary, flattening viewers’ expectations of the insight that narrative exposés of professional sport’s inner workings can offer and normalizing a tabloid-like transactionalism in the way that stories about sport’s central personalities and institutions are presented to the public. A documentary worthy of the name enjoys a measure of distance from its subject; the films responsible for the modern mainstream documentary boom – Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine, Super Size Me, and so on – had a real outsider’s zeal, and they were all, in one way or another, exercises in challenging power. Streaming has upended all of that; in the hands of the platforms the sports documentary has become an instrument for consolidating power rather than holding it to account.
Sport’s mightiest personalities and institutions don’t need to “get ahead of the narrative” anymore; increasingly they are the narrative, and the streamers’ seemingly inexhaustible resources and Haalandesque appetite for content are responsible for making sports cinema the most reliably lifeless and propagandistic viewing experience on the internet today. Rooney’s managerial career may be close to the end, but it’s still further from death than the modern sports documentary – as a vehicle for uncovering the truth, contesting authority, and surprising the viewer – now appears. Are you still watching?