Al Majalla’s Film Watch: football on the big screenhttps://en.majalla.com/node/331507/culture-social-affairs/al-majalla%E2%80%99s-film-watch-football-big-screen
On the occasion of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Al Majalla highlights some of the most notable and recent films on the world's most coveted sport. We start with a classic and then dive into more recent titles.
A Stranger in My House
Written by: Wahid Hamed
Directed by: Samir Seif
Country of production: Egypt
Director Samir Seif was one of Egyptian cinema’s great admirers of the Hollywood school. The imprint is clear across much of his work, whether in stylistic influence or in more direct forms of adaptation, though he had a particular gift for moving beyond mere Egyptianisation or simple reworking. His cinematic project thus acquired a distinctive character, one that reconciled two difficult demands: popular appeal and artistic ambition.
This mark appears in a long list of films, among them Souk Al-Motaa, The Tiger and the Female, The Suspect and A Stranger in My House (1982), his first collaboration with screenwriter Wahid Hamed, adapted from the American film The Goodbye Girl (1977). In a twist of irony many may not know, the leading role was initially offered to Egyptian football star Mahmoud El-Khatib.
The plot of A Stranger in My House rests on the two protagonists falling victim to a scam that forces them to live together in the same apartment. Over time, their relationship develops into a love story between the widowed nurse Afaf Abdel Wahed, played by Soad Hosny, and the rural footballer Shehata Abu Kaf, played by Nour El-Sherif, before the ending surprises them with a new guest who had already bought the apartment before them.
On the surface, this dramatic thread may not seem especially promising. Yet through it, Samir Seif managed to penetrate the hidden world of football pitches in the 1980s, and to unpack aspects of the psychology of stardom and its relationship with the public. The result was an unprecedented cinematic document of football culture, one that wove the live atmosphere of sport into the film’s drama and made it one of the most distinctive references for the match-day world of that era, from police security and crowd movement to the players’ entrance onto the pitch, all the way to moments of excitement and suspense during the match itself, which he fashioned through a remarkable series of swift shots blending documentary texture with acted drama.
A Stranger in My House was not the only time Mahmoud El-Khatib was offered an acting role. The offer was repeated in 1990 for the leading role in An Appointment with the President, directed by Mohamed Radi, although the character was that of a police officer, before the part eventually went to Farouk El-Fishawy. Throughout its history, cinema has often tried to capitalise on the fame of sports stars across various fields, from athletics and boxing to squash, with Ahmed Barada as one example.
Football, however, remained the widest arena for such recurring wagers, beginning with the appearance of Al-Ittihad Alexandria and Egypt national team star El-Sayed Houda in Togo Mizrahi’s Shalom the Athlete (1937), one of the earliest films of this kind, and continuing through Adel Heikal, Saleh Selim and the famous goalkeeper Ekramy, whose experience may have been among the most successful, particularly with audiences. As El-Khatib himself said, he could not find genuine emotion in himself before the mirror during the months he spent reading the screenplay and trying to inhabit the character. He later contented himself with appearing in a number of commercials as himself.
The Saudi film Noor summons the memory of an entire generation of fans whose lives became linked to moments in Mohammed Noor's ascent on the pitch
The role then passed to Adel Emam, who had already completed a similar character in A Man Who Lost His Mind and was preparing for another football-related experience in Mohamed Khan's The Street Player, before the offer finally settled on Nour El-Sherif. He, too, was no stranger to the pitch, having joined the youth team of Zamalek Club early in his life.
That background may explain the screenplay's shift from casting the hero as an Al Ahly player to casting him as a Zamalek player, though more than one account circulates on this point. Some suggest that Al Ahly Club was undergoing renovation work at the time of filming, while others maintain that the club's management demanded a higher fee for the use of its name, and that Zamalek accepted the proposed budget.
The most famous paradox attached to the film, from its release until today, lies in the six goals Abu Kaf scores against Al Ahly during the events, despite the appearance of the club's own stars in the team, among them El-Khatib himself. Many fans see it as an achievement that could only have happened on the cinema screen.
Noor
Written and directed by: Omar Al-Muqri
Country of production: Saudi Arabia
Following in the footsteps of the inspirational figures who preceded him, Mohammed Noor wove his footballing legend in the alleyways of Jeddah before joining Al-Ittihad "overnight," as he puts it. He progressed through the youth and junior teams, then rose to the first team in that same season. It was an exceptional journey, whose echoes travelled far beyond the pitch and whose details mingled with popular imagination in the minds of generations of fans.
Among them was the young director Omar Al-Muqri, who undertook his first feature-length documentary by tracing that career in Noor—one of the latest works in Saudi documentary cinema, and in sports documentary in particular. This remains one of the less explored and less illuminated cinematic forms, lending the experiment added value even before the act of documenting the life of one of the most prominent symbols of Saudi football in the new millennium.
Al-Muqri spent years in sports media, moving between presenting and field reporting for several specialised channels, while also making short films and documentary material for television and archival purposes. This gave him close access to the inner world of stadiums and their stars, including Mohammed Noor himself. That experience is clearly reflected in the structure of the screenplay, whether in its details and visual perspective, or in its dramatic context, including its treatment of life after retirement, Noor's move into match analysis, and then his acting appearances in several episodes of the series Shabab Al-Bomb.
The film is interspersed with a vast amount of archival material documenting various stages from the mid-1990s to 2016. The director succeeds in managing and redeploying this material, often weaving it into the narrative fabric while preserving its technical and artistic balance. These images and clips acquire a function beyond mere documentation. They summon the memory of an entire generation of fans whose personal lives became linked to moments in Mohammed Noor's ascent on the pitch, helping to renew the footballing legend and restore its presence for those who witnessed it, and for others encountering it for the first time.
Throughout his footballing career, Mohammed Noor offered a striking embodiment of the idea of the champion team, rather than a model centred primarily on individual achievement. Like several of his contemporaries, he carved his name into the game through collective endeavour. He became one of the foremost symbols of Al-Ittihad Club, yet the esteem he enjoyed extended to fans of rival clubs as well, a rare paradox that calls for an exceptional presence and an influential personality.
He contributed to more than 20 titles, including the Saudi League, the Federation Cup, and the Crown Prince Cup, as well as triumphs with the Saudi national team in the Gulf Cup and the Arab Cup. The film also revisits his participation in the AFC Champions League in 2004, one of the defining milestones in his career, when he led Al-Ittihad to become the first Saudi team to win the continental title under its new name.
For all this, the film may disappoint the curiosity of a broad segment of viewers searching for revelations, or for answers to unresolved questions, most of them connected to Noor's final years on the pitch before retirement: the nature of his later relationship with the national team, the reasons behind his absence from certain tournaments, and the controversy surrounding the doping case, among other matters.
Wide areas of the unspoken remain outside the frame. Noor himself clearly had a hand in leaving them undisclosed, or perhaps the decision was his from the outset. Faced with an exceptional, cross-generational career that stretched across more than two decades on the pitch and continues to command the love and passion of fans to this day, the story's importance lies in what it chooses to preserve, allowing the tale to renew its presence again and again.
Thus the legend's life extends beyond the pitch, in an unbroken wager, refusing to submit to a timetable or to end with the referee's whistle.
México 86
Written by: Luis Reséndiz, Daniel Krauze and Francisco Javier González
Directed by: Gabriel Ripstein
Country of production: Mexico
As one of the countries hosting this year's World Cup, Mexico returns to the spotlight as the first country to host football's greatest event for a third time, following the tournaments of 1970 and 1986. The latter remains one of the most thrilling editions in the history of the game. In that tournament, football became an instrument of propaganda, placing the World Cup in direct confrontation with politics and the Fourth Estate, within a clamorous dramatic context that exposed the hidden face of the green rectangle. This is vividly embodied in México 86, whose makers succeed in producing a cinematic document that brings the contours of that period's struggle into sharp relief, while also making the shrewd choice to release the film just as the fever of the marathon returns once more.
Through a satirical screenplay crafted by Reséndiz, Krauze and González, director Gabriel Ripstein builds his world across a duration that almost exactly matches the length of a football match. We follow the strange, feverish journey of a Mexican government official, Martín de la Torre, played by Diego Luna, who exploits his political cunning, along with Colombia's sudden withdrawal from hosting the World Cup because of internal crises, to secure the privilege for Mexico amid a tangled web of interests and accusations from which even FIFA itself was not spared.
These backstage machinations may not have been clear to everyone, especially football fans and devotees, among them the film's own director, who noted in an earlier interview that this was the first tournament he attended, when his family took him to watch Italy play Argentina. The match ended in a draw, with Maradona scoring one of his most famous goals.
Yet the film takes a risk by avoiding the most celebrated features of the event, such as Maradona's goals, Hugo Sánchez's ascent to global stardom, or even the epic character of the tournament itself, turning instead towards the idea of "closed doors." Behind those doors, decisions are made and power is exercised in a drama no less gripping than any match, shaping the lives of millions far from the stadiums and crowds, in an era when television possessed an influence difficult to imagine today in the age of social media.
The film also moves swiftly through provocative themes such as institutional corruption, media conglomerates and the manifestations of geopolitical influence, along with their intersections with the present moment. In doing so, it underscores the enduring, stark contradiction between the joy of the stadiums and the darkness of their backstage rooms, within a framework that blends real events and actual figures with black comedy. This is made clear before the journey begins, through an introductory title card telling us that the film is inspired by truth, while also being a work of imagination.
It is therefore unsurprising that some characters appear in a mode closer to caricature, beginning with the film's protagonist, Diego Luna, who delivers a solo performance match that ranks among the film's most distinctive elements. Luna had previously played an eccentric goalkeeper in the comedy Rudo y Cursi (2008). The visual elements, from set and production design to costumes, succeed in recreating with precision the atmosphere and colours of Mexico in the 1980s. The film forms part of a slate of dramatic projects exploring new horizons and genres in contemporary storytelling, as Carolina Leconte, Vice President of Regional Content and Licensing, described them during this year's announcement of the joint collaboration with Netflix.
One Last Deal
Written by: Peter Howlett
Directed by: Brendan Muldowney
Countries of production: Ireland, United States, United Kingdom
In his new film, One Last Deal, director Brendan Muldowney follows the backstage world of major football deals through the story of veteran players' agent Jimmy Banks, played by Danny Dyer. Banks enters his final battle to complete a deal whose success may rescue his professional future, and perhaps his personal life as well. Yet Muldowney does not use this plot merely as the engine of the film's drama. He goes further, taking a directorial gamble that he handles with remarkable command.
The action unfolds inside the agent's cramped office, while the camera remains distant from the green rectangle, the customary arena of conflict and colliding interests. In its place, the director turns the mounting psychological pressure endured by his protagonist into the path along which events unfold, making the tension of negotiation a substitute for the thrill of the matches themselves.
As the agent is subjected to blackmail that threatens to expose secrets and transgressions from his past, Peter Howlett's debut screenplay succeeds in sustaining dramatic tension despite the confines of place and cast. This escalating sense of suffocation is reinforced by editing that relies on a limited number of recurring shots, allowing emotions to gather gradually on screen in parallel with the protagonist's psychological decline.
The narrative's strength also lies in its refusal to concern itself solely with the details of transfers or astronomical figures. Instead, it turns, with considerable boldness, to the ethics of the agent's profession, revealing a less visible side of the game, where football appears as a bleak trade for those who pull its strings from behind the curtain.
The film avoids the trap of treating the agent as a ready-made embodiment of greed in the modern football industry, granting the character a more complex and interpretable human dimension. Jimmy Banks is not the most powerful man in the game. He appears, rather, as a prisoner of its ruthless rules, trying to hold on to his place within a system changing faster than his ability to adapt to it, or even to comprehend it. From this point, the character earns a considerable measure of the viewer's sympathy and astonishment at once. The deal becomes a battle for survival in a world that recognises only immediate success, and that swiftly casts aside its old sons the moment their lustre begins to fade.
Blue52
Written by: Archana Borhade
Directed by: Ali El Arabi
Countries of production: Qatar, Egypt
Blue52 does not belong directly to the category of sports films. It is closer to the cinema of the road, or of the journey, those journeys that, by their end, or even in the very act of being undertaken, become a way of discovering the self and redefining it. The film's protagonist is a young Indian man named Ashish, played by Yadav Shashidhar, who has spent his life cut off from the world on a remote island in India, in an isolation imposed by his father out of fear of losing him as he had lost his elder son.
His life is overturned when he decides to break free and sets out on a race against time to meet the only person with whom, in his imagination, he had woven a friendship that accompanied him through the years of solitude: the Argentine player Lionel Messi, one of football's contemporary legends.
Ashish then finds himself drawn into the more clamorous worlds of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which ended with Argentina winning the title after defeating France in a final described as historic. The tournament also witnessed a notable Arab presence, beginning with Qatar's first ever participation as the representative of the host nation, alongside distinguished performances by Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Morocco.
After several attempts at short films and music videos, Egyptian director Ali El Arabi continues in Blue52 a project he began with his first feature documentary, Captains of Zaatari (2021). There, he followed a similar journey undertaken by two young Syrians who moved from a refugee camp in Jordan to Qatar, also in pursuit of a dream of professional football. In both cases, fiction and documentary alike, sport is not presented as an end in itself.
It becomes a dramatic instrument bound up with the idea of an instinctive inevitability in the marginalised characters' pursuit of deliverance, whether from paternal control or from the force of siege. It is a Sisyphean pursuit that the director deliberately adopts in both films, declining to reward his characters with happy endings and contenting himself with granting them the ability to chase the dream.
The film ends with its protagonist trapped inside his new world after failing to meet the figure who inspired him. Yet the more astonishing irony lies in the way the echo of that encounter extended beyond the frame, when the young actor Yadav Shashidhar met Messi two months ago, following the film's world premiere at the opening of the 40th Washington Film Festival. Messi signed the film's official poster for him and posed for photographs, in an enchanting symbolic gesture that allowed the dream withheld by the drama to come true beyond the borders of the screen.
Saipan
Written by: Paul Fraser
Directed by: Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa
Countries of production: Ireland, United Kingdom
Saipan centres on the hidden battles inside players' dressing rooms, and on the way such conflicts can shape the destinies of national teams and clubs. The film draws on a famous crisis that struck the Irish national team nearly a quarter of a century ago, during its training camp on the island of Saipan, when the dispute between the team's manager and its captain at the time, Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane, escalated until Keane withdrew from the 2002 FIFA World Cup only days before it began. It became one of the most controversial crises in modern football history, turning the affair into an event that exceeded the boundaries of sport. Irish society was divided over it at the time, forming camps and fronts that produced warring psychological binaries in keeping with the original battle.
A footballing psychological drama that recalls the two-hander of the stage, especially in light of the competitive performances of its two leads, Éanna Hardwicke as Keane and Steve Coogan as McCarthy, the film turns their disagreement over sporting facilities into an ideological conflict in which ego, identity and even the concept of masculinity come sharply into view. It resembles an existential battle conducted within an absurd frame, which the directors, the couple Glenn and Lisa, render on screen with a rising rhythm.
They begin with archival material from television and radio news bulletins and programmes, revealing to the viewer from the first moment the scale of the controversy generated by the crisis, to the point that one speaker in the testimonies likens its impact, in terms of its overwhelming presence in the public sphere, to the shock caused by the death of Princess Diana.
The camera also carries the narrative between the city and the camp as it follows the media uproar. Yet most of the events unfold on the island chosen by the Irish federation for the team's training camp. When the national squad arrived, however, it was met with a disastrous situation, including serious shortcomings in the training facilities and, according to some testimonies, even a shortage of enough footballs for practice.
The idea for the film began with a moment in which screenwriter Paul Fraser watched Roy Keane walking his dog on his way home. For this reason, Fraser sees the work primarily as a story, as he has said in an earlier interview, one that differs from conventional sports narration and avoids direct reliance on events or historical facts.
This may be what exposed the film to criticism from some who saw in it a measure of distortion or reinterpretation of certain events, particularly in relation to circulating accounts about widespread alcohol consumption inside the national team's camp. Those allegations were addressed by former international player Kevin Kilbane, as an eyewitness, in an article in "The Irish Times," which he opened by invoking a saying often attributed to the American writer Mark Twain: "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
