FOOTBALLERS: THE NEW FILM STARS

As the World Cup looms, even those of us who don’t know a handball from a penalty kick can agree: sport is huge. But how did it get this way, and why? Tim de Lisle, editor of Intelligent Life, tackles this subject head-on in his feature “How Did Sport Get so Big?” He explores a list of suspects ranging from imperialism, to big business to advertising. One of the most interesting arguments he makes is that film and music, by failing to provide a relatable stream of “man-sized heroes” in recent years, has paved the way for athletes to take centre stage. He writes:

In the 1960s and 1970s, the cinema kept up a steady supply of man-sized heroes: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson. In the 1980s, it provided human cartoons like Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and likeable everymen like Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis. Since the 1990s, it has favoured pretty boys (Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio), smiling scientologists (Tom Cruise) and more everymen (Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington). With the odd exception like George Clooney, the leading men are not pitched at grown-ups...

This gaping hole has been filled by sportsmen, from the basketball star Michael Jordan to the cricketer Andrew Flintoff. The artist Andy Warhol, who knew virtually nothing about sport, saw it coming 30 years ago: “the sports stars of today”, he said, “are the movie stars of yesterday.” The singer and poet Leonard Cohen made a similar point when I interviewed him in 1988: “In the Sixties, music was the mode, the most important form of communication. I think today it’s sports. The sports figures in America are much more attractive and interesting and their lives are much more dangerous than the rock figures. They are in the traditional heroic mould.”

This hunger for heroes, which goes some way towards explaining our Tiger Woods worship/horror, is captured in Nike's viral World Cup commercial (see below). The ad both conveys sport mania and is sport mania itself: it has been viewed over 13m times on YouTube and around 17m times on other video websites, and it has been aired in over 30 countries. Even for the non-sports fan, it is awesome.

Created by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Oscar-nominated director of such films as "Babel", "21 Grams" and "Amores Perros", it features his tell-tale quick cuts and overlapping narratives, here applied to football players mid-kick. As they are about to make contact with the ball we see them imagine their future success or failure. Such visions veer from statues erected in their honour to the dread of living in a trailer with a potbelly and bushy beard (a particularly funny fate credited to Wayne Rooney, an English footballer). Their extreme hopes and fears renders them human, in a way, even as it plays on the most winning sport narrative of all: everything hinges on a single moment.