Les rebelles du foot

An expedition to the dirty abyss of professional sports. The award winning investigative journalist Benjamin Best (CNN Journalist of the Year 2011) takes a global look behind the scenes at the colourful world of sports and exposes the bitter taste behind the multi-billion sports business.

November 7th, 2001. After a seventy years absence, the Ecuadorian national soccer team is close to qualifying for the first time to a Soccer World Cup. This documentary follows the events that took place during that historic date, when a whole country lived under the shadow of a soccer game.

The best of the action from over 30 years of FA Cup finals at Wembley Stadium.

1928-29 Irish Cup Semi-Final action between Ballymena and Coleraine, from Belfast's Windsor Park.

Batan is the goalkeeper of the Zanatlija football club from Visoko, competing in the lowest-level town league of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their opponent in the game is the local rival which holds the top position and has the ambition to move to the next league, which would be secured with a victory over Zanatlija. The atmosphere is blazing hot and any silly move on the field is received by the supporters as a life-or-death event. However, although he's been keeping the goal of his team for 10 years, Batan, the hero of this story, doesn't find the result of the game all that important.

Framed against the backdrop of Arsenal’s historic “Invincible” season of 2003-04, the first and only occasion a team has gone an entire Premier League campaign without defeat, the film sees Wenger reflect candidly on his revolutionary era at Arsenal and the emotional and personal turmoil that surrounded his controversial exit after 22 years.

The documentary “Brotherhood of Lions” is a story about the legendary football club Lions. Lions were created in 1978 under the leadership of Roman Ubakivi who wanted to start training Estonian boys when the general sports circles did not think the world’s most popular game was suitable for Estonians. The tremendous training volumes, successful trips to competitions in the Soviet Russia, tales of happenings and work ethics that are absurd from today’s point of view all paint a colourful, warm and inspiring story of young men, their charismatic coach and everybody else who took part in their journey. Promoted by the media, those young boys became national heroes at the end of the 1980s and, in the winds of freedom, people started to see them as the Estonian football team. Unknowingly, the Lions were thus like the ambassadors of freedom, and even more so – the foundations of football in the newly independent Estonia.

In the summer of 2018 the England football team defied expectations to reach the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup™, achieving their best result in the tournament in 28 years and becoming the nation’s heroes. Following the highs and lows of the England squad’s journey, including highlights from all England matches and every goal; this is the perfect way to relieve the moment in time when a country dared to dream that football was coming home.

Steven Gerrard became perhaps the greatest player in the history of Liverpool FC, but did so when success and trophies were declining. It became his personal mission to lift the famous club back to the top. That loyalty raised him to God-like status with Liverpool fans, but was an unbearable burden, bringing with it a profound sense of responsibility to live up to their and his own expectations.

Jonathan and Romario are two Afro-Ecuadorian children from the Chota Valley, one of the poorest regions of Ecuador. Their fate can be one of two: to become world-class footballers like Ulises de la Cruz, Chucho Benitez and Antonio Valencia, or farmers like Darwin. This documentary reveals the lack of opportunities, discrimination, and economic and social segregation that black communities face in Ecuador.