Ginghina’s thoughts on football are more than thoughts about football

Play close attention. The rules of football are wrong. Casting his mind back to 1986, three years before the fall of Ceaucescu, Romanian civil servant Laurentiu Ginghina recalls how he fractured his fibula while playing the game, an injury that would not only end his footballing days, but his dream of working for the forestry department.

“I dreamed of being in the middle of the forest,” he says mournfully.

After some thought he decided the injury was neither his nor the other player’s fault. “It was the fault of the imposed norms.”

The solution was simple. Make the beautiful game more beautiful (and safer) with an octagonal pitch and each team split into two parts – attackers and defenders – with each confined to their own half.

His thoughts on the offside rule are revised throughout this engaging documentary portrait by Ginghina’s childhood chum Corneliu Porumboiu, the auteur behind such deadpan delights as 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective. By the end he’s advocating something that sounds suspiciously like a monstrous mash of Rugby Union and soccer.

More than halfway into this eccentric project its subject notes parallels between his life and the double lives led by superheroes like Superman and Spider-Man. And why not? By then we’ve heard of his abandoned plans to irrigate a farm in Reno, Nevada, using melted snows from the Sierra Nevada range. (A second attempt to move to the US to work as an orange farmer in Florida was abandoned after 9/11.)

He’s clever enough to closely analyse the mistranslation of “metanoia” as “repent” in the New Testament, and kind enough to intervene on behalf of a 93-year-old who is still trying to get land back that was taken by the Ceaucescu regime.

He’s also self-aware enough to smile at his own footballing philosophy which he’ll happily share with anyone who cares to listen (and some that don’t).

Over the years he has been in touch with English sports lawyers, to no avail, but it’s clear that Ginghina’s thoughts on football are more than thoughts about football. They’re a complicated knot of regrets, ambitions, contrariness, and personal philosophy. Without the corner kicks.

Available on Curzon Home Cinema