PREMIER LEAGUE:What's badly needed is a classic movie about soccer without the David Beckham cameo role, writes ANDREW FIFIELD

THERE ARE certain cultural phenomena which are guaranteed to induce spasms of nausea among those condemned to consume them: musical collaborations involving one, or more, of R Kelly, Ne-Yo or Akon; any television programme which includes the words ‘Camp’ or ‘Academy’; and, most gut-wrenchingly queasy of all, films about football.

Quite why movie-makers have been singularly unable, or unwilling, to harness football’s emotional and physical punch is a mystery. American football and baseball have been brilliantly served by Hollywood in recent years by the likes of Field of Dreams and The Full Nine Yards, while boxing has created an Oscar-heavy genre all of its own. Even golf – a sport whose worldwide popularity is roughly on a par with syphilis – has been immortalised on celluloid thanks to Tin Cup and the incomparable Kevin Costner, surely the Marlon Brando of sporting cinema.

And what does football have to offer in response? The Goal trilogy, which achieved the apparently impossible by making people yearn to watch the real Newcastle United, When Saturday Comes, where Sean Bean – playing entirely against type – was cast as a gruff Sheffield United supporter who happened to land a contract at his home-town club (tag-line: ‘To Jimmy life was just a game . . . until the game became his life’); and candy-floss fluff such as Bend It Like Beckham, a work so sugary it should have come with a health warning for diabetics.

Then, most recently, we have been subjected to Nick Love’s The Firm, whose depiction of the fashions and feuding of 1980s casuals makes you want to watch through your fingers, and not in a good way.

Love’s problem – or one of them, at least – is that the ‘Hooli Movie’, British cinema’s preferred mode of depicting the manifold delights of its national game, has now become a grotesque parody of itself, largely thanks to the efforts of its ubiquitous leading man Danny Dyer, an actor who clearly believes that if something can’t be said while walking bow-legged down a suspiciously darkened railway tunnel, it cannot be worth saying at all.

Dyer, incidentally, will soon be gracing your nearest multiplex in Dead Man Running, a feature that has been produced thanks to a significant cash injection from his football buddies Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole, a collision of talents which represents a veritable perfect storm of naffness. Do book a seat before they sell out.

At least Love, understanding that the hooligans’ associations with their various clubs represented little more than a marriage of convenience to satisfy their own blood-lust, albeit one that caused great inconvenience to everyone else, largely resists the urge to depict any on-field action, which invariably sounds the death-knell for soccer films.

Peter Morgan also knew this, which is why his screen adaptation of David Peace’s brilliant novel The Damned United, which charted Brian Clough’s spectacularly unsuccessful spell as manager of Leeds United, deserves to be considered a rare nugget of gold amid the dross.

Morgan’s success lay in identifying that the crucial dynamic in Peace’s book centred less on the corrosively antagonistic relationship between Clough and his old Yorkshire bete noire, Don Revie, and more on Old Big ‘Ead’s tumultuous partnership with Peter Taylor, exquisitely played by Timothy Spall. The film thus became less a sports drama and more a surprisingly sweet, if ultimately doomed, love story between two men who could not exist fully without the other – English football’s answer to Brokeback Mountain, only with (slightly) less kissing.

But this is a problem for those keen to label The Damned United as a breakthrough. A film about soccer which shies away from showing any actual football cannot be said to have wholeheartedly embraced its genre. It would be like making a war film without showing any guns being fired, or an erotic thriller where everyone kept their clothes on.

There is no obvious answer to this conundrum. Drafting in real footballers is one solution but, as anyone who has seen the performances of Pele, Bobby Moore and Ossie Ardiles in Escape to Victory can attest, this just creates a whole new raft of problems, although all three can at least claim to have acted Sylvester Stallone off the screen.

Perhaps the way forward is for Hollywood to deliver footballing versions of old classics. In light of recent headlines, a Chelsea-based remake of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, with Frank Arnesen cast in the role of the Child-Catcher, might be a hit at the box office, while a new interpretation of Rambo – the tale of a morally repugnant foreign mercenary with a daunting array of firepower – is surely tailor-made for Manchester City.

In the meantime, anything that doesn’t feature either a David Beckham cameo or a Kapa tracksuit would be welcome.