The clip starts with the striker stretching his calf, bent at the waist, willing some bit of suppleness into his muscles. “It’s hard to get going when you’ve stopped for a while,” he groans in a treacle-thick Donegal accent. “F**king hell.”
In the background, Lough Nacung Upper is as still as a glass tabletop. Mount Errigal towers over it all, snow-tipped and majestic, a Tír Chonaill Mont Blanc. The grass is long, the surface is a guessing game and the players are built for comfort, not for speed.
Welcome to Leriga Rötter. Welcome to Muddy Roots.
This is not an RTÉ Production. It’s not a TG4 thing. You can’t even see the full episodes in Ireland yet, not by legal means anyway. Instead, it’s only available on Discovery+ in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and, for some reason, Turkey. It was filmed just before Christmas last year by a three-man Swedish documentary team, led by director Joel Segerdahl. It is riotous, fun and hilariously, magnificently sweary.
“For people in the south of Ireland, do they completely understand the accent?” asks Segerdahl when we get him on the phone. As well he might. The clips all come with Swedish subtitles but you would need a well-tuned ear to catch everything said by the players from Dunlewey, from right up on the edge of Glenveagh National Park.
“I found it a difficulty at times. Once I put in the effort, it was okay. But of course, once they spoke Gaelic, it was impossible. And they used that to their advantage when they were playing against the team from Letterkenny when we were there so that was fun to watch. They were talking to each other in Irish and talking s**t about the referee and nobody could say anything to them.
“But obviously one of my favourite things about seeing it on social media was seeing people saying that it was easy to understand the subtitles if you were Swedish but what about English speakers? You need subtitles for them too!”
Segerdahl has been drawn to amateur football as a subject for his films for a few years. He started off doing it in Sweden but when the 2022 World Cup hovered on the horizon, he felt the urge to broaden it out a bit. What better way to mark the ultimate sell-out of professional football than to go right back down to the lowest rung on the ladder and start over?
So he pitched a series to Discovery and got a small bit of funding to cover the budget for himself and two cameramen and away he went. Sweden, Romania, Poland, Spain and, somehow, Ireland. Segerdahl had never been to Dublin, never mind deepest Donegal. So of all the scruffy pitches in all the world, how did he end up in not one but two in the north-west of Ireland?
“It came through the UK actually,” he laughs. “I had been doing some stories on the absolute worst of Swedish soccer. I really enjoyed them because everything is so unpredictable. Always something new happened. It was so authentic and so real. And so I fell in love with those kinds of stories.
“So when I thought of spreading it out across Europe, I spoke to some friends in the Groundhoppers UK community. One of the guys said to me, ‘If you really want to find an extraordinary venue in terms of scenery, you should look into football in Ireland.’ And I was like, ‘Do they play football in Ireland?’ I had heard of Gaelic football, with the hands. But soccer, not really.
“But then I browsed the internet and quite quickly found Dunlewey and just by the look of it I was going, ‘This is crazy.’ Mount Errigal in the background, it was so beautiful.”
They came over during the World Cup last year, in the weeks running up to Christmas. They focused on two clubs – Dunlewey Celtic from Gaoth Dobhair and Carrowmena up the top of the Inishowen Peninsula. Segerdahl had a little trouble organising it at first, essentially because any time he got in touch with people from either club, they weren’t buying that he was who he said he was.
“The biggest obstacle was communicating with both Dunlewey and Carrowmena. They thought it was a joke, both of them. Everybody I spoke to said, ‘Who is this? Who put you up to this?’ It took a while for me to convince them that I was for real and that I wasn’t one of their friends. Once I did that, it was okay.
“Even when we got there, they were a bit suspicious. It took a while before they were calm and relaxed with us. But they were super friendly. After a while, we took a beer together and it was great.”
The results have gone far and wide on social media over the past few weeks. Leriga Rötter is a six-part series and two of the episodes are set in Donegal. It’s Sunday pub football in all its gory glory. Nobody is light on their feet. Nobody is too good for the arena. Even the players that are in decent shape – former Donegal defender Neil McGee, for instance – show they belong at the level. One foul throw in a game is bad, Neil. Two is shocking.
All in all, it’s just terrific fun. The language would make a sailor blush but hardly any of it is aggressive. Most of it is players giving out to themselves, almost in disbelief at how bad their touch has been or how wide they’ve managed to screw a shot at goal. For Segerdahl, that’s the meat of the thing. Nobody goes to these games to enjoy the football. They go because they are the football.
“I was standing in Donegal, at Dunlewey, at the same time as the World Cup was happening in Qatar. And I was thinking to myself, this is really what the story is about. A lot of people are tired. They think that modern football has lost its attraction. It’s a big money industry and it’s all about glamour and corruption. But what I think this shows is how real and authentic football is. This is the heart and soul of football, really.
“This is where it all began for everybody. You do not see this kind of stuff any more. It’s not the sort of football that you watch. If you want to watch football, you watch professional football. It’s as if this part of football – which makes up 99 per cent of the football played in the world – just doesn’t exist. But a lot of people see themselves in these guys. They can see how wonderful it is.”
For all six episodes, Segerdahl and his crew only stayed a couple of days. In one way, he’d have liked to have stayed longer and explored more. But setting parameters does wonders for any project like this. You go, you watch, you find a story. You go home and tell it.
“I find football so interesting this way,” he says. “You have 90 minutes to capture whatever it is you’re going to get. I find it an interesting exercise – you have to push yourself to find something in those 90 minutes.
“You can’t just come away from it and say, ‘Well nothing happened’. Something is always happening. My job is to find the smallest thing around the game that matters. It could be in the way the audience at the game can’t look when the ball is in the defence. It could be anything. Something is always there. People say, ‘How can you make 30 minutes of television about an amateur football game?’ And I say, ‘Of course you can’.
“I always try to mic-up at least two players and the referee. Usually the two captains because they are the ones who will be involved in discussions and usually they are the ones who talk the most in the game. Nobody ever says no, not that I can remember. It takes two minutes and then they forget they have them on. The first two minutes of the game, they probably stay a little quiet and then from the third minute onwards, they just get involved as they normally would. All blabbering, all the way through.”
Not just the players, of course. Spectators too.
“F**k’s sake, hi,” laments one of the Carrowmena players as he walks off defeat at the end. “How did we get beat there, hi?”
“They scored more goals than you,” chortles his mother, sending him on his way to the dressing room. “You can’t say he played well when he didn’t. He knows himself he didn’t play well. But sure we’ll go for lunch now and forget it. Have a laugh.”
Nothing else for it.
