The year 2014 in football will be remembered for many things, but the list will definitely not include Fifa's movie about itself, United Passions. Fifa supplied more than €21.5 million of the €24 million budget for the film. In October, the Associated Press reported that United Passions had taken a total of €160,000 at the box office.
Since you will probably never see the movie, here's the gist of what happens. It turns out that United Passions is the most anti-English movie since Mel Gibson's The Patriot. Fifa is started by a group of idealistic young Europeans who run into opposition from the supercilious xenophobes who run what is referred to in the film (though never before in real life) as His Majesty's Football Association.
Fifa’s officials try to approach the FA’s president, Lord Kinnaird, but he brusquely dismisses them, perhaps because he is watching a football match at the time. “What did those blasted Frogs want?” Kinnaird later demands of his flunky.
A few scenes later, another slimy Englishman randomly pops up to accost Jules Rimet’s daughter with an astonishing racist and sexist tirade. “Negroes, playing football, ha-ha! Why not women? That would be very amusing, hmm? Most amusing.”
We never see this character again. His only role is to continue the theme of the English as the reactionary racists against whom Fifa must strive to bring the game to the rest of the world.
Heroic disregard
Since it was the English (or rather the British) who, in fact, brought the game to the rest of the world, this is a remarkable inversion of historical fact. But the only remarkable thing about
United Passions
is its heroic disregard for the facts.
Gèrard Depardieu’s Rimet is scrupulously politically correct for a man who was born in 1873. On the boat to Uruguay, he worries that it will seem “inappropriate” to play football in the midst of the Great Depression, but his daughter reasons: “When have dreams ever been appropriate?”
At a committee meeting in 1936, Rimet denounces the German and Italian dictatorships and even accuses the Italians of having “appropriated” the 1934 World Cup for propaganda purposes. Was Rimet really so far-sighted? The credibility of the scene is compromised when it rehashes the myth that Hitler refused to shake Jesse Owens’s hand at the Berlin Olympics.
Cut to 1942, and Rimet’s associates are telling him about a match between Ukrainian “prisoners” and German soldiers in Kiev, which ended 5-3 to the Ukrainians even though they knew that defying the pre-match order to lose meant certain death at the hands of Nazi executioners.
The match did take place (though it’s unclear how Rimet and his friends could have heard about it in Zurich eight days later) but the horrific story surrounding it is a Stalinist myth that was debunked decades ago.
On to the 1950 World Cup, in which Uruguay’s surprise victory over Brazil in the final is portrayed as an epic disaster, like the nuclear annihilation of a city. Rimet experiences that effect we know from war movies, when a shell explodes too close to a soldier, and time slows down while he stumbles about in a daze.
This moment is the occasion for one of the movie’s more subtle yet more embarrassing mistakes, considering the Fifa-as-racially-progressive theme. Uruguay’s captain in 1950, the “Black Chief” Obdulio Varela, was, as his nickname suggests, mixed-race, but the Uruguay captain in the number-five jersey who steps forward to accept the trophy from Rimet’s trembling hands is a white man.
Rimet promptly dies, and suddenly the central character is Sam Neill’s Joào Havelange, who outmanoeuvres the English incumbent Stanley Rous to win the presidency.
“Pity it wasn’t a fair fight,” Rous whines.
“I took the rest of the world seriously,” Havelange replies.
Legitimate business
Havelange discovers that Fifa is penniless and he enlists
Sepp Blatter
, played by
Tim Roth
: “Apparently he is good at finding money. Let’s hope so.”
Luckily for Fifa, Blatter makes all his money from legitimate business activities. Havelange is the only character around whom the whiff of corruption seems to swirl. In one bizarre scene, he appears to tell Blatter that he intends to fix the 1978 World Cup in Argentina’s favour.
Blatter has expressed concerns about the World Cup taking place there, not because of the junta’s human rights violations, but because the sponsors “feel exposed” due to the junta’s human rights violations.
Havelange replies by telling Blatter to imagine that he's God, then flicking a Subbuteo ball into the net with his finger. The benighted Argentines "need reasons to rejoice," he says, "they need reasons to hope, they need good news they can actually see. Argentinians need papelitos. We will cover them with papelitos."
Aside from apparently being willing to stand by while his boss declares his intention to rig the World Cup, Roth’s Blatter is incorruptible. He understands there are always a few bad apples – “I knew I wasn’t joining the chess club” – but there will be no corruption on his watch.
The climax of the movie follows his thrilling ascent to the Fifa presidency and his first re-election. Along the way various flyweight journalists and anonymous, usually English, political enemies try to drag him down, but he just ignores them.
One of his employees urges him to fight back, claiming his opponents are trying to drag his name through the mud. Blatter replies: "I grew up on a farm. I have no fear of mud." Sepp Blatter didn't actually grow up on a farm, but that's United Passions.
