As the FIFA World Cup approaches, we list 10 of the best movies about football players to watch for pure passion and beautiful football.
There is no better time to revisit football movies than right before the FIFA World Cup. Before the tournament turns every conversation into national pride, it is worth looking at the films that have tried to capture what the sport does to people. And yes, for readers searching for soccer movies, you are in the right place too. We will call it football because most of the world does, but no hard feelings.
The point is the same: these are movies about football players, their lives and dreams attached to the beautiful game, the crowds watching the jogo bonito, and even the strange private loneliness that can sit inside the minds of the greatest players in the sport. This list brings together some of the best films to watch before the tournament starts.
Films about talent, discipline, failure, obsession. For many of them, football is closer to a religion than a sport, with lives devoted to glory and a place in history. Every player is, before anything else, a human being, and from that simple fact come all the flaws and virtues these films are interested in. Some of these movies are inspiring, some are sadder than expected. All of them know that football is never only about football.
1. Pelé (2021)
Directors: Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn
Genre: Sports documentary
Pelé will always be the greatest football player of all time. Hold your horses: that is not nostalgia or Brazilian pride talking. He remains the only player to have won three FIFA World Cups, with Brazil in 1958, 1962, and 1970. He scored in a World Cup final before he was even 18, became a global symbol while still a teenager, scored more than 1,200 goals by the broadest count, and helped plant the seeds of soccer in the United States when he left the legendary Santos to play for the New York Cosmos. He also helped turn Brazil into the country people imagined when they thought about football at its most beautiful. With Santos and the Brazilian national team, he did more than anyone to popularize football across the world.
And if that résumé does not convince you, Pelé did something no other icon of the game came remotely close to doing: he stopped a war. In 1969, Santos traveled to Nigeria during the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, and Pelé’s presence was powerful enough to help create a temporary ceasefire around the match, so people could watch him play. That is the kind of myth that belongs only to Pelé. His name even crossed into other sports and forms of entertainment, with the “Pelé kick” in professional wrestling named after him.
That is where Ben Nicholas and David Tryhorn’s Pelé has a difficult job. In 108 minutes, the documentary had to organize a life already bigger than the usual sports-film structure. It manages to do that by keeping the older Pelé in front of the camera, with the archive pulling the film back toward the simpler evidence: Pelé playing. Zagallo, Jairzinho, Rivellino, and other figures around Brazilian football appear throughout, though no testimony says as much as the footage of him with the ball.
The movie also looks at the country around him during the years of military dictatorship. Pelé was filmed and remembered as a symbol of joy, but Brazil was not simple. The documentary is conventional, and sometimes too careful with him, which limits it. Pelé with the ball is already enough reason for this list to begin here. Every conversation about greatness in football still has to pass through him first.
2. Diego Maradona (2019)
Director: Asif Kapadia
Genre: Archival sports documentary
After mentioning Pelé, any argument about the greatest football player of all time gets more dangerous, yet Diego Maradona still feels like his greatest rival. Their relationship always seemed to move between affection and bitterness, public respect and old resentment. Pelé became the king; Maradona was a saint with mud on his shoes. In Argentina, he was D10S, the man whose number helped form the word for God, and the center of a devotion so intense it eventually produced its own religion: the Iglesia Maradoniana, or Maradonian Church.
Maradona never looked untouchable in the same way Pelé did. He was painfully human: political and self-destructive. He gave Argentina the 1986 World Cup almost as a personal act of will, helped by the most infamous illegal goal in football history (a handball against England that the referee allowed, later immortalized as the “Hand of God”), then left another World Cup in disgrace after failing a drug test for ephedrine in 1994. The cocaine and the excess, the closeness to the poor, the anger and the charisma: none of it sits outside the myth. For many Argentinians, and for many football fans outside the country too, El Pibe de Oro was loved through his contradictions, not after they had been forgiven.
Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona is built almost entirely from archive footage and spends most of its time in Naples, where Maradona arrived in 1984 and changed the size of Napoli, the city’s football club. The images feel crowded, made from television footage and private recordings. They catch the worship around him, with stadiums treating him like a god while the man still had to live inside a body that could break.
The movie lets Maradona remain difficult. The football is extraordinary, but the film refuses to stay only with the football. Fame gets in; the drugs do too. The Camorra and the family pressures follow, along with that awful sense that everyone around him wanted a piece of him. Maradona brings a greatness that is harder to separate from the damage around it.
3. Messi (2014)
Director: Álex de la Iglesia
Genre: Sports documentary
Lionel Messi is harder to place than Pelé and Maradona. He was the small, awkward and inward kid, the kind of boy who might have been laughed at until the ball reached his feet. He could look almost absent from the noise around him and still destroy entire defenses without appearing to raise his voice. His record eight Ballon d’Or awards, football’s top individual prize, only make that quietness stranger.
His relationship with Argentina was complicated for so long. Messi became Messi in Barcelona. He left Rosario as a child, grew up in Spain, played his finest football in a Barcelona shirt, and for years many Argentinians looked at him as if he both belonged to them and somehow did not. With the national team, the same genius did not always translate cleanly. The expectations were Maradona-sized, and Messi was not Maradona. After losing the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final to Germany, La Pulga took another blow in the 2016 Copa América Centenario final, when Argentina drew 0–0 with Chile and lost on penalties. Argentina had not won a major senior title since the 1993 Copa América at that point, and Messi was again the face of the frustration. After that final, he announced his retirement from the national team before eventually returning.
Álex de la Iglesia’s Messi came out in 2014, before the story had time to change. The movie focuses on his childhood and glorious career until that point, but does not reach the later chapters: the exit from Barcelona, the move to PSG, the 2021 Copa América title over bitter rivals Brazil (at the Maracanã, of all places), and the biggest one, the 2022 World Cup with Argentina. Since then, his relationship with Argentina has become a love story again. He was already one of the greatest players football had ever seen, but after Qatar the argument became even heavier, maybe strong enough for some to place him above Maradona himself. The movie catches Messi before that ending, when the question around him was still uncomfortable: how could the greatest player of his generation look so complete at Barcelona and still seem unfinished with Argentina?
4. Ronaldo (2015)
Director: Anthony Wonke
Genre: Sports documentary
A man, a machine, a caged beast made of rage. Cristiano Ronaldo is the football player who made obsession and discipline feel like a second language inside a sport that many people still prefer to understand in purely emotional terms. He is the fourth, and probably the proudest, name in the endless and completely personal argument over the greatest football player of all time. Pelé, Maradona, Messi, Cristiano: he comes after the first three still chasing, still trying to force his way into the final answer.
At the European level, there is one glorious absence in his career: the FIFA World Cup, a trophy Portugal has never won in nearly a century of the tournament. For a player who has built so much of his life around proof, that missing title is still his Achilles’ heel, the one wound in the indomitable man of discipline, standing with his spear before the gods of football.
Anthony Wonke’s Ronaldo comes out of Cristiano’s Real Madrid years, when he was already famous beyond football. The movie was shot with close access to his private circle over 14 months, moving between Madrid and Madeira, family time and heavy training routines. It brings in Cristiano himself, his son Cristiano Jr., his mother Dolores Aveiro, his brother and sisters, and even his agent Jorge Mendes. Cristiano is always near cameras and mirrors, reminders of the brand he built around his own body and the vanity that became part of his public image.
It was filmed around the moment when he had just won La Décima, Real Madrid’s 10th Champions League trophy in Europe’s biggest club competition, and then produced a season that looks absurd even by his standards: 61 goals in 54 games in 2014-15, including 48 in La Liga, Spain’s top league. Madrid still had to watch Barcelona, their fierce rivals, take the biggest prizes, while Cristiano’s numbers looked almost insulting anyway.
5. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006)
Directors: Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno
Genre: Experimental sports documentary
Zinedine Zidane was one of the smoothest footballers to watch. He won the 1998 FIFA World Cup with France, scoring twice in the final against Brazil, won Euro 2000, and gave Real Madrid that left-foot volley against Bayer Leverkusen in the 2002 Champions League final. With Zidane, everything began with the first touch: a midfielder who controlled the tempo with his passing and his timing, and the way he seemed to slow the game down without forcing it. His final match, the 2006 World Cup final against Italy, ended in heartbreak when he lost the chance to retire as a two-time world champion. In a flash of rage, he headbutted Italian defender Marco Materazzi and received a red card. Zizou was graceful, but not gentle.
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait follows him during a single Real Madrid match against Villarreal. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno use multiple cameras to stay with Zidane instead of following the full game. The movie does not explain his career, concentrating instead on a small fraction of what he offered on the pitch.
The trick is simple and a little strange: isolate one player inside a team sport. The frame often feels incomplete because the match is happening around Zidane, but not for us. Sound does a lot of the work. The crowd becomes background pressure, and Mogwai’s music pushes the movie away from sports coverage and closer to watching concentration in real time. It is not the most informative movie about Zidane, but it is one of the best at making you feel his presence.
6. Garrincha: Joy of the People (1962)
Director: Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
Genre: Sports documentary
Before Pelé became the face of Brazilian football, Manuel Francisco dos Santos was already there, playing another kind of football. He was known as Garrincha, the Bent-Legged Angel: with those curved legs and that strange walk, he became one of the most impossible dribblers anyone had seen. Garrincha was a winger, an idol at Botafogo, and the kind of player who made defenders look pathetic. Brazil won the 1958 World Cup with him and Pelé together, but in 1962, after Pelé got injured, Garrincha became the center of the team and carried Brazil to another title.
Away from the pitch, the story gets ugly. Garrincha came from poverty and drank heavily through most of his adult life. His life became a mess of marriages, affairs, many children, money problems, and serious car accidents, including one in 1969 that killed his mother-in-law. The public loved him. After football, his money disappeared and he died in 1983 from cirrhosis of the liver, after repeated hospitalizations, in misery. “Joy of the people” sounds… bittersweet, doesn’t it? The joy was real and it did not save him. His funeral procession, from the Maracanã to Pau Grande, drew millions. People wrote, “Thank you, Garrincha, for having lived.”
Garrincha: Joy of the People was made while Garrincha’s best years were still recent. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s movie is far from a clean sports biography. The editing feels dated now, but not dead. It uses match footage from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and don’t get me wrong: the shots of fans weigh as much as the shots of Garrincha, with the sound and rush of old football coverage everywhere.
But the camera keeps returning to the same things: Garrincha’s crooked legs and the people packed together to see him play. The documentary is short and works like a document from another time, a snapshot of an era when football was becoming huge and players were still left frighteningly exposed.
7. The Two Escobars (2010)
Directors: Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist
Genre: Sports documentary / true crime
Unlike the previous names on this list, Andrés Escobar was not a superstar. He was a calm and respected Colombian defender, the kind of player who mattered because he kept things in order. In the early 1990s, Colombia had one of the most exciting national teams in the world, with players like Carlos Valderrama, Faustino Asprilla, Freddy Rincón, and René Higuita (I’m sure you’ve seen the Scorpion Kick somewhere). They arrived at the 1994 World Cup carrying huge expectations after destroying Argentina 5-0 in Buenos Aires during qualifying. Until everything collapsed.
Against the United States, in the group stage, Andrés Escobar scored an own goal. Colombia lost 2-1, went out early, and days later Escobar was murdered in Medellín. His death showed the pressure around Colombian football at the time, when the sport was tied to drug-cartel money and the violent shadow of Pablo Escobar. The two men were not the same kind of figure at all, but the documentary treats their stories as impossible to separate.
The Two Escobars does not separate football from the country around it. Jeff and Michael Zimbalist build the movie through interviews, archival footage, news images, and match material, moving between the rise of Colombian football and the rise of Pablo Escobar’s power. The structure is closer to true crime than a normal sports documentary. The football keeps pointing outside the pitch.
The movie can be blunt, sometimes almost too neat in the way it connects hope around the national team to the violence around the country, but it has a strong reason to be on this list. Andrés Escobar’s story shows how cruel football can become when a player is forced to carry more than a game.
8. Becoming Zlatan (2015)
Directors: Fredrik Gertten and Magnus Gertten
Genre: Sports documentary
Zlatan Ibrahimović was never built to be the polite son-in-law of European football. He carried his talent like something nobody else had the right to touch. The man who would later call himself God, and even take out a full-page ad in Los Angeles just to say “You’re welcome” when he joined the American soccer team LA Galaxy, was not always the “Zlatan” we know.
Born in Rosengård, Malmö to immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, Zlatan grew up with a family that quickly fell apart around him. He stole bikes, fought with teammates, struggled at school, and still, even as a problem kid, carried something absurd in his feet.
Becoming Zlatan follows that early rise. The documentary stays with his Swedish years at Malmö before moving to Ajax, where he spent three seasons trying to survive inside a club that prized discipline and good behavior. Zlatan was not built for that kind of obedience. He could look impossible to coach, and then suddenly score the kind of goal that made all the trouble seem worth it.
At Ajax, he was a rebel in a club still carrying the memory of its own rebels from the early seventies. I loved him there. He was irritating, yes, and often young in the worst possible way, but he was also brilliant in flashes that made you wish Ajax could keep him one more year before Juventus came. In training, he could be moody and difficult, but the documentary also catches a young player who could still be generous with supporters, even after hearing abuse from the stands because a pass had not worked.
Thankfully, the film does not try to make him nicer. That would be impossible. The footage shows Zlatan before the self-mythology. You see the raw version: a difficult kid with too much talent, trying to build a career out of all that anger.
9 The Day Brazil Was Here (2005)
Directors: Caíto Ortiz and João Dornelas
Genre: Sports documentary / political documentary
The Day Brazil Was Here (O Dia em que o Brasil Esteve Aqui) follows the Brazilian national team’s trip to Haiti in 2004 for the so-called “Game of Peace”, organized as part of Brazil’s support for the UN peacekeeping mission in the country. Brazil had won the 2002 World Cup two years earlier. Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Roberto Carlos arrived with the yellow shirt at full power, in a country living through political crisis and the presence of foreign troops. The match was sold as a gesture of peace, and that gesture could be useful to politicians. Brazilian football has a power almost everyone recognizes, especially so soon after the 2002 World Cup.
Caíto Ortiz and João Dornelas spend a lot of time around the match, trying to understand why this festive friendly was happening. The Brazilian players arrive like stars, in a parade through Port-au-Prince. Haitians around the stadium, showing their passion even from the edge of open drains, are harder to smooth out. People just want to see Brazil play. The camera stays close enough to catch that discomfort in one place.
Football gets called the most important of the least important things, and days like this help explain why. Brazil won 6-0, with three goals from Ronaldinho, but the score is almost the least interesting part. The match did not fix Haiti, and the same event was never really repeated. Brazil and Haiti met again years later, in the 2016 Copa América Centenario, in another context entirely. In a nice touch, the two nations will meet again at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The Day Brazil Was Here watches the 2004 game as a political image that worked for one afternoon: the yellow shirt made peace visible, even for a day.
10. George Best: All by Himself (2016)
Director: Daniel Gordon
Genre: Sports documentary / biographical documentary
George Best was one of football’s earliest pop stars. Before Beckham, before Cristiano, Best was already living like fame had found football too early. He came from Belfast, arrived at Manchester United as a teenager, and became part of the club’s rebuild after the Munich air disaster, the 1958 plane crash that killed several United players and staff members. Pelé once called him the best player in the world, and for a while that did not sound absurd. Best had balance, speed, hair, and nerve. By 22, he had won the Ballon d’Or and helped Manchester United win the 1968 European Cup.
Best’s legend came with salt in the wound. “In 1969 I gave up women and alcohol; it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.” Brilliant, drunk too often. Hard to manage for long. The joke shows how long the myth kept people laughing at the damage. The drinking became the thing that ate the career from inside; his time at the top was already slipping before he was even 29.
George Best: All by Himself looks at that rise and collapse without pretending charm can explain everything. Daniel Gordon uses archive footage and interviews to bring back both Bests: the player and the celebrity. The football still looks alive, especially because Best moved with a looseness that never seems fully coachable. The movie also has to deal with the years after the peak: the smaller clubs and the drinking. The public deterioration too. There is also the sad fact of a man who became easier to quote than to help.
Best helped make the footballer into someone people wanted to follow even away from the pitch. The documentary leaves you with the roughness of it. Best had the dribble and the charm; he had the jokes people kept repeating, and nowhere safe to put the rest.