U is for United Passions: the most corrupt sports movie ever

In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, United Passions cuts out all the good bits of a sports biopic and offers a bloviating brand exercise instead.

The mission to achieve true, redemptive self-love is kind of a lifelong struggle for most of us. We might read self-help books, place cheery motivational Post-It notes on our bathroom mirror, attempt to shoot the shit with our inner child once in a while. This life is trying to make you feel insecure and inferior so you’re more easily marketed to, and I deeply admire anyone fighting against it however they can.

Except the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. One might argue that the world’s foremost governing body for soccer shouldn’t need to gas itself up too much, but then we wouldn’t have United Passions, a masturbatory brand biopic made by and seemingly solely for the company’s execs. I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m not a sports guy, and even decent sports movies can be a tough sell. I can be talked into it, though, if there’s a fascinating star athlete or underdog team or stranger-than-fiction sporting moment to chronicle. Imagine instead watching the slimy suits in the corporate box getting their time in the spotlight.

The plot structure of United Passions is severed neatly into three acts, each following one influential FIFA president’s reign. Things kick off (hmm maybe I am a sports guy after all) with ye olde timey Fisher Stevens (an American playing a Dutchman) at the turn of the century, worrying that “football in different nations will lack organisation. Perhaps we need a central governing body for our wonderful game.” Nerd shit!! In the 1920s, Gérard Depardieu’s Jules Rimet (wow, a Frenchman playing a Frenchman! Enjoy it while it lasts.) takes over and takes the little-known business to a whole new level, leading to exciting scenes where he gushes to Uruguayan colleagues about how many seats their first world championship might have.

It’s nothing but admin, cutting away from historical and presumably entertaining matches to instead address petty managerial concerns. Once the inaugural games begin, we cut to spinning newspapers to outline the action, in a bald exercise of telling rather than showing. Hilariously, director and writer Frédéric Auburtin (with plenty of shadowy input from FIFA head honchos, ofc) also chooses to showcase many examples of his bureaucrat heroes looking like complete jerks, forcing me to wonder if the film is actually an anarchic inside job. One scene outs Rimet and his team as penny-pinching misers, screwing a sculptor out of his fee and then breathlessly revealing the official FIFA trophy he’s designed for a discount. Only an evil rich guy would see an episode like this as a cool resume highlight — same goes for the movie’s adoring recreations of FIFA nabbing Adidas and Coca-Cola sponsorships.

The next president to get the United Passions treatment is Sam Neill as shady João Havelange (a Kiwi playing a Brazilian, although he often sounds more like Arnold Schwarzenegger). Tim Roth as Sepp Blatter (a Brit playing a Swiss man) is his underling and then successor, both men chillingly referring to their organisation as “our family” in a way that reminds the viewer of 1. mobsters and 2. every toxic 21st century startup workplace. Havelange and Blatter indicate that they do know about broader societal threats that complicate their international work, such as genocides and apartheids and whatnot. A WWII-era match between them nasty German officers and Ukrainian factory workers is grandly described as playing out “as if God himself had laced up his boots”. But wouldn’t you rather hear CEOs remember an incident like that aloud, rather than seeing it relived onscreen? Screw South Africa, what happened at the 1998 FIFA Marketing Seminar?!

According to the film’s director, FIFA initially suggested titles such as ‘Men of Legend’ and ‘The Dreammakers’, which may have aided them further in their furious whacking-off while watching the finished product. Unfortunately for Blatter and co., under the title United Passions the film was released in 2015, at exactly the same time FIFA was prosecuted for corruption charges by the FBI. Tim Roth, who is forced to play Blatter as an impenetrable warrior against the precise kind of bribery his tenure oversaw, has been refreshingly frank about his involvement in the film, refusing to defend it and brushing United Passions off as a “money job”.

Taking into context this ironic rebuttal of the film’s narcissistic faith in its subject, United Passions could’ve almost been used by the FBI as a smoking gun. If your institution is truly so heroic, so historically honest and virtuous, why does the movie about that history reek of bullshit? It’s best seen on a big TV in the lobby of the FIFA headquarters — muted, so you can’t glean just how narrow-minded and dull these ‘Men of Legend’ really come across. Then again, what do I know? I’m simply not a sports guy.