As someone who has struggled through football-based novels in the past, I wonder if the problem for movies, just like books, is that it’s almost impossible to match the emotion of the real thing. Real life football has plenty of drama, and hundreds of stories, just from one season’s action, so what can the movies provide to top that? Taking, as one terrible example, ‘When Saturday Comes’ - the story is so hackneyed that it puts the film at a disadvantage from the start. Throw in some poor acting performances and a lazy lack of tension and you have one sorry mess of a movie. ‘Escape to Victory’ only has a little more popular appeal because it mixes football with ‘The Great Escape’ but no one is ever going to kid themselves they’re watching a classic.

Boys own mags used to be full of sports based strips (anyone remember ‘Wilson’ or ‘Alf Tupper’?), it’s quite odd that we can’t translate that stuff to film - perhaps it’s something in the British psyche, that we don’t really mind coming second?

Much the above applies to cricket films (which you would think baseball movies would provide a parallel narrative path for) , but perhaps it’s quite telling that the most famous, Asquith’s ‘The Final Test’, ends with our hero getting out first ball. How very English.