Very few Leeds United fans regard the denouement to the 2018-19 football season as anything other than the cruellest and cheapest of dramatic devices. It was as painfully inevitable as a dutiful cop being shot in the head on his last assignment before retirement. But like all football fans, Leeds supporters are suckers for punishment. They will relive this misery and pay for the privilege of doing so. In fact, they will look forward to the prospect – Leeds Twitter has been abuzz with talk of a new Amazon documentary series about their glorious failure for several months.
And really, why not? Take Us Home tells a brilliant story, full of the cliches that somehow resonate in the context of sport. A sleeping giant of a football club with a glorious past and a tragicomic present is reawakened by a mysterious guru. He turns journeymen into thoroughbreds. He gets the club – and the city – believing in itself again. Redemption beckons. But increasingly, there is a sense that this renaissance is brittle, fragile, running on fumes. And heartbreakingly, this proves to be the case.
Leeds’ wonderful Argentinian manager Marcelo Bielsa is a shadowy, elusive presence in Take Us Home, as if his impossible gravitas makes him too potent to process in large doses. After all, this is a man who, in January this year, was accused of spying on opponents and, in response, managed to turn an hours-long PowerPoint presentation into the mother of all mic drops. Rather than lengthy interviews, Bielsa’s gnomic pronouncements are subtitled onscreen. Here he is, for example, on Leeds’ burly, earnest skipper Liam Cooper: “He helps other people and is humble enough to accept help.” Now that is the kind of acute and empathetic interpersonal assessment you rarely get from “Big” Sam Allardyce.
Leeds’ owner, however, is far from camera-shy. Andrea Radrizzani made his fortune trading in sports TV rights. There is an underlying shrewdness to him allowing his club to be opened up to this scrutiny. For Radrizzani, Take Us Home presumably represents a triumph of diversification, brand establishment and synergy. And he is not the first sports magnate to feel this way. Increasingly, the sprawl of small-screen streaming options has left ample room for enterprises such as this; documentary series with niche appeal but a guaranteed and eager constituency.
Amazon’s All Or Nothing strand has taken us inside football, rugby and American football outfits. Netflix’s Losers was an understated triumph, exploring the dimensions and psychology of sporting disaster via eight individual stories, ranging from the gently amusing to the genuinely harrowing. The streaming giant’s Sunderland ’Til I Die series was a minor classic of its kind, too, capturing a football team in catastrophic freefall. There is always the sense that these shows are far from warts-and-all renderings and that the clubs have final edit approval; what made the Sunderland series so compelling was the sense that it was impossible for the club to hide their many blemishes by the end of the season in question.
There is already a set of directorial cliches in place for this emergent genre, too: obsessive, excessively tattooed supporters; establishing shots of half-cooked burgers being flipped in catering vans; aggressive men shouting “WE GO AGAIN!!” at each other. You can rely on hearing the assertion that the supporters of each and every club undergoing the documentary treatment have a unique level of passion and intensity. In fact, the word “passion” is foundational, a sort of holy writ.
Still, passion is arguably the key component of any constructed drama, whether fact or fiction. The events being dramatised have to matter. Or why would anyone bother? Sport is, of course, the ultimate binge-watch. There are hours and hours of it – sport literally never ends. Each one is a self-sustaining ecosystem of ever-expanding and unspooling plot. It’s like Game of Thrones, only real and eternal. Every season there are new characters, new heroes and villains, new plot twists. Every year seeks to ramp up the intensity with ever-riper melodrama. There are narratives of agony and redemption. So in some ways, all this glut of accompanying entertainment does is make tangible something that has been latent for years. Sport is a permanently self-renewing drama serial with a vast captive audience.
And the other thing with sport is that hope springs eternal. It is always changing, but it is always the same, too. There is always next week, next year. Myths accumulate around teams; every failure and injustice is grist to the mill, making occasional triumphs sweeter. Sport in general, and football in particular, can feel like an exercise in permanently deferred gratification. Accordingly, it is the perfect subject matter for television in the streaming age. Resolution is always just around the next corner but, somehow, never quite within reach. Maybe next season? Leeds United fans certainly know that feeling …