If you follow soccer (can we please just call it football?), then you would have long since understood that team managers are now stars in their own right. They are also increasingly global/mobile, and they go wherever they get offered a good job.
This quirky but very likable documentary from Christopher Andre Marks is about one famous manager. Well, he might not be so famous as such, outside the sport, but what he achieved was indeed the stuff of legend.
Otto Rehhagel had already shown himself to be the sort of manager who could turn teams around. More than that, like the famous English manager Brian Clough, Rehhagel showed he could take a side languishing at the bottom of the ladder and inspire them to win championships. It is one thing to do this with a club side, but to do it with a national team is something else again.
Around 2003/4, Rehhagel got the offer to manage the Greek national side. Despite not speaking any Greek or even knowing much about his eventually-adopted country, he set off. This film tells the story of how he got the Greek team to achieve the impossible – to win the 2004 European Cup, performing above any reasonable expectation.
The documentary is straightforward in film terms. It relies on the events themselves to carry the narrative. It also features a lot of ‘King Otto’ himself interviewed on a sort of throne sitting alone and chatting to camera. One’s liking for the film might depend a bit on whether you can warm to this affable but overconfident German. As the cliché goes, he has a lot to be modest about and he knows it.
There are other talking heads – composed mostly of the team’s players– who all line up to heap superlatives on their favourite coach. Perhaps because these glory days were so many decades ago, there isn’t that much actual soccer on display and precious little footage of Rehhagel actually coaching or relating to the players. We could have done with more of that. However, the film does eventually pick up pace towards the end when it takes us through the final stages of the Cup.
Otto’s tactics are certainly not popular with the other teams – especially the European giants like hosts France. However, these views are not given much consideration in this perhaps understandably biased account. In following the arc of many a fictional sporting drama – the underdog who rises – the film is sure to pluck at a few heartstrings. It is emotional stuff, and it will be as enshrined like its lead player in the annals of Greek history.
