soccer Archives – CULTURE MIX

Review: ‘Maidaan,’ starring Ajay Devgn

April 12, 2024

by Carla Hay

Ajay Devgn in “Maidaan” (Photo courtesy of Zee Studios)

Directed by Amit Sharma

Hindi with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in India and other parts of the world, from 1952 to 1962, the dramatic film “Maidaan” features a predominantly Asian cast of characters (with some white people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Against the odds, Syed Abdul Rahim, also known as Rahim Saab, takes India’s national soccer team, which was on a losing streak for years, to the Olympics and to the 1962 Asian Games.

Culture Audience: “Maidaan” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in sports biopics, movies about soccer, and stories about underestimated people who overcome challenges.

A scene from “Maidaan” (Photo courtesy of Zee Studios)

“Maidaan” did not need to be a three-hour movie, but this drama about soccer coach Syed Abdul Rahim, also known as Rahim Saab, is undoubtedly inspirational. The team players needed more character development, but the soccer matches are exhilarating. “Maidaan” is reliably predictable, mainly because what Rahim (played by Ajay Devgn), who was nicknamed S.A., achieved is already well-known to many people and is the type of subject matter that gets made into a movie like this one. However, “Maidaan” gives more insight into the behind-the-scenes challenges and the power struggles within the All India Football Federation that affected Rahim’s in his life and his quest to turn India’s national soccer team in to a world-class championship team.

Directed by Amit Sharma, “Maidaan” (which means “field” in Hindi) was co-written by Sharma, Saiwyn Quadras, Aman Rai and Atul Shahi. The movie takes place in chronological order, from 1952 to 1962, during which Rahim had a transformative reign as the head coach of India’s national soccer team. As “Maidaan” shows, it was a turbulent experience where Rahim got resistance at various times from certain members of the All India Football Federation board of directors, which votes for who will be the head coach.

“Maidaan” opens in 1952, with a scene that was unfortunately all too common for India’s national soccer team: The team loses a match. In this case’s India was playing against Yugoslavia’s national soccer team and lost in a humiliating 10-1 final score.

Rahim is shown in a conference room meeting with members of the All India Football Federation. At this point in his career, Rahim had been a teacher (with a college degree in arts), a professional soccer player, and a coach for soccer teams in his birthplace/hometown of Hyderabad, India. Rahim tells the assembled federation committee members that India’s national team has been on a losing streak for three main reasons:

The team members play in bare feet.
India’s domestic matches are 70 minutes each, while international teams have 90-minute matches.
Too much belief in old team stars who need to retire.

Rahim confidentially tells the federation committee that if they elect him to be the head coach of India’s national soccer team, he can help the team achieve something that the team had not achieved since it began doing international tours in 1924: Win a championship. Although there are some skeptics on the committee, Rahim gets enough votes to become the head coach. Rahim doesn’t promise quick success with this goal, but he is sure he can achieve this goal if he find the right team players. (In real life, Rahm became the head coach of India’s national team in 1950, not 1952.)

“Maidaan” then has the expected montage of Rahim traveling to various places in India (such as Calcutta, Punjab, Bombay and Kerala) to find the players who will be on his “dream team.” They include forward Tulsidas Balaram (played by Sushant Waydande); striker PK Banerjee (played by Chaitanya Sharma), who was the team’s captain for a period of time; goalkeeper Peter Thangaraj (played by Tejas Ravishankar); striker Neville D’Souza (played by Aryann Bhowmik); and striker Chuni Goswami (played by Amartya Ray). The casting for “Maidaan” is very admirable, since all of the actors portraying the star team members resemble the real-life people and are convincing as professional athletes. (For the purposes of this review, the characters in the movie are referred to by their first names.)

One of the first things that Rahim does that’s a revolution in Indian soccer is that he requires the team members to wear shoes, which obviously reduces cuts and bruises to the team members’ feet. “Maidaan” does a pretty good job of showing how this wasn’t an easy adjustment for most players, who were accustomed to being barefoot while playing the game. Getting shoes for the team members was also fraught with financial issues, because India’s cash-strapped national soccer team couldn’t afford large expenditures. n the early years, they often had to use previously owned or donated shoes.

The players themselves also needed a lot training in other areas. “Maidaan” shows that there was a lot of raw talent that Rahim had to hone into finely tuned and disciplined athleticism. When Rahim first meets Tulsidas, Rahim says that Tulsidas is talented but needs more stamina. PK is heartthrob with a large female fan base, so Rahim tells him not to get distracted by dating fans. Chuni is kind of a prima donna, so Rahim has to train Chuni to be more of a team player.

Meanwhile, during Rahim’s career that is depicted in the movie, he has two main adversaries: a powerful All India Football Federation board member Shubhankar (played by Rudranil Ghosh) and influential sports journalist Roy Chaudhary (played by Gajraj Rao), who were early and very vocal skeptics of Rahim. Because of their initial skepticism, Shubhankar and Roy want to be proven they were right, so they want to see Rahim fail, even if it means that India’s national soccer team will fail too. Various scheming ensues between these two manipulative haters.

As for Rahim’s personal life, it’s a secondary part of the story. He has a stereotypically loyal and loving wife at home named Saira (played by Priyamani), who is supportive of Rahim, even though she knows that his job requires him to frequently be away from home. Rahim and Saira have two children: son Hakim and daughter Seerat. In the beginning of the movie, Hakim (played by Devyansh Tapuriah) is about 9 years old, while Seerat (played by Nitashi Goel) is about 5 years old. Hakim as a teenager and young adult is played by Rishabh Joshi.

Rahim is obviously a workaholic, but the toll that it takes on his marriage seems a little too glossed over in the movie. Rahim’s frequent absences from home and obsession with soccer have caused him to have a somewhat distant relationship with Hakim, who desperately craves Rahim’s attention. It should come as no surprise that Hakim decides to become a player on India’s national soccer while still being an engineering student at a university.

Rahim took the team to the Asia Games and the Olympics more than once. The outcomes of these experiences won’t be revealed in this review. However, it’s enough to say that a big part of these experiences was how Rahim and the team dealt with racism and xenophobia. Rahim becomes under increasing pressure when a championship title becomes more elusive than he imagined. And, since this is a sports movie, there are the expected injuries that happen during crucial moments in or before a match.

Devgn gives an impressive (but not award-worthy) performance as Rahim, who is not presented as flawless or “too good to be true.” Rahim can be stubborn, impatient and arrogant. However, Rahim is also an empathetic and motivational leader who inspires his team instead of intimidating them.

The supporting cast members also do fine jobs in their roles, although Shubhankar is written as bit of a two-dimensional villain. Considering the movie’s three-hour runtime, there could have been more shown in the movie about the individual players. The most that viewers will see about the indivdual players’ personal lives is when PK tells Rahim that PK is distracted during a practice session because PK’s father has lung cancer. If you know what happened in real life to Rahim (a heavy smoker), then you will already know that Rahim will have his own health crisis in this story.

“Maidaan” has moments when the movie’s pacing drags. However, viewers who have the patience to keep watching will be rewarded in the movie’s final hour, which is the best part of the film. The 1962 Asian Games depicted in the movie have some adrenaline-charged, immersive scenes that will make viewers feel like they’re experiencing the matches right along with the players. A.R. Rahman’s stirring musical score also adeptly heightens the moods in each scene. “Maidaan” is not a groundbreaking sports movie, but it’s competently made, and it delivers exactly what it’s supposed to deliver in crowd-pleasing entertainment.

Zee Studios released “Maidaan” in U.S. cinemas and in India on April 10, 2024.

Review: ‘King Otto,’ starring Otto Rehhagel

May 20, 2022

by Carla Hay

“King Otto”

Directed by Christopher André Marks

Greek, German and English with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Greece and other parts of the world, the documentary film “King Otto” features an all-white group of men who are connected in some way to Greece’s national soccer team of the 2000s.

Culture Clash: German soccer coach Otto Rehhagel, who had success in coaching German professional soccer teams, took a big risk to coach Greece’s national soccer team, which was on a losing streak for decades, to transform the Greek team into underestimated winners.

Culture Audience: “King Otto” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of soccer and underdog sports stories.

Otto Rehhagel (top center, in black and white outfit) in “King Otto” (Photo courtesy of MPI Media Group)

You don’t have to be a sports fan to enjoy the documentary “King Otto,” the inspirational story of how German coach Otto Rehhagel transformed Greece’s national soccer team from a group on a losing streak into international champions in the 2000s. It’s also a story of how people can overcome language barriers and cultural differences to succeed in common goals without losing their identities. “King Otto” follows a familiar documentary format for this type of story, but the thrilling archival sports footage and insightful interviews make this movie an engaging watch from start to finish.

Directed by Christopher André Marks, “King Otto” is also just the right length (82 minutes) to tell the story well without being too long or too short. At the center of the interview footage is Rehhagel, who has a compelling way that he shares his memories of how he took the Greek national soccer team from the bottom of the pack to the top of the heap. He was with the Greek team from 2000 to 2010. It’s a story of massive risk-taking and how confidence and the right teamwork can pay off to great rewards.

Most coaches who are at the top of their game with a championship and well-respected track record don’t decide to do an about-face to relocate to another country and coach a losing team. But that’s exactly what Rehhagel (a former soccer player himself) did in 2000, when he began coaching the Greek national soccer team. When Rehhagel took the job offer to coach the Greek team, he was a very famous soccer coach in Germany. He had the nickname King Otto because of his charismatic leadership qualities.

Rehhagel had his greatest success in German soccer as the coach of Werder Bremen from 1981 to 1995. During this time period, Werder Bremen was transformed from a modestly winning team to a powerhouse, winning German championships in 1988 and 1993, as well as the European Cup in 1992. Rehhagel left Werder Bremen to coach rival team Bayern Munich from 1994 to 1995, but it was a tumultuous change that resulted in Rehhagel being fired.

Rehhagel then moved on to manage the German soccer team Kaiserslautern from 1996 to 2000, to mixed results. The team won the German national championship in 1998, but that turned out to be the peak victory for the team under Rehhagel’s leadership. He resigned from Kaiserslautern in 2000. It’s no wonder, under these circumstances, that Rehhagel probably thought it might be good for him to do something radically different. And that’s when he accepted the offer to coach the Greek national soccer team.

In the beginning of “King Otto,” Rehhagel is shown looking around at an empty Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, Greece. In a voiceover, he makes this comment about why Greece appealed to him: “We admire the Greeks for their history. They have given so much to the world. I, as a German, had a special relationship with the Greeks.”

He continues, “And if someone had told me what would happen one day, no one would have believed it. We were outsiders in the entire world of football. But, as Greek history teaches us, the gods always have their own plans.”

Most of Rehhagel’s interview footage is of him in a room literally sitting on a throne, which was probably the “King Otto” filmmakers’ idea, not his. Although Rehhagel’s nickname is King Otto, he doesn’t put on pretentious airs. There are touches of arrogance in his storytelling. However, this pride isn’t so much about himself as it is about the collective pride that he feels about what he was able to accomplish with the team members who were widely underestimated and disrespected in the world of soccer until Rehhagel came along.

Greek National Team president Vassilis Gagatsis was the one who recruited Rehhagel for the job. Gagatsis says in the documentary: “I wanted to hire Rehhagel because I thought [Rehhagel] being a German, he would be able to instill the discipline that we Greeks lack.” Gagatsis describes Greek culture as a lot of partying and procrastination—two words that he said also could describe the Greek National Team at the time.

There were other problems too. Gagatsis remembers, “When I became president, the National Team was like a traveling circus.” By the time Rehhagel joined as the coach, the team still didn’t have its own training center. “The team had to wander around and beg local clubs to let us use their facilities,” adds Gagatsis.

Rehhagel (who was born in 1938) remembers that he was reluctant to take the job at first. For starters, he was in his early 60s, an age range when most people in his line of work are retired or plan to retire within a few years. Second, there was a language barrier, since Rehhagel did not speak Greek, and none of the Greek players spoke German. And third, there was no denying that it was going to be an uphill battle to transform an underfunded, perpetually losing team into winners.

But take the job he did. And it wasn’t easy, because Rehhagel’s strict and intense style clashed with the Greek players being accustomed to a more laid-back way of coaching. Rehhagel also refused to permanently relocate to Greece and maintained his home in Germany in those early years, thereby adding to the perception that he was just a visiting outsider. With tensions rising between the German coach and the Greek team, something had to be done to solve this problem.

Understanding that he couldn’t bridge the gap alone, Rehhagel recruited Ioannis Topalidis, a former soccer player who was fluent in Greek and German, to be Rehhagel’s assistant coach. In the documentary, Topalidis says that in his translations to the team members, he would “sugar coat” Rehhagel’s often-harsh criticisms to the team members. In other words, Topalidis would translate Rehhagel’s comments as being nicer and more humorous than what Rehhagel was actually saying. The trick worked, because Topalidis said the team started responding better to Rehhagel when they thought that what he was saying was more diplomatic.

Also interviewed in “King Otto” are several former Greek National Team members who worked with Rehhagel as their coach. They include midfielder Giorgos Karagounis, defender Georgios “Giourkas” Seitaridis, goalkeeper Antonios Nikopolidis and defender Takis Fyssas. Their interviews—along with the interviews of Rehhagel, Gagatsis and Topalidis—provide lively play-play-play recollections of some of the team’s best tournaments, including the 2004 European Championship. (David Beckham and Thierry Henry in their youth are included in the documentary’s archival footage.)

“King Otto” does what every good sports documentary does, even if you might already know the outcome of the matches shown in the movie: It makes you root for the protagonists, feel the pain of defeat, and rejoice in the glory of hard-won and well-deserved victories. It’s a well-edited documentary where the pace never drags.

There’s also even-handed mix of the archival footage and the interviews, all presented in a straightforward manner. “King Otto” does not make the documentary mistake of having too many talking head interviews. Some viewers might get a little emotional at the end of the documentary, which shows a sentimentally sweet moment when former coaching partners Rehhagel and Topalidis reunite at an empty Panathenaic Stadium to reminisce together about their best memories of the Greek National Team.

Sports are often indicative of how people overcome obstacles in other areas of their lives. Sports can teach people how it’s important not to get too conceited or too comfortable in life’s accomplishments. In this unique soccer story, “King Otto” also proves that it’s never too late to take bold risks in life; to mentor people who need mentoring; and to be willing to work hard to make seemingly unattainable dreams a reality.

MPI Media Group released “King Otto” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on March 25, 2022.

Pepsi launches global capsule collection with Boohoo, Umbro, Le Specs, New Era, Anteater

April 24, 2018

The following is a press release from PepsiCo:

Iconic beverage brand Pepsi® announces a global capsule collection with fashion partners Boohoo, Umbro, Le Specs, New Era and Anteater. In the brand’s latest extension of its 2018 global #LOVEITLIVEIT campaign, Pepsi intersects art and sport to celebrate the world’s beautiful game – football – on a new pitch: fashion.

“Pop culture acumen – from sport and music to art and culture – is embedded in our Pepsi brand identity. It’s exciting to see our brand extend its power beyond the refreshing cola it is traditionally known for,” said Natalia Filippociants, Senior Marketing Director, Global Pepsi Trademark, Global Beverage Group, PepsiCo. “Football is the world’s game – and that culture and lifestyle goes beyond where and how we watch the game, to how we love and live the game. And that is where this fresh capsule collection plays. It brings the spirit and energy of football off the pitch and into lifestyle apparel and accessories.”

The 2018 Pepsi “Art of Football” Capsule Collection consists of an alliance with labels originating from around the world — including Russia’s Anteater, the UK’s Boohoo and Umbro, Australia’s Le Specs and the U.S.’s New Era. The collection includes a range of streetwear apparel and accessories such as t-shirts, backpacks, bucket hats and iPhone cases from Anteater; hoodies, tracksuits, t-shirts and cropped jackets from Boohoo; soccer t-shirts, shorts and balls from Umbro; sunglasses from Le Specs; and fashion headwear and t-shirts from New Era. The collection will be available beginning May 21^st at each individual partners’ e-commerce site, and department stores and fashion specialty retailers where the partners’ brands are normally sold, as well as the full Pepsi “Art of Football” Capsule Collection available on http://www.boohooman.com/pepsi.

The 2018 Pepsi “LOVE IT. LIVE IT. FOOTBALL.” campaign collides football with art, bringing to life some of football’s greatest stars with distinctive artwork from emerging visual artists from each of their home countries — Argentina’sDIYE, Brazil’s Bicicleta Sem Freio, Germany’s DXTR, U.S’ Kim Sielbeck and UK’s Iain Macarthur. Each item in the Pepsi “Art of Football” Capsule Collection incorporates the artwork – another way the disruptive art aesthetic links and animates all campaign elements, from the limited-edition player packaging and arresting out of home that is more art than billboard, to thumb-stopping digital content and a blockbuster TV commercial.

For more information on the Pepsi “Art of Football” Capsule Collection, join the conversation online with #LOVEITLIVEIT.

About PepsiCo

PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. PepsiCo generated more than $63 billion in net revenue in 2017, driven by a complementary food and beverage portfolio that includes Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Quaker and Tropicana. PepsiCo’s product portfolio includes a wide range of enjoyable foods and beverages, including 22 brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales.

At the heart of PepsiCo is Performance with Purpose – our fundamental belief that the success of our company is inextricably linked to the sustainability of the world around us. We believe that continuously improving the products we sell, operating responsibly to protect our planet and empowering people around the world enable PepsiCo to run a successful global company that creates long-term value for society and our shareholders. For more information, visit www.pepsico.com.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vg6AKi6bs