Soccer documentaries are all the rage, whether it’s Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s Welcome to Wrexham – the charming story of how an underdog club sold its soul to Disney – or Sunderland ’Til I Die on Netflix. RTÉ now laces up its boots with Football Families (RTÉ One, Thursday), a behind-the-scenes series about Dublin’s Shelbourne FC and its underage academies.
The appeal of Shels was obvious when Football Families was commissioned last year. The club was riding high in the league while its manager, Damien Duff, was largely credited with helping make the League of Ireland cool (it was between him and Bohemian FC and their infinite churn of novelty Fontaines DC shirts).
Twelve months later, alas, the wheels have come off. Shels have been dumped out of the Champions League qualifiers and are struggling to stay mid-table. Worse yet, Duffer has headed off into the sunset after becoming an accidental meme when footage of the former Ireland international watching his side from a grassy knoll went viral (he was serving a touchline ban at the time).
That’s bad luck for Shels fans and more so for Football Families, given how keen it is to push Duff as the face of the club. But if viewers can look past his departure, there is a lot to like, with the film telling the affecting story of a number of bright prospects at the Shels academy.
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We meet Jayden Marshall from Tallaght, who dreams of making it big and is coming to terms with the trauma of the family home burning down several years ago. Then there is 15-year-old Cillian O’Sullivan from Howth, small for his age but potentially talented enough to compensate for his lack of stature. We are also introduced to under-17s goalkeeper Ali Topcu, whose father, Atakan, is gung-ho about his son’s progress, to the extent that he gave up his day job to help Ali progress his career.
They are a likable bunch, but Football Families falls down in several areas, including basic accuracy. For instance, when Shelbourne play Cork City, the opposition is incorrectly and repeatedly referred to as “Cork”. It’s a sloppy error. After all, Cork City is a much bigger club than Shels, with a more successful academy. Can you imagine RTÉ making a documentary featuring Manchester City and referring to it as “Manchester”?
Then there is the name of the series itself. As with many, if not most, Irish people, when I hear “football” I think of the Sam Maguire, of David Clifford lofting another two-pointer over and of Mayo doing whatever it takes to not win the All-Ireland. “Soccer” is, in Ireland, the widely accepted term for the 11-man game – as is, indeed, the case throughout the English-speaking world. That was also historically true of the UK – my old issues of Shoot magazine were full of the “s” word.
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Such niggles aside, however, the series offers a moving snapshot of the challenges involved in making it to the top. Only a handful of Shelbourne academy players will break through to the League of Ireland, and even fewer will play for a big club on the Continent or in Britain. Whether it’s fair to put such pressure on young shoulders is another question entirely, but this is a fascinating portrait of Shels during their (short-lived) imperial phase. It’s just a shame that Duff was out the door and off into the sunset before it made it to air.
