From 'The Last Dance' to 'Full Swing', is the sports doc boom threatening to become a bust?
FUN TIMES: Ireland players and their manager Vera Pauw celebrate qualifying for women's World Cup in Australia. Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Ryan Byrne
There was an agonising moment midway through heartening documentary, in July. It came as Megan Campbell recalled her comeback to the Irish Women’s National Team after a two-and-a-half-year absence. A taxing mental and physical ordeal.
We know this because the Drogheda native’s parents, Eamon and Suzanne, outline it. “That was a horrible time for her,” her father explains. “Mentally, it was really, really tough.”
Campbell then traces the trajectory of her sporting life. Reminiscing about kickarounds in the back garden as footage of an eager child with a ball rolls. In the backseat of the car on the way to training, her father content to finish work and taxi her up and down to Dublin four times a week. “I just saw it as a necessity. It was what she wanted to do. It was all she wanted to do.”
They never said no. They were there in Hampden Park with face paint and flags as Ireland made history. They were the making of Megan. Her voice chokes up and her eyes water as that fulfillment materialises. The clip is all the more heartbreaking in hindsight. When the Ireland squad for the World Cup was announced, Campbell was omitted. It was the day of her 30th birthday.
The documentary was another triumph by award-winning filmmaker Ross Whitaker. He has produced the critically acclaimed about boxer Katie Taylor as well as , and .
In a so-called golden age of sports documentaries, Whitaker is surely at the front line of this expansion. Not exactly. Days before that football documentary aired, he took to social media in frustration.
“These last three months I’ve had two promising feature docs fall apart. An exciting offer to direct a pilot for a streamer was rescinded. And development funding for a no brainer doc refused. It’s a funny old game, this!”
The revolution will not be televised. It will be streamed. Constantly, mindlessly, formulaically. Every single sport wants in. inspired a raft of legacy-affirming duplicates. .
Increasingly athletes don’t just want their story to be told, they want to tell it. Executive producer and lead all in one. Social media allowed stars to control their message and now they can do so on screen too. It doesn’t matter if the story is even finished; just churn out another sanitised episode when that time comes.
The other game changer was . In the same mould as docuseries All or Nothing, it provided a stock drawn-out template that could be copied and pasted from sport to sport. A bingeable format targeting the curious passerby, promising to channel new fans in. After justified success with their F1 series, the same producers moved on to tennis (unwatchable), cycling (decent), and golf (high ceiling, low floor).
demonstrates the greatest casualty of the new order. With Brooks Koepka and Tony Finau they strike real gold. Cut the rest, delve deeper into that and it could be one of the great documentaries. Great is no longer the goal.
For a company whose self-confessed enemy is sleep, the ambition is just to keep people watching. Watchable is good enough.
So they mix Koepka’s descent to a place where he realises he can’t consistently compete in with Justin Thomas’ struggles to navigate the self-service checkout at CVS after scouring the aisles in search of allergy relief.
That is the cost of quantity over quality. A steady diet of empty calories, enough to avert outright hunger without ever offering fulfilment.
Campbell’s contribution in was one beat in a broader story. It took 50 minutes to chart the winding road to Australia and cover the stance at Liberty Hall, Vera Pauw’s takeover, the failure to qualify for the European Championships, the Celtic Symphony controversy, that night in Scotland, and the central characters who were there for it all.
In that arrangement, sports documentaries are still art. This has always been a galvanising appeal of the genre. The fallout when the Academy snubbed the sensational 1994 basketball documentary was so severe that they were forced to change the Oscars voting rules and scoring scale. Around the same time, the behind-the-scenes became a gripping spectacle in the UK. Closer to home gave the GAA its first truly great account. In 1996, won the award for Best Documentary feature. Leon Gast’s film about the Rumble in the Jungle took 22 years to edit and finance. What resulted was a marvel.
Nor is it extinct. Wonderful work, like and is still emerging. A sports-related film won the Academy Award for best documentary from 2016 to 2018. But they increasingly exist beyond the prevalent formula. There has been no funding boom or windfall in that realm. It is one thing if this trend is not helping them, it is another if it has started to hurt them.
Andy R Worboys was the editor for 2016 film as well as several mainstream productions. He penned an essay earlier this year titled, Why I’m quitting as an editor.
“The industry’s refusal to take a chance on people is making docs look samey - and worse, it’s driving talent out,” he wrote.
“Broadcasters and streamers seem unwilling to risk productions falling at the edit stage and therefore continue to demand the tried and tested handful of editors whose names you see time and again. The result is that everything starts to look and feel the same, as there’s no new creative voices in the cutting rooms.”
Maybe we should have seen it coming. As sport becomes more commodified and processed, it is only logical that so too does its world. What else did you expect?
Some might lose out, but it won’t be the business.
