PICK OF DIGITAL & ON DEMAND TV
THE ENGLISH GAME, NETFLIX
TONIGHT and tomorrow, the footballing superstars of Liverpool and Manchester City will be hoping to book their place in the final of the Champions League – the pinnacle of the sport that is now a global obsession. So what better time to take a look back at how soccer first started out on the road to becoming the big-money enterprise that it is today? Julian Fellowes’s six-part drama about the birth of the beautiful game, first released in 2020, follows two real-life figures, Lord Kinnaird (Edward Holcroft) and Glaswegian stonemason
Fergus Suter (Kevin Guthrie, pictured), as football reaches a turning point in the 1870s. Kinnaird belongs to the more brutal, aristocratic era; Suter to the more refined passing game played by the working classes. The story tells how these men, from across the class divide, transformed the game into a professional proposition in which players were – gasp! – paid. Footballing ability was a significant consideration during casting, and the actors spent months learning the technical aspects of the Victorian game at Manchester United’s training ground.