Irish Daily Mail

PICK OF DIGITAL & ON DEMAND TV

THE ENGLISH GAME, NETFLIX

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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.

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