Sports movies: 21 films beyond the final score

Weekly collection in the app for the week of June 12, 2026.

Sport on film is never really about the game; it is drama with a scoreboard. This collection ran the week the 2026 World Cup kicked off, so football leads: Loach's Cantona fable, Panahi's women locked out of a Tehran stadium, Chow's Shaolin strikers, an Allied XI escaping through a Paris crowd.

It ran as the weekly theme in the I Like Movies Discover tab for the week of June 12, 2026, featuring Bend It Like Beckham. Beyond the pitch: Scorsese's ring, Kapadia's cockpit, Tonya on the ice and Lagaan's cricket match against the Raj.

The collection

1. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) Chadha Featured A London Sikh teenager secretly joins a women's football team against her parents' plans for her; the crowd-pleaser that launched Keira Knightley and a thousand girls' teams. Cast: Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
2. Looking for Eric (2009) Loach A depressed Manchester postman starts receiving life coaching from an imaginary Eric Cantona, playing himself and quoting his own aphorisms; Loach's warmest film. Cast: Steve Evets, Éric Cantona, Stephanie Bishop
3. Offside (2006) Panahi Iranian women disguise themselves as boys to sneak into a World Cup qualifier and are penned by young soldiers just outside the stadium; shot guerrilla-style at the real match. Cast: Sima Mobarak-Shahi, Shayesteh Irani, Ayda Sadeqi
4. Escape to Victory (1981) Huston Allied POWs agree to play a Nazi propaganda football match in occupied Paris, planning to escape at halftime; Caine, Stallone in goal, and Pelé's overhead kick. Preposterous and beloved. Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow
5. The Damned United (2009) Hooper The true story of Brian Clough's 44 days managing Leeds United, the champion team he had spent years publicly despising; a sports film about ego, rivalry and one broken friendship. Cast: Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney
6. Diego Maradona (2019) Kapadia Assembled from 500 hours of archive: Maradona's years at Napoli, from god to scapegoat, as the city, the Camorra and his own appetites close in. Cast: Diego Maradona, Pelé, Dalma Maradona
7. The Miracle of Bern (2003) Wortmann A boy's POW father returns broken from a Soviet camp as West Germany improbably marches to the 1954 World Cup final; the tournament that let a country feel something again. Cast: Louis Klamroth, Peter Lohmeyer, Johanna Gastdorf
8. Shaolin Soccer (2001) Chow A down-and-out kung fu devotee recruits his former Shaolin brothers to apply their superhuman skills to football; cartoon physics, flying bicycle kicks, pure joy. Cast: Stephen Chow, Richard Ng Man-Tat, Zhao Wei
9. The Two Escobars (2010) Zimbalist Pablo Escobar's cartel money built Colombian football's golden generation; captain Andrés Escobar's own-goal at the 1994 World Cup got him murdered. One country, two Escobars, one documentary. Cast: Andrés Escobar, Pablo Escobar, María Ester Escobar
10. Raging Bull (1980) Scorsese Boxer Jake LaMotta batters his way to the middleweight title while destroying his brother, his marriage and himself; Scorsese and De Niro's black-and-white masterpiece about rage with nowhere to go. Cast: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci
11. Rocky (1976) Avildsen A Philadelphia club fighter and debt collector gets a freak title shot against the champion and asks only to go the distance; the underdog original, written by its unknown star. Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young
12. When We Were Kings (1996) Gast The 1974 Rumble in the Jungle: Ali, huge underdog against Foreman in Zaire, the rope-a-dope, and the music festival around it; twenty years in the editing, an Oscar at the end. Cast: Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Don King
13. Senna (2010) Kapadia Ayrton Senna's decade in Formula 1, his war with Prost and with the sport's politics, cut entirely from race footage and home video into something like Greek tragedy. Cast: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Frank Williams
14. Rush (2013) Howard Playboy James Hunt and calculating Niki Lauda push their 1976 title fight to the edge, through the crash that burned Lauda and the comeback 42 days later; the rare racing film that honors both men. Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl, Olivia Wilde
15. The Wrestler (2008) Aronofsky A broken-down 1980s wrestling star, living in a trailer and working deli counters, gets one more shot at the spotlight that ruined him; Mickey Rourke playing painfully close to home. Cast: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood
16. Moneyball (2011) Miller The cash-poor Oakland A's ditch scouts' instincts for an economist's spreadsheet and change baseball forever; a sports movie where the action is arguments in offices, and it works. Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman
17. Hoosiers (1986) Anspaugh A disgraced coach and the town drunk lead a tiny Indiana high school to the state basketball final; the small-town sports myth, played straight and earned. Cast: Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper
18. I, Tonya (2017) Gillespie Figure skater Tonya Harding's life from abusive childhood to the Nancy Kerrigan attack, told through contradictory to-camera interviews that keep correcting each other. Cast: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney
19. Borg vs. McEnroe (2017) Metz The ice-cold Swede chasing a fifth straight Wimbledon and the combustible New Yorker who cannot lose meet in the 1980 final; a portrait of two kinds of pressure. Cast: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård
20. Lagaan (2001) Gowariker Drought-struck Indian villagers accept a British officer's wager: beat his men at cricket, a game they have never played, and pay no tax for three years; a four-hour musical epic that flies by. Cast: Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley
21. Million Dollar Baby (2004) Eastwood A waitress in her thirties talks a crusty trainer into taking her on and rises fast through women's boxing, until the story becomes something else entirely; bring reserves. Cast: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman

Keep your place

Tournament summers are when these get rewatched: keep the collection on your I Like Movies watchlist and mark what you have seen between matches. New themed collections arrive in the Discover tab every Friday.

Questions people ask

What is the best football movie?

Bend It Like Beckham for joy, The Damned United for the sport's inner politics, Offside for what a stadium means when you are banned from it, and Diego Maradona with The Two Escobars for the documentary heights.

Do I need to like sports to watch these?

No. Raging Bull, I, Tonya, The Wrestler and Senna are regularly loved by people who never watch a match; the sport is the stage, not the subject.

The week before: Queer classics: 21 essential LGBTQ films. The week after: Behind the Iron Curtain: 21 films that defied the censors. See every weekly theme, or browse every guide, watch order and comparison.