Soccer Overlords FIFA Made a Ridiculously Biased Movie About How Awesome FIFA Is

Jordan Zakarin

Tim Roth in ‘United Passions’

If you’re looking to understand why the US Justice Department arranged for the arrest of several senior officials from FIFA yesterday, you probably won’t find the answers in the film United Passions. That is, if you can even locate a copy.

The 2014 movie is one of the stranger footnotes in the many, highly serious allegations being leveled at the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the international governing body in charge of world soccer. FIFA saw nine of its executives arrested on Wednesday, accused of participating in more than $150 million worth of bribery over a period of 24 years.

There are potentially more charges coming, but one person who wasn’t indicted was longtime FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who presided over the whole mess. This is where United Passions comes in: Blatter is one of the central characters in the movie, a glorious history of the stuffed shirts at FIFA…which, as it happens, was financed by FIFA. (After all, the thing people most want to see in a sports film is the suits sitting in the skyboxes.)

The movie — which reportedly had a $27 million budget — premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted with bewilderment and derision. It takes place over the course of nearly a century, and really gets going in the 1930s, when rich Europeans do their best to organize a soccer tournament to heal a war-torn world (and make money in the process). Gérard Depardieu plays FIFA’s third president, Jules Rimet, the man responsible for the first World Cup (which went to Uruguay after a bribe).

In later years, the film concentrates mostly on the heroic efforts of Blatter (Tim Roth), who was behind FIFA’s transformation into a corporate-sponsored, bribery-fueled machine that it is today. (For an alternate history of FIFA and Blatter, check out Last Week Tonight host John Oliver’s epic takedowns.)

According to The Guardian, the film more or less treats Blatter as a squeaky-clean hero, who helped elevate the Beautiful Game into a financial juggernaut. Even Roth raised an eyebrow at the way his own movie portrayed the guy. “I was like: ‘Where’s all the corruption in the script? Where is all the back-stabbing, the deals?’” Roth told London’s Observer last year. “I tried to slide in a sense of it, as much as I could get in there.”

The film has hardly been screened since its Cannes debut: it was released in Russia, where it made less than $200,000 and went straight to DVD in France. Which is probably just as well: The true story of what happened behind-the-scenes at FIFA is likely to capture a whole lot more attention.