This week in sports documentaries
A look at two documentary series I watched this week - Court of Gold and From Doubters to Believers LFC: Klopp's Era.
There are few things I love to do more than sit down and watch a new sports documentary series, absorb it in one sitting and then move on with my life pretty quickly. They used to be novel; before instant streaming and even more instant gratification became a thing, a good sports documentary was engrossing, often lasted the test of time and became shared experiences with your fellow sports nerds.
Irish sports lovers are still talking about a 1998 documentary film which followed the Galway Gaelic football team in their title winning season that year. A Year ‘Til Sunday was one of the first of its kind—a behind the scenes, fly on the wall of the dressing room documentary that broke the mould, especially in a sport that has become notorious for keeping its cards closer to its chest.
And that, since then, it very much has done. There hasn’t been a repeat or reboot of any kind since that film. As sports have embraced the documentary, the cracking open of the pandora’s box, the GAA world has become even more tight-lipped and insulated.
Nowadays, it’d be weird if your sport or team weren’t involved in a sports documentary of some kind. Everyone wants to be the next Drive To Survive, almost every sport in the world would love that sort of renaissance.
Amazon’s All or Nothing, Netflix’s suite of shows following various sports throughout their campaigns or their single episode “Untold” films, ESPN’s 30 for 30s, Welcome to Wrexham, The Last Dance. There has never been more for the all-consuming sports fan to take in. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns also exists and for every Drive To Survive, that largely ignited this whole documentary series revolution, there’s a Full Swing, which for many, myself included, missed the fairway of what it was capable of.
So, I flicked on Court of Gold expecting all the bullshit and bluster you’d expect from the stars of today’s NBA and beyond and was pleasantly surprised with what it had to offer. The six-episode series follows the men’s basketball at the 2024 Paris Olympics and welcomed us behind the curtain of the American super-team, the Canada stalwarts, Nikola Jokic and his Serbian team, and the French hosts led by rising superstar Victor Wenbanyama.
Expecting hollow Olympic buzzwords from the likes of LeBron James, it zeroed more on the likes of Kevin Durant, who’s tearfully impassioned rallying call for representing his country on the international stage showed a side that we don’t see enough of for someone who’s become increasingly maligned in the game, despite his precocious talent.
It opened the doors to the Canadian team which boasts a studded array of NBA players for the first time. It documented the growth of the Canadian game in the past decade and the rise of some of its superstars, led by Oklahoma Warriors stud Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and it’s grander standing on the world stage versus the Steve Nash era when he was a near one-man-band for his national team.
Where Starting 5 struggled to present its cast of characters in the long and winding NBA season, the Olympics basketball tournament was a perfect container—a quick two-week turnaround featuring the best players in the world, away from the big money and glitz and glamour of the NBA stage, where national pride was the only thing on the line.
Where Starting 5 often pushed us too much into the larger-than-life colossus that is LeBron James, Court of Gold used him more preservingly—one of his few but most endearing moments was sharing a beer with the American coaches on the steps outside the basketball arena in Paris. It was a special moment to record—exhausted after an all-time ding-dong battle with Serbia in the semi-final, we saw the players with all layers removed, away from the pestering media and journalists, simply the players and coaches at their most pure soaking in the game that had just gone down and the relief of making an Olympic final.
Court of Gold is a rare accomplishment where sports documentaries are concerned. The time and occasion help but opening the door into a segment of high-profile sport that has all the same household names but still feels new and engaging is a triumph. Watch Nikola Jokic at the tactics board in the Serbian dressing room, before the camera gets scooted out the door by a coach. See the devastation of the Germans. Get invested in the French team defending its home soil. It even manages to make the US team an endearing outfit—of course they get the fitting finale, but it was tastefully done, grounded in the exceptional quality of Steph Curry.
If you’re jaded by the Netflixification of the sports documentary, Court of Gold breathes some life into the category.
Elsewhere, I watched the long-awaited series of Jurgen Klopp’s final season at Liverpool, Doubters to Believers LFC: Klopp’s Era. Announced shortly after his shocking decision to step down at the club, the series was initially expected to be a triumphant diary of a successful final season at Liverpool, with several honours still up for grabs.
Again, expectations were tame, and it largely failed to climb too far beyond mildly interesting. It does feel like the premise had to change several times in production, initially after Liverpool failed to win any of the big trophies last season, and maybe again as it turned out that Klopp’s replacement, Arne Slot, managed to keep the show on the road as the club look likely to win the Premier League and possibly more this season. That certainly impacts this watching—if Liverpool were struggling under Slot an emotional lookback on the Klopp era would have been a welcome distraction.
As such, it becomes a mostly by-the-numbers football documentary, ticking off the various moments and talking points of the Klopp era but rarely going much deeper than that. Of course, Klopp remains this hugely compelling and complex character, but I don’t think the documentary manages to lighten too many of his darkened rooms.
The best moments of the show generally feature the younger talent—there’s great segments on Conor Bradley and Curtis Jones in the opening episode that could’ve been expanded into a standalone mini-series, and there’s nice features on Jayden Danns and Harvey Elliott, but in this series it feels largely filler. The throwbacks to Klopp’s rise from player to manager in grainy footage at Mainz is great, as is the segment looking at his spell at Dortmund which sets up the show for his time at Liverpool and the success that was to follow.
But it’s not appointment viewing, by any means. As a Liverpool fan there were some curious elements behind the scenes, such as assistant manager Pep Lijnders having a pep talk with Darwin Nunez and Trent Alexander-Arnold’s rise from a shy, weedy local kid to league and European champion, but it’s all largely superficial. As a club-led vehicle it was never going to dig too deep into the inner sanctum of the football club, but it was neither a Klopp documentary nor a season review. It tries to thread both, kind of switching forward and back in time between the current season and Klopp’s history at Liverpool, but it perhaps tries to take on too much.
If it truly wanted to be the former it should have become the Klopp show, discovering what makes the man tick and focused centrally on how he got Liverpool to where they were in his final season. If it wanted to be a season review it should have allowed for more access, deeper, more meaningful moments with the squad and staff, and expanded further on the 2023/24 season.
In the end, it doesn’t accomplish either particularly well. It’s a fine watch across four episodes, but to me it could have been a more well-rounded and compact 90-minute microscope on Klopp. Which poses another issue, it just feels too soon for that kind of project. I realise the club needed to strike while the iron is hot in Klopp’s final season, but if you’re a curious sports fan looking for some background noise this week, I’d probably stick on Court of Gold.