This week marks a major victory for New York City FC off the field, when they become the first MLS team to feature in a documentary at a major mainstream film festival. On Thursday, the Tribeca Film Festival presents its red-carpet premiere of Win!, a new work by English filmmaker Justin Webster.
But, fans of rival teams, don’t immediately run away or prep the banter. This isn’t a hackneyed fanboy’s portrait of a team. In fact, beyond personal fandom of the sport, Webster isn’t even a specialist in soccer films or journalism. Instead, this is a cinéma vérité-style look into the project of launching something big, a fly-on-the-wall view of human drama and all its accompanying tension.
Filmed over the course of two years, Win! starts with Ferran Soriano and the NYCFC’s conception, and follows it through to the team hitting the pitch. Among the major characters, naturally? The team’s marquee names like David Villa and Frank Lampard, as well as sporting director Claudio Reyna and former head coach Jason Kreis. Thanks to Webster’s patient, painstaking method, all drop the media-ready sound bites, for a rare close-up of a world rarely shown so unvarnished.
In advance of the film’s premiere, we caught up with Webster by phone from rural Spain, where he’s working on a future project unrelated to soccer. Here’s what he had to tell us about the movie, and why it will appeal to fans of other MLS teams as well as overall film fans who don’t even follow the sport.
MLSsoccer.com: What’s your history with soccer/football fandom, and with MLS specifically?
Justin Webster: I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I’m not a specialist in soccer or sports or anything, really—but I live in Barcelona. So I made a film in 2003 about FC Barcelona, Barça! The Inside Story. In fact, the idea of that film is very similar to the idea of the film Win! In England we call it “observational cinema,” but I think in America it’s called “direct style” or “vérité.”
Between then and now, really I haven’t done anything else on soccer. I’m kind of a soccer fan, like lots of people, but I’m not a soccer expert, by any means.
What made this specific MLS story so compelling to you?
Two things. One is, starting anything from scratch, starting a club when there aren’t any players, when it’s just an idea, is interesting. That would be interesting in any place, seeing something grow from the ground up over a period of time and following it in a vérité way.
The other thing is that MLS is interesting right now. I actually do believe there’s kind of a tipping point of soccer becoming more popular in the states for lots of reasons.
So it’s a small story on the inside of something starting from scratch, but also with a bigger story of whether or not this really is a tipping point of people in the United States becoming more interested in soccer.
How did you first become aware of NYCFC’s creation, and at what point did you decide you wanted to dedicate your next film project to it?
Because I made the film about Barcelona, I knew Ferran Soriano, who was one of the main characters in that film. He and I have been kind of friends and in contact, so the conversation started when he went to Manchester City.
The idea was to do something maybe similar to the Barcelona film, which was very successful because it was kind of pioneering in that way of getting inside a big club. So Manchester City seemed like it was an interesting possibility, and Ferran was interested in that. And then, of course, very soon it became clear that there was this project in the States that could be a very interesting story as well.
How long ago would you say you really started working on this in earnest?
A long time; it’s terrible how long these things take. It was 2012, I would say, when Ferran and I started talking about doing something, without any particularly clear idea, but just being in touch.
Then it wasn’t until May 2013 that the franchise was actually announced, and then we had a good year developing, talking, thinking about how to make the film. We didn’t actually start filming until May 2014, and then the filming went on until October 2015—so about 18 months of filming.
What was the most challenging part of deciding the main story line or conflict in the film?
This kind of film means an awful lot of filming for what ends up being a two-hour film. It’s hundreds of hours of filming. One of the challenges is to work out when to film, because we couldn’t film all the time, over 18 months. But it was very important to be there intensively at the most important times.
How would you sum up the main conflict or tension of this film?
The very simple arc of the story is that there are a few guys who are main characters. There’s Claudio, as well as the players—and that’s both the famous players and the not-famous players, too—who come together. There’s the board. It’s people facing up to a challenge.
Even though Jason is not there any more, because he left at the end of the season, you can see the kind of journey he went through, and how really, really difficult and demanding it is. The tension for him was to see if he could even field a team to begin with.
So there are all those ups and downs. I think the best thing about the film will be not so much sort of having a simple, two-line explanation of what the story of each character is, but actually feeling like you’re in their shoes.
Claudio is more connected with the bigger story of winning over the fans in New York, and helping soccer become something more relevant. And I think David is another, different story, too. I think he’s never been a captain of a team before, so there’s that new responsibility.
And then Frank Lampard, he had a difficult challenge in the sense that his arrival was delayed, and that caused a lot of comment and grief and tension, and I think seeing that play out from the inside gives you a different take on it.
In the world of a high-profile team, how do you get people to drop their guard?
I think one of the benefits of this kind of film is that you need time. So that’s why it was a long road, convincing people like Jason and Claudio and people on the board, convincing the players. It was very difficult to communicate what the film was going to look like at the end, but at least you could give an impression that it was being thought out.
Then it’s a matter of building trust. The whole business of filming a lot means that, in the end, if it works right, the camera disappears because you’re around so much. So after a while, people do drop their guard, in the sense that they aren’t playing to the camera or trying to escape from the camera.
Who turned out to be the most surprising character, to you, during the whole process?
I’d say David Villa. In this kind of film, the surprises are kind of cumulative, when you can see the whole picture. I don’t think he really grew into the character he is in the whole film almost until right at the end.
I think it was surprising because of his connection with the fans. I know he has lots of money and he is very famous and all that, but at the end, he is someone who generally believe sin playing football for the fans. I think that’s what gives him real satisfaction.
NYCFC has provoked some of the strongest reactions and rivalries among fans of other teams in the league, and lots of commentary from the soccer world at large. Why would this film interest some of these people who aren’t NYCFC fans?
Well, I’d hope it would interest people who aren’t even interested in soccer. I think that’s the ambition of the film. I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Senna, which is about the Brazilian racing driver. I have no interest in Formula One racing, but I love that film, because it takes you inside a world you don’t know that well. Or if you do know it, you see it from a slightly different angle, and it becomes surprising again.
I think fans of the Chicago Fire or Toronto FC or wherever should be interested, because it’s not going to be that different [from what might be happening inside their favorite teams]. Obviously the details will be different, but it’ll be an interesting voyage on the inside of a soccer team.
Win!
… premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival at 5:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, April 14 at Regal Cinemas Battery Park, New York. Only rush tickets remain – but the film will screen four more times throughout the festival. View showtimes
Social Media: @Tribeca
