Good soccer movies?

Pan Am premieres tonite and who can't be fascinated by the lives of "stewardesses" or flight attendants in the early 1960s!

Looking for something to watch, however, I am trying to figure out why there aren't any good soccer movies. Certainly I am delighted that Gracie and Bend it Like Beckham are around. They are both (relatively) clean, focus on a girls' sports, and are reasonably entertaining. Perfect entertainment for when your 4th thru 6th grade daughter is home sick with flu. But such criteria doesn't really constitute a great sports movie like Bull Durham, Slap Shot, Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Remember the Titans, Rocky, Caddyshack, or -- the creme de la creme -- Raging Bull. Even Miracle with Kurt Russell as US 1980 hockey coach Herb Brooks is better than any soccer movie I can think of...


I recall a Stallone vehicle from the 80s -- Victory, I think -- about an American POW in WWII who ends up playing goalie on an English soccer team squaring off against the German team holding them prisoner. This was back when only Stallone and Jane Fonda insisted that everyone over 40 be fitter than they were when they were 20. Think, too, The Longest Yard, where the prisoners get a shot at the guards. Michael Caine co-starred as the English officer and coach of the team. The film was positively goofy, if for no other reason that Caine's "cockney" accent made him ineligible to play a WWII officer ( a colonel, for pete's sake); David Niven must have been dead by then. The premise was that Stallone, an American, could play goalie because he was good with his hands -- as if catching a baseball or football prepared you to snag hard soccer strikes. Quite an American fantasy.