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on the arrival of giants like Netflix or Amazon Prime, audiovisual production is not only experiencing a gold rush in terms of fiction, but also a great opportunity opens up for documentaries that, converted into chapter series, can free themselves from the corset of two cinematic hours and set much more ambitious goals.
For now, this golden age of documentaries has given us gems like Wild Wild Country, the crazy portrait of the Rajneesh sect and their attempt to build a utopian city in the middle of the Oregon desert, and also promises to revolutionize sports documentaries with projects like All or Nothing, an Amazon brand that until now had made immersive portraits of American football and rugby teams, until this 2018 it landed in football-mad Europe with an immersive portrait of Manchester City.
For a figure that some media outlets placed around 10 million pounds, City agreed to have Mediapro's cameras stick to the team like limpets during last season, with practically unlimited access to training sessions, the stars, and Pep Guardiola's locker room talks. "They even followed us into the showers," one of the captains commented, mockingly. In the world of journalism, this technique is called Fly on the Wall, and it dates back to historical reports such as the portrait of Ernest Hemingway that Lillian Ross signed in 1950 in the New Yorker magazine, but the possibilities that are opening up now are infinite, especially when cameras are allowed into inaccessible places.
The result of All or Nothing: Manchester City is a never-before-seen inside view of a football club – in eight one-hour chapters, that is, 480 minutes in front of the screen – with the luck or misfortune of accompanying the team that pulverized all Premier League records: record points, victories, goals, and the first to break the 100-point barrier thanks to an in extremis victory in the last minute of the 2017-2018 season.
Compared to the amount of daily sports minutes we swallow in the news, quality sports documentaries are scarce, especially because they tend to give in to and fall into well-worn obviousness, with phrases like football is football and everything that has transformed a good part of sports journalism into male gossip magazines. Putting the microphone in front of fans and recording them while they shout "City is the best" or "we devoured them" doesn't provide much relevant information, to be clear. Furthermore, in a discipline that moves so much money, it becomes difficult to find the critical and impartial tone that great documentaries have – that is, those that seek to pose the big questions – and not fall into an unmitigated advertorial.
We discover, for example, that Kun Agüero spends his time watching mafia and action movies on a gigantic screen while missing his son, who visits him once a month as he lives in Argentina. The striker may be swimming in abundance, but it is pitiful to see him living alone like a mushroom.In All or Nothing: Manchester Citythe chapters alternate the main plot, which is the team's progress in various competitions, with the small daily routines, such as the recovery of injured players – who operate in Barcelona because the technical team blindly trusts Dr. Ramon Cugat, a world reference in knee injuries – and the life that the stars lead in the city of Manchester. We discover, for example, that Kun Agüero spends his time watching mafia and action movies on a gigantic screen while missing his son, who visits him once a month since he lives in Argentina. The striker may be swimming in abundance, but it is pitiful to see him living alone like a mushroom.
The documentary also wants to show the work of the technical team, but in the many minutes spent in the locker rooms, we don't learn any important tactical lessons, beyond seeing Guardiola moving colored pieces on a whiteboard – Guardiola's English, at times improvised and incomprehensible, has been quite criticized in The Guardian. Nor do we discover any revelations about the club's economic planning: in several chapters, we see Txiki Beguiristain and Ferran Soriano planning signings with Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the owner's all-powerful right-hand man, but we never know what objective they set or how much they were willing to disburse – it seems like a lot. In the winter market, we accompany them to Bilbao for the lightning signing of Aymeric Laporte, but the negotiation is a piece of cake because City pays the release clause in cash: no emotion.
The documentary's revelations are in the small details, such as in the scene with citizen captain Vincent Kompany following a transcendental match and having to endure the comments of his father-in-law, a United fan. Or during Fernandinho's daughter's birthday party, a kitsch spectacle for new rich, with guests filling a gift table with bags and bags of Burberry and Polo Ralph Lauren, while the player's wife, Glaucia Roza, opens up and explains her role in the midfielder's renewal: "we had been discussing it for a long time, staying will be good for the children." A good dose of reality for those who think that these decisions are always made based on the star's sports career, and not according to the family situation.
In the final edit, the match summaries already strive to inject emotion into the documentary with suspenseful music, but with the team winning by a landslide most days, it's difficult to create cliffhangers or draw on epic moments: at the peak of winter, with the team leading and a thousand points ahead of the second-place team, the documentary's intrigue is reduced to trying to guess who will be the next player to get injured.All or Nothing: Manchester Cityalso reveals what, in my opinion, is the club's best-kept secret: it's Brandon Ashton, the kit man who fixes the players' boots, a hilarious redhead who always brings the humor and relaxation the team needs. In a squad full of twenty-something millionaires, having a young, empathetic kit manager who lets himself be teased is worth his weight in gold.
In the final cut, the match summaries already strive to inject emotion into the documentary with suspenseful music, but with the team winning by a landslide most matchdays, it's difficult to create cliffhangers or pull off epic moments: at the peak of winter, with the team leading and a thousand points ahead of the second-place team, the documentary's intrigue is reduced to trying to guess who will be the next player to get injured.
But, in my opinion, the main flaw of All or Nothing: Manchester City is that it doesn't work as a journalistic document because it shies away from the most controversial topics: it renounces the will to inform and only entertains and satisfies the fans. Since the arrival of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Manchester City has gone from being a mediocre club to winning everything, it has gone from "having toilets without doors," as captain Kompany explains, to having luxury facilities and breaking all transfer records with a checkbook. On the field, City is a perfect machine, a dream, a video game team, but all of us who have played video games know that you can cheat to achieve unattainable power: this is what City has done with the Sheikh's unlimited economic potential, and despite everything, the documentary does not question this, nor the discomfort caused by glory when it is financed with blood-stained money.
Nor do we see any controversy with the players who don't play, the classic fights that occur in all locker rooms and that would provide a bit of dramatic tension. The discontent of Yaya Touré, for example, who only played 228 league minutes that season, ostracized, according to him, by the coach, could have been exploited.
In summary: All or Nothing: Manchester City will satisfy football fans due to its access to an unlimited amount of confidences and gossip, but it always tiptoes around important issues. The omnipresent follow-up on Pep Guardiola – who never takes off the yellow ribbon from his lapel – would have allowed for addressing the almost philosophical debate that has been floating in England since his arrival, about whether possession-based, first-touch football in the style of Johan Cruyff can be played in the Premier League, but once again we skim over the issue without delving deeper. In the series, Guardiola stands out as the absolute protagonist, a white hero without contradictions, loyal and committed to the squad to the extreme: "In the press conference I will defend you to the end," he says after a defeat, "but here I will tell you the truth: come back down to earth."
Be that as it may, the idea behind All or Nothing is fantastic, and we hope that in future installments the series will give us more unique witnesses and delve into other inaccessible environments. Of course, to do it well, they should follow a small team, with a bad atmosphere in the locker room and the coach fired mid-season: this way, a genuinely epic and Shakespearean story would be achieved.