Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Champion’ on Netflix, an Opposites-Attract Drama About a Slick Soccer Star and His Nerdy Tutor

This week on Generically Titled Netflix Theatre is The Champion, a Spanish movie about a learning-impaired soccer superstar and the tutor who helps him. The film isn’t even about a “champion” per se, so that generic title REALLY feels slapped on there, furthering my theory that Netflix churns out so much content, it’s exhausted the entire dictionary in the quest to name its movies and TV series. But as always, we shouldn’t judge books by their covers, so let’s dig into this earnest drama and see if it gives us something that transcends that boring, boring title. 

THE CHAMPION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Diego! Diego! Diego!, the crowd chants. He’s the superstar. The wunderkind. The savior of Atletico de Madrid, aka Atleti. It’s late in the game, late in the season. Diego (Swit Eme) lines up the penalty kick and – DOINK – doinks it off the crossbar. So it goes. He doesn’t handle it well. He immediately red cards. Atleti loses the game. A teammate confronts him in the tunnel to the locker room and Diego headbutts the guy. Three games left in the season and Diego’s slapped with a two-game suspension, with the third in question. Atleti’s league championship hopes are looking dire. It’s one thing if a guy chokes under pressure but it’s another to make a bad situation worse by being a rash, nasty, hotheaded prick who thinks only about himself and all the money he’s making and having a good time at all times – which is a way of saying the first act of this movie establishes Diego as someone we’d like to see banished to Uranus’ version of Siberia.

I guess this is what happens when you were a sizzling hot prospect at 15, and now you’re 20 and you have a fleet of Ferraris and an entourage of enablers and fame up the wazoo. Being suspended just further fuels his need to party party party. Diego’s life is run/exploited by his manager father Tito (Pablo Chiapella) and his agent Juanma (Luis Fernandez), who’s the type of guy who makes an oozy banana slug look like a fossilized sea cucumber ca. the Mesozoic. Tito and Juanma concoct a damage-control PR strategy they hope puts him back in the team’s and the league’s good graces so they’ll let him play in that final game: He’ll get a tutor and pursue the academics he left behind when he went pro. The optics are amazing, bro! The OPTICS!

And Juanma’s brother is just the shlub to hire for the job. Alex (Dani Rovira) is an educational psychologist teaching a course all about geniuses, which I think makes him a genius in analyzing genius. He’s also struggling to the point where he’ll have to sell the home he and Juanma grew up in, so the fat paycheck he’ll earn to pantomime his way through this charade will come in handy. Thing is, Alex isn’t like his greezy brother. Alex is legit. He’s got some issues, e.g., he has phobias about being touched too much and being around crowds of people, and takes medication for his anxiety. Alex meets Diego, who does what Diego always is wont to do, and promptly insults the guy for wearing normal shlumpy clothes and being an egghead loser who never ever parties with babes by the pool or drives absurdly expensive cars or brags about being able to buy and sell people like it’s nothin’. I’m telling you, he’s a loathsome cretin. You’ll hate this guy with the heat of a million-zillion Superman-eyeball laser blasts.

But maybe you’ll almost feel sorry for him once you see Juanma and Tito prop him up for a press conference, where he struggles mightily to read the fake-ass apology they wrote for him. Alex is the only person taking things seriously, and he fights through the condescension and childish name-calling enough to sit Diego down for a minute and diagnose the dude with dyslexia. Tito and Juanma just want to sweep everything away and keep the money rolling in, and the only person on Alex’s side is Diego’s long-suffering girlfriend Ceci (Cintia Garcia), who apparently sees what we don’t: That beneath all the grotesque bluster, Diego’s an actual human being with, like, feelings and shit. And we therefore find ourselves watching as the boring principled neurotic dweebus hangs out with the loud undisciplined assholish lout – and they become unlikely friends who might learn something from each other? You don’t say.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Two soccer movies I liked better than this: The Damned United (directed by Tom Hooper long, long before Cats) and The Beautiful Game, another Netflick, about the Homeless World Cup.

Performance Worth Watching: Rovira holds this movie together with his earnest gravitas and a willingness to transcend a few cliches with a thoughtful, well-considered characterization.

Memorable Dialogue: Alex’s wise mantra: “A genius is the one most like himself.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s easy to like the first two acts of The Champion, which establishes the prickly opposites-attract relationship between Alex and Diego, and cultivates enough warmth and sincerity to win us over for a while. Other films might take the subject matter less seriously, and render the material broad comedy. Take the sequence in which Alex has a little too much to drink at dinner with Diego and his friends, or the scene where Diego sits in on one of Alex’s lectures and is promptly mobbed by admirers – Rovira’s performance and Theron’s direction assure these moments remain realistic and therefore more dramatically sound, instead of simply exploiting all the usual overplayed stereotypes for some cheap laughs.

The third act is a problem, though, as it posits the principled Alex (and to a lesser extent Ceci) against Juanma and Tito’s attempts to further exploit Diego in a fit of shortsighted self-interest. If Alex teaches Diego to truly comprehend the contracts these creeps make him sign, well, it might affect their checking accounts. The screenplay lines up a series of contrived conflicts leading up to the Big Game and too many of the usual sports-movie cliches, while also finding a way to indulge the ancient breakup-and-make-up rom-com scenario; meanwhile, Alex is short-shrifted by a simplistic Psych-101 just-overcome-your-fears arc toward resolution. So much for taking the drama seriously. It was pretty good while it lasted. 

Our Call: I’m on the fence, so let’s look at the math: Two-thirds of The Champion is solid, reasonably thoughtful entertainment, and the other third is dreck. That’s a passing grade even though the movie D-minused the final. So STREAM IT but keep your expectations modest.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.