Sport cinema is not the first genre that one would associate with Irish fiction film (or any other European film culture for that matter) given the popularity of other genres, including melodrama, romantic comedy and the gangster genre in recent decades. However, while Hollywood has largely defined and popularised the genre, sport has featured prominently in the European context, including some notable Irish productions (Clash of the Ash (1987), The Boxer (1997), Studs (2006)). European sport cinema now includes both acclaimed works, from Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), This Sporting Life (1962), and Boxer a smrť (The Boxer and Death, 1962), to distinctive national sub-genres such as Spanish ‘Kick Flicks’ (Ashton 2013). Furthermore, European Sport cinema has proven on occasion to be remarkably popular in specific contexts with indigenous productions breaking local box office records, including in Norway (Flåklypa Grand Prix (Pinchcliffe Grand Prix) (1975)), Russia (Движение вверх (Going Vertical (AKA Three Seconds) (2017)), and Spain (Campeones (Champions) (2018). As I have discussed previously (Crosson 2021), European sport cinema has historically been primarily national in both its focus and reception and in some contexts, as in Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain, this has involved the employment of sport on film to affirm and promote hegemonic and exclusionary constructions of national identity. However, the advent of the European Economic Community in 1957 (and the European Union (EU) in 1993) and the establishment of a range of European international co-production and film funding initiatives – including Eurimages (established by the Council of Europe in 1989) and the EU’s own MEDIA Programme (1991) – has encouraged and facilitated the increasing importance of coproduction partnerships in the production of European films, including sport cinema, accounting now for approximately 20% of relevant productions (Crosson, 2019). While more research is needed of these productions and the phenomenon more generally of European co-productions, this increasingly transnational production context does appear to be impacting upon the content of relevant productions with the narrower more nationalistic sentiments apparent in an early period less evident. In its place we find rather an increasing focus on international and inter-cultural concerns and encounters, including in some of the most commercially successful European sports films of recent years (e.g. Bend it It Like Beckham (UK/Germany/USA, 2002), Sixty Six (France/ UK, 2006), Looking for Eric (UK/ France/ Belgium/ Italy/ Spain, 2009), The Keeper (UK/ Germany, 2018).

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