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Amazon.com essential video
The entire history of the world's favorite game? It's an extraordinary challenge that could go have gone horribly wrong, but History of Soccer: The Beautiful Game is a class act. It boasts top-drawer production values, including narration by Terence Stamp, access to everybody who has really mattered in the game, ever, plus loads of famous, rare, and never-seen-before footage, each volume offering a blend of narrative, action, and illuminating interviews. This is a polished product: part celebration, part commemoration, but always with a sharp investigative sense, digging around the misty-eyed, good ol' days tradition, to explore in the company of those interviewed the reality behind some of soccer's myths and legends. The breadth of enquiry is naturally impressive, as is the narrative structure, but it's the deft handling of the subplots that really sets this apart, including: analysis of the dominant club sides such as Liverpool, Real Madrid, and Milan (volume 2); the evolution of Brazil (volume 3); the superstar casualties, like Maradona and Garrincha (volume 5); football as an agent of social control in Victorian England (volume 1); the revolution in French football that created the 1998 World Champions (volume 4); and the failure, so far, of Africa to fulfil Pele's famous World Cup prediction (volume 6). There's so little material here that isn't memorable that it's difficult to pick highlights, but action aside (and it's hard to think of an historically important game that isn't featured), an emotional Maradona exposing the "conspiracy" that fixed the 1990 World Cup final (volume 2) is an unforgettable slice of soccer culture.
History of Soccer on DVD comes complete with a heap of extras (between 33 and 54 minutes' worth per volume) including, across the set, every single goal from every World Cup Final game; extended interviews with the likes of Pele, Maradona, Zidane, and Bobby Charlton; loads of "first-ever-recorded-on-film" material including the 1907 England-Scotland game; text-only biographies of the major interviewees; extended tournament highlights of past European Championships, African Nations Cups, World Club Championships, Asian Cups, and, of course, World Cup Finals. The picture itself is presented in widescreen, and there's a Spanish-language track plus an Easter egg of additional hidden material in every volume. --Alex Hankin
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