Why Soccer Films Are the Hottest in Sports Cinema

There’s nothing like the return of the FIFA World Cup to remind the entire world — even America — about the great soccer movies of the past. Movies about sports have been a staple of the medium since 1894 , and although there might not be as many about the sport known as football around the world, movies like Shaolin Soccer and Bend It Like Beckham are now being re-appreciated by viewers. Movies that aren’t just great — they’re also hot.

To this humble writer, soccer has always felt like a sport superior to most, both cinematically and otherwise. The pace of the game is unmatched, especially compared to the stops and starts of sports like baseball and American football. The tight timeframe proves to be an advantage for those with short attention spans, too. Yes, as Dan Rydell of Sports Night often complained , soccer is never a very high-scoring sport . But that only makes its big goals all the more exciting.

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Wrapping your head around the offsides rule can be a little complicated, but otherwise the action is very straightforward — there’s a ball, a goal, and a bunch of people trying to kick the first thing into the second. Those people do happen to be, on balance, staggeringly hot: Constantly running up and down a field that ranges from 330 to 360 feet long keeps them in the best possible shape, they look fantastic in shorts, and they have a habit of ripping off their shirts after a big win, regardless of gender.

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Because it’s a team sport, that creates a wide array of opportunities for a diverse and/or eclectic collective of hotties, and also allows for both big group energy as well as a variety of one-on-one… positions. Additionally, the general flow of a high-stakes soccer game is both simple and powerful for the viewer, whether fictional or real life: You have the build-up of regular play, then overtime in the event of a tie, followed by the white-knuckle intensity of a penalty shoot-out, followed by the inevitable… climax.

There aren’t a huge number of movies in the Western canon devoted to soccer, but those that do exist prove the point. Yes, other sports movies are capable of hotness. Baseball films do find plenty to explore in how, ahem, explosive it is to watch a batter propel a ball deep into the stands for an epic home run. However, modern baseball has a mullet problem. And although there are certain contexts wherein spitting can be hot, the way a baseball player does it is not on that list.

Maybe if basketball went back to the 1970s short-shorts, it’d be hotter ( Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball being the major outlier). Boxing movies can have their moments, but the blood (and weirdly, the mouthguards) are a turnoff. Football? There is without question something primal about the grunts and bodyslams of football, but although the pants might be tight, the padding and helmets otherwise detract from the desired effect. Hockey falls into a similar trap, despite the impact of a certain Canadian TV drama — all the really sexy stuff on that show happens off the ice.

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The one major challenger to soccer’s dominance in this area is tennis. Not just because of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers , though that’s not not a factor — the matches featured in that movie are literally intercourse. However, here is my biggest argument for why soccer remains dominant in this specific regard: At most, a tennis match will feature four attractive people on the court. Soccer games feature twenty-two attractive people on the pitch. It’s simple math.

In talking about the hotness of soccer movies, Bend It Like Beckham is such an exemplary example of this that it’s also famous as a queer awakening movie , largely because of Keira Knightley’s could-be-more-explicitly-gay-but-still-pretty-gay character and her chemistry with teammate Jess (Parminder Nagra). Everyone in that movie is quite attractive, though, and the examples continue from there.

Michael Sheen and Stephen Graham don their shorts for historical drama The Damned United , and have rarely looked better. In 1997’s Fever Pitch , Colin Firth doesn’t even play a full-time soccer player — he coaches the team at the school where he teaches English — but it’s still one of his hottest performances. Will Ferrell? Maybe not who you think of as a sex symbol, but put him on the field in 2005’s Kicking and Screaming and the screen is on fire .

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Hotness, to be clear, is not strictly defined by superficial qualities. One of the best soccer movies ever is the aforementioned Shaolin Soccer , directed by and starring Stephen Chow, which features a scrappy team of upstarts and underdogs of varying body types — all of whom start carrying themselves with pride as they unlock their hidden talents. The documentary Next Goal Wins (no need to bring up the fictionalized adaptation here ) is also beautiful because its eclectic subjects are all finding that same faith in themselves.

Judging hotness is always a very subjective exercise, but one thing remains objectively true: Only a shallow soul would limit the definition of hotness to the presence of physically fit people achieving athletic excellence. In truth, one of the sexiest qualities any person can exhibit is confidence. Watching someone sprint down a field, dribbling the ball with grace and skill, is a pure and true distillation of that.

By the basic metric of confidence, then, all sports movies are fundamentally pretty hot.

But soccer movies are the hottest ones.

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_Originally reported by [Consequence](https://consequence.net/2026/06/soccer-movies-hottest-sports-movies-why/)._