This is a pretty respectable entry in the current corporate-landfill era of sports documentaries. It’s the customary slavishly admiring portrait of its subject, the Danish goalkeeper who anchored Manchester United to a string of league titles and Denmark to the European Championships, but you are left with a sense that, somehow, Peter Schmeichel is a big enough character to justify it. Inevitably, the film also acts as yet another outpost of the “Football, bloody hell!” documentary industrial complex, with one more airing of the footage of United’s Champions League final triumph.
Admittedly, there’s now an extra dimension to Clive Tyldesley’s strangulated shrieks as United scored their winner: this was Schmeichel’s last game for the side, having unexpectedly announced his exit from the team earlier in the season. It’s a piquant moment when he raises the cup as his last act. And while he’s talked about it before, it’s still a little sad to hear him say: “Of course it was a massive mistake leaving Manchester United.” Schmeichel talks about how changing his mind might have been interpreted as a sign of weakness by manager Alex Ferguson, and perhaps he might be right, but you can feel the jolt when he shows up to play against United for Manchester City, and gets the cold shoulder from former compadre Gary Neville.
Though this film is very much the official version, it does mine some interesting family and psychological seams. Schmeichel’s Polish-born jazz-musician dad was, he says, a double agent for both sides during the cold war (the price of getting out of Poland), and evidently passed on his musical gifts; there’s an amusing clip from a Danish version of This Is Your Life when Schmeichel Sr tells his son to work on being a pianist: “It’s never too late, you can still make it.” As a corrective to Schmeichel’s notorious on-field aggression, there’s a quite a bit of soft-focus emoting on show here, mostly in connection to his footballing son Kasper, but he does manage a measure of honesty over the dislikable elements in his character that propelled his career: “I know deep down, if I hadn’t have been like that, it wouldn’t have happened for me.”
• Schmeichel is at Home, Manchester, and on digital platforms from 21 February.
