Alexander Hutton emmigrates to Argentina from the UK and wants to bring football to the barbarian lands. Those young boys who were doing nothing but throwing balls around in circles before hand now find a second chance at life in football. Well, the powers that be aren't having it, and they'll stop at nothing from halting this evil game from extending its evil reach throughout their institutions and childrens' hearts and minds.
This is a world where football solves all problems. Children rowdy? Make 'em kick the ball around. Children aren't studying? Teach them to play football, that straightens them out. Wife sick? Get her a football trophy ASAP.
On the other hand, the entrenched powers all hate football with a passion. It's evil, it's dirty, it breaks a lot of windows; it's violent, it's barbaric, it spreads plague. You name it. They try to stop Watson Hutton from spreading it but he's willing to martyr himself for the cause of football.
Football is Argentina's most popular sport and they happen to be very good at it, so it's not difficult to see what this movie is. It reeks of historical negationism for the sake of jingoist sentiment. Everything is done to artificially create the impression that it was a battle to get football into Argentine society and patron saint Wattson Hutson martyred himself for the cause.
As this is that type of movie, it's very sloppy, with bits of possibly real events haphazardly tiled atop one another to form a hodgepodge of a plot. One minute Hutton is insulting the female assistant teacher who was sent to be his workmate, the next minute they're in love. One minute a poet comes to offer his services to save Hutton's school, the next minute a guardian of a dozen boys come in to enroll all of them in the program. They clearly wanted to cram in as much of the real events into the story as possible and did not do it very well.
The film won Best Film in Argentina's national film awards for that year. Is this really the best they could come up with - some silly revisionist melodrama? They should have called the award "most jingoist Argentine film." That would have been more appropriate.
Honourable Mentions: Captain Tsubasa/Supercampeones. If you're going to invent some Pokemon-like world where everything is seen through the lens of football and everyone either loves it and plays it or hates it, then you can at least do it in exaggerated anime style.
