Best African Football Documentaries

Football as history

More than Just a Game (2007), directed by Junaid Ahmed, is the essential South African title. The semi-documentary shows how political prisoners on Robben Island fought for the right to play and organised their own league, the Makana Football Association, in the 1960s. Like all the best football films, it is about much more than the sport.

More Than A Goal is a feature documentary built around Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, who saw football as a weapon of liberation and a rallying cry for unity. It places the national team inside the story of independence rather than beside it.

Tragedy to Triumph: The Story of Zambian Football covers the 1993 plane crash that killed most of Zambia's national team and the long road to the country's first Africa Cup of Nations title in 2012, won in Gabon, close to where the crash happened.

Players, fans and small stories

Faces of Africa: King George Serves His Country follows George Weah from poverty in Monrovia to world football stardom and, later, the presidency of Liberia.

Black Stars: Ghanaian Football Fever (2012) is a short documentary about three Germans who travelled to Ghana during the 2010 World Cup to record the place football holds in everyday life. It pairs well with The Black Stars, a six-part documentary podcast on the history, struggles and occasional glories of Ghana's national team.

Several shorter films were screened on the 2010 Soccer Cinema tour of South African towns, including Drogba Fever by Naashon Zalk, about Didier Drogba and Ivory Coast, and Zuma the Puma by Jon Bang Carlsen, about South African forward Sibusiso Zuma's move to FC Copenhagen. They are harder to find today but worth tracking down through festival archives.

Two outsiders that still fit

Maradona by Kusturica (2008), by Emir Kusturica, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It is an intimate portrait of Diego Maradona that covers his political activism, his drug addiction and the "Hand of God" goal against England at the 1986 World Cup. It is not African, but it is the classic of the genre and was part of the 2010 Soccer Cinema programme.

The Other Final (2003), directed by Johan Kramer, records the match between Bhutan and Montserrat, then the two lowest-ranked teams in the FIFA ranking, played in Thimphu on the same day as the 2002 World Cup final. It is a reminder that the game's best stories often happen far from the biggest stages.

The practical takeaway: start with More than Just a Game for South African history, add Tragedy to Triumph and More Than A Goal for the continent, and keep The Other Final for the evening when football needs cheering up.