20 great movies from the past 20 years: Infinite Football

I’m counting down to the 2025 best-of-the-year season by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:

2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing
2007: Sunshine
2008: Speed Racer
2009: Vengeance
2010: Unstoppable
2011: The Three Musketeers
2012: Eega
2013: Rope A Dope
2014: Hill of Freedom
2015: SPL 2: A Time for Consequences
2016: Love & Friendship
2017: Mersal

I hope today’s movie gets picked by a future Sports Movies That Don’t Suck guest – it’s the offbeat 70-minute documentary Infinite Football, about one man’s quest to reinvent the world’s most popular sport.

The movie follows Laurentiu Ginghina, a Romanian bureaucrat who suffered a debilitating injury while playing soccer as a teenager. In a series of interviews with director Corneliu Porumboiu, Ginghina gradually unveils his plan for the future of the sport: Football 2.0 (but he sees a necessity for future Football 2.1, 2.9, 4.0, etc.). His goal is to spread the game out, to keep the ball moving quickly and to prevent the pile-ups of bodies that resulted in his injury.

Ginghina’s main idea is to divide the field and each team in half, assigning five players to offense and five to defense on each team (plus a goalie), and barring them from passing the centerline. He proposes that reducing player movement will increase movement of the main star of the show: the ball itself. But he has many, many additional ideas for the game and for life, and his highly entertaining and passionate verve helps Infinite Football’s brief running time fly by.

Game design in sport is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – partly because of the podcast, and partly because I watch a lot of sports and play a lot of games. The balance of fairness, entertainment, and safety are constant conversations in both American football and motorsports, and seeing someone whose life was changed by a sports injury attempt to reckon with that by changing the nature of the sport itself is fascinating.

Porumboiu is endlessly patient as Ginghina’s interviewer, probing his subject’s ideas and taking them seriously, as farfetched as some of them sound. The pair even stage demonstrations with local players to test out these ideas in the field, giving the whole thing the air of a science experiment.

As Richard Brody put it in The New Yorker:

“[Ginghina’s] plans for the game seem at first like the quixotic visions of an impish local crank, one whose intense, if jovial, sincerity is matched by the mighty impracticality of his obsessive quest. But Porumboiu (who reveals, late in the film, his lifelong acquaintance with Ginghina) doesn’t present his subject as a crank, and certainly not as a fool (although he openly expresses his skepticism regarding his friend’s plans for soccer).”

You can watch Infinite Football for free with a library card on Hoopla, or rent or buy it digitally on Apple.