“No one here is too smart for this team. No one here is a princess, no one is a prima-donna. You work, grafts, fight for the badge that’s on your chest because it’s bigger than the so-called one,” West Ham United Captain Gilly Flaherty shouts in the initial scenes of the most recent documentary series about the fortune of a women’s soccer team.
Produced through Curious Films and narrated through actress Jamie Winstone, Squad Goals follows the West Ham United women’s team for the truncated 2019/20 season and will premiere on BBC Three via iPlayer on Saturday. The good fortune of Britain’s youngest football boss last season, who focused on the club’s teenage executive leader, Jack Sullivan, who attracted nearly 2 million audiences on the country’s flagship television channel, led executive manufacturer Dov Freedman to film a series of moments from a different perspective. He explained: “The resolution would possibly have been taken to focus a little more on the players at the time of the season. The kind of feedback we made from the audience was that they were all really connected to the players and were looking to know more about their lives. If we can also make the audience worry about the players and everyone in West Ham as characters, they would actually worry about what’s happening on the field. “
In the opening episode, fresh from the FA Cup final last season, coach Matt Beard told the team before his first open-air crusade game, protective champions Arsenal, “we’ll win the league,” finished eighth. “How do you measure success?” the show would point to the 24790 enthusiasts who paid to watch the team play Tottenham Hotspur at London Stadium last October as evidence that the exposure generated through the first series allowed their players to win hearts. “For us, it was a huge achievement for a semi-professional team just two years ago. It showed you how much enthusiasts were looking to help the West Ham women’s team. “
Other clubs around the world have begun generating similar documentaries about their teams. The creators of the next series about Real Madrid’s new women’s team, Un Sueo Real, told me they had seen the youngest coach in British football and Sullivan was not surprised. “I know some clubs have seen it. For us, the only explanation for why we made the documentary was to check to engage so many new people in women’s football and help as much as imaginable to teach other people about demanding situations. “women’s football. “
Squad Goals aligns the player’s career paths and private life with intimate details. Jacynta Galabadaarachchi’s new firm takes us to the space in east London that she shares with her mother and talks about her aspirations to win the Ballon d’Or. Meanwhile, she experienced two- English league champion Kate Longhurst is exasperated by having to share a space with her young teammates before explaining how the monetary truth of being a professional player can’t afford the rent of her own place.
Earlier this year, Flaherty, who won English league titles while playing for Arsenal and Chelsea, revealed how he attempted suicide at the age of 17, which is looming during this series. For me, talking about it and sharing it, not only with the team, but also with thousands more people and then talking about it, as well as about the goals of the team, for me, I found it really appropriate I felt that there was a genuine understanding of my point of view and a lot of empathy. It’s not the simplest thing of percentage, but I think it worked well, with them doing the filming, now I’m going to be able to have an effect on a lot more people than me just by just sharing it through social media. “
“I’ve been playing senior football since I was 14. There are times when we miss weddings, we miss the parties of the family circle, we can’t spend holidays with the rest of our family circle because when everyone takes their time, it tends. being in summer when we do the pre-season, so it’s hard, my partner and I, our total week-to-week life is focused on my work.
“It’s an emotional challenge for us. We don’t stand out. If you’ve had a bad game or a bad workout or if things are happening to you, you take it home. You don’t have a break, because that’s your life and there’s a lot of tension for us. We are full-time professional footballers and in the end our task is at stake if we do not get results.
Grace Fisk signed with the club midway through the series in December and won her first senior foreign call-up in February, but only a month later, the coronavirus pandemic led to the suspension and eventual end of the women’s season. the hardest thing for everyone was not knowing, I think that’s when as players and as a team, we were actually given together, it was just about being in touch with chacun. there’s one for each other at a really tricky time. “
Freedman believes that the mapping of this unprecedented era adds to the uniqueness of history. “There was an age of 8 or nine weeks in which we literally didn’t shoot at all. It was the last time the team met before the start of the preseason just a few weeks ago. We tried to control it in the most productive way we could. The most recent episode of COVID-19 is a genuine vision of how a football club handles a pandemic. It’s a desirable watch. “
All six episodes of Squad Goals can be watched on BBC iPlayer starting Saturday.
After traveling the world watching football for 20 years, attending matches in more than 80 cities in approximately 40 countries, I have covered the Men’s and Women’s World Cups and
After traveling the world watching football for 20 years, attending matches in more than 80 cities in approximately 40 countries, I covered men’s and women’s World Cups and European Championships as a journalist. I also write for The Morning Star and the anti-discrimination charity Kick It Out I graduated from the University of Manchester with a law degree.