The politics of sport

I AM not a sports fan. I refuse to spend hours trading polite pleasantries or raucous insults trying to grasp unfathomable rules as teams run back and forth doing things to various balls.

Though I resent the sports incursion that unbalances broadcast media, I will sit captive through Raging Bull, Eight Men Out and Horse Feathers because I do know one rule - sports movies are never really about sport.

Rarely, though, like George Clooney's latest directorial offering Leatherheads, do they care how money has changed the nature of crowd-pleasing games.

Unwisely, he tries to slot together romantic comedy, social commentary and the history of the commodification of the professional game. It's more a brave choice than a happy combo.

And it may have been Clooney's uncompromising tendency to demystify false heroes that scared off financiers. Between the publicity tour jokes, he admitted that the film was never going to be a blockbuster.

But its theme, tracing the game's development from post-war displacement activity to toy for big business investment, clearly kept Clooney's interest during the decade that it took to get the film made.

In 2001, Britain's first football film Mean Machine used Vinnie Jones to make trenchant points about power in prison. And way back in 1932, WC Fields concentrated on comedy, focusing on the Olympics and the secretary of the treasury into Million Dollar Legs to satirise political power.

Most sports films build their structure on the inherent win-lose dichotomy and have done since the silents.

Both Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd used college football to poke silent fun at nerds on campus, while MGM cannily combined the growing passion for football, the insatiable desire for talkies and the public's love of canines in the 1929 short College Hounds.

Part of a bizarre series starring scores of real dogs dressed as people, it was shot to make it seem as though the pooches were speaking, an effect achieved by feeding them chewy sweets.

Clooney's more powerful sports story draws contemporary parallels. He knows that the international trade in teams, readily available online betting and the temptation to clean dirty money in the guise of investment have little to do with the spirit of the sportsmen that he admires.

In a neat end twist during the predictable final game, Clooney capitalises on the dubious morality of his sporting rival by using his tactics against him. It provides a satisfying narrative finale and proves that he's developing into a fine visual director.

But, in the end, he drops the ball, leaving those narrative imperatives of money and power unresolved.