Next Goal Wins (2014)
This documentary follows American Samoa’s heroic efforts to qualify for the 2014 World Cup, and treats this subject in ways somewhat distinctive from Taika Waititi’s feature film of the same name.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Content warnings: Transphobia; Child loss; Death.
Spoiler alert: This analysis of the documentary film Next Goal Wins and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for the One Take section of this newsletter about Next Goal Wins, the Taika Waititi-directed comedy based on the true story of the low-ranking American Samoan men’s football team, and its pursuit of a long-awaited victory:
That film is itself a loose adaptation of an earlier documentary film of the same name, made by Britons Mike Brett and Steve Jamison and released in 2014, which I will be analysing here. Its opening credits comprise footage of the goals from and newspaper headlines about American Samoa’s infamous, world-record international defeat, 31-0 to Australia in 2001. The documentary then switches to the then present-day, with American Samoa still the lowest ranked side in international football, and its current men’s team’s preparations for the football tournament at the 2011 Pacific Games in New Caledonia.
Next Goal Wins introduces the audience to several members of the American Samoan team as they combine training with work and studying. These include the veteran goalkeeper Nicky Salapu, who had played in that 31-0 defeat and has returned from Seattle to join the team again, and young defender Jaiyah Saelua, who is faʻafafine, a third gender present in American Samoan society. We also meet members of the team’s coaching staff, including Ace Lalogafuafua and US-born Larry Mana'o, as well as the head of Football Federation American Samoa (FFAS), Tavita Taumua.
The Pacific Games tournament goes terribly for the American Samoans, who lose all five of their games, conceding 26 goals and scoring none, returning home dishevelled. At this point, the football association seeks outside help, asking the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) to assist it in recruiting a foreign coach ahead of the start of qualifying for the first round of Oceania Football Confederation qualifications for the 2014 World Cup. Their call is answered by Dutch-born, US-based coach Thomas Rongen.
Rongen is demanding to the point of being confrontational, including clashing with Taumua at one point. Yet he succeeds in motivating the players to raise their levels, and in turn develops a strong appreciation of them, their dedication to the game, and American Samoan life and culture more generally. The team is also bolstered by Salapu and others once again returning from the US, as well as new call-ups of American-based players of American Samoan heritage.
The American Samoan team arrive in neighbouring Samoa for the qualifiers. It begins well with the elusive victory they had yearned for, going 2-0 up against Tonga and then holding out for the win despite a late Tongan goal. They also go a goal up against Cook Islands, but concede an own goal and the match finishes in a 1-1 draw. This sets up a dramatic group finale with Samoa, with the winner to go through to the next round of qualifying. With the scores tied at 0-0 late on, American Samoa hit the post; Samoa counterattack and score the winner. The film ends with fond farewells as Rongen returns to the US, along with the American-based players, but the general mood in the party is one of pride at the improvement the team has made, and optimism about its future.
The documentary structure
I only learned of the existence of the documentary Next Goal Wins after seeing the feature film adaptation. I watched the former, therefore, somewhat through the prism of the latter, gleaning from this viewing experience just what was exaggerated and embellished in Waititi’s version. This of course reflects a subconscious presumption on my part, which I had to consciously correct myself on, that what I was watching was somehow an objective rendering of the events as they occurred. A fairly unstylised production like this, with no overarching narration, invites the viewer to assume they are being presented with a window on reality.
Yet it is no such thing: it is a production by British documentary-makers, albeit with the buy-in of the FFAS and the American Samoan team, filmed during two extended visits to the country. It combines fly-on-the-wall filming of the players, as they train and prepare for matches and as they go about their lives outside of football, with match footage, interviews with different players, coaches, and officials, and on-screen captions. Nonetheless, there is a clear broader narrative sweep to this presentation of American Samoan football over a three-month period: a repetition of humiliating defeats, presented with a mixture of humour and pathos; the arrival of an unlikely outsider who helps them transform their fortunes; a surprise success; and an ultimately heroic defeat in which they are moral victors. This is the stuff of many a sports film.
With this comes individual trajectories, which the participants themselves have agency in presenting. Salapu, haunted by his having been in goal for the 31-0 defeat, to the point of continually replaying the match on his PlayStation, finally gains redemption through his part in the team’s change of fortunes. Rongen does not come across here as the broken man in need of rescuing that he is portrayed as in the feature film, but is motivated in part by his own personal tragedy, the loss of his teenage daughter in a car accident some years earlier. He is augmented, if not transformed, by his experiences in American Samoa.
Jaiyah Saelua, meanwhile, presents her own experience as a faʻafafine in American Samoa and men’s football positively. There is none of the jeopardy present in her arc in the feature film, in which she experiences transphobia, including initially from Rongen, and struggles with taking hormone blockers while trying to maintain her performance on the pitch. This difference highlights the greater visibility and negative salience of trans rights issues in the West over the decade since the documentary was made, which the 2023 version used Saelua’s story to comment on.
Depicting American Samoa
Another distinction between the documentary and the feature film, perhaps reflecting the fact that the latter was made by a Pasifika filmmaker, is that the former is less closely focused on American Samoan culture per se. There are frequent clips of the players engaging in traditional dances in training and ahead of matches, as well as a number of scenes of their attending church services. Interviewees frequently reference how much American Samoans value family and love their country. Yet the deeper meanings of those rituals and ideas, conveyed comically but affectionately through intimate dialogue between characters in the 2023 version, is less accessible here.
By contrast, the hardships of American Samoan life are far more explicitly dealt with in the documentary. Along with shots capturing the beauty of the island, particularly when Rongen and Lalogafuafua embark upon a mountain trek, there is also reflection on the 2009 tsunami that killed an estimated 149 American Samoans, and footage of the destruction it caused, including to the football team’s playing facilities. Moreover, the documentary also deals with the lack of economic opportunities in the territory, and the way young islanders are frequently compelled to move overseas in search of better paid work, including joining the US Army. There is a contrast too here with the feature film, which riffs far more light-heartedly on Taumua holding multiple jobs (without explaining why that might be), for example.
This connects to another integral component of American Samoan society as depicted in the documentary, which is the importance of its diaspora, primarily as located in the US. Again, in contrast to the relative insularity of island life shown in the feature film, the documentary stresses the extent to which American Samoans’ lives are often transpacific. This is where their patriotism and pride in playing for their countries most resonates, with players like Salapu and Ramin Ott utterly determined to travel back for international matches despite scant prospect of success. Rawlston Masaniai, a biracial American-born footballer who is recruited by Rongen and qualifies to play for American Samoa by descent, also stresses his strong Pacific islander identity and pride in playing for the land of his grandfather’s birth.
American Samoa’s place in the world
These touches of cultural specificity aside, the American Samoan team is therefore able to stand in for more universal narratives about football, and sport more broadly. It offers the possibility that the underdog, the weakest, can by dint of their strength of character and virtue, overcome apparently far stronger opponents. Related to this, Next Goal Wins also tells a story of devotion to playing the game for the love of it, rather than financial gain.
Yet conversely, this narrative is also the product of deep global inequalities within sport and more broadly, in which American Samoa and other Oceanian states – some of which have not even gained the figment of flag independence – remain rooted to the bottom of the FIFA rankings of international teams. Sport offers the fantasy of all outcomes being possible once the game begins, despite the odds being stacked by dint of the same inequalities of wealth and power that structure international relations more generally.
This is manifest in American Samoa’s need for outside intervention. There is a brief scene early on in the documentary where a local sports psychologist comes into the changing room to give a motivational talk, and its is clearly bunkum (the players’ bemused facial reactions to it shown for humorous effect) – a poor imitation of actual (American) expertise. The ineffectiveness of internal efforts to bring about an improvement in performances are what prompts FFAS to turn to its bigger brother, USAF, to supplement what it lacks domestically.
What it gets is Thomas Rongen, who as the documentary presents it, brings the additional organisational and motivational skills necessary to translate the desire of the players to do well into victory on the pitch. In many ways, it is through Rongen that we see the universally appealing qualities of American Samoan team, and of American Samoa more generally. Their religiosity, for example, comes through most strongly when Rongen, a self-identified atheist, is deeply moved during a church service. In this way, the documentary tacitly reiterates tropes of white saviourism, and to a degree of the Westerner re-finding themselves in a postcolonial society, which the feature film more clearly mocks and subverts.
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