‘Anelka: Misunderstood’: Release date, plot, cast, trailer and all you need to know about the Nicolas Anelka documentary
Sports documentaries always have a certain energetic feel to them. Maybe it's the energy of the game being channeled into the story. Maybe it’s seeing players outside the setting we always see them in, but sports documentaries get wilder when they are about controversial figures. And ‘Anelka: Misunderstood’ looks like it’s about to take this wildness to the next level.
Release date
‘Anelka: Misunderstood’ releases on August 5, 2020, only on Netflix.
Plot
As per Netflix’s official synopsis, ‘Anelka: Misunderstood’ follows Nicolas Anelka, supposedly the “bad boy of the French football”. The streaming giant uses a slew of epithets to describe him: arrogant, precocious, misunderstood, scorer, unclassifiable, genius, unmanageable.
“Despite having a career of almost 20 years at the highest level, Nicolas Anelka is still hard to define,” says the synopsis. “From sporting feats to controversies, he remains a mysterious persona for many observers. It's an image that Anelka himself has cultivated.”
For seven years, filmmaker Franck Nataf followed Anelka in his day-to-day life. His experiences in China, India, his life far away from France, his children's birthdays, his moments of relaxation with friends Paul Pogba, Thierry Henry or Patrice Evra. The director has now created a documentary that supposedly “lifts the veil” on a controversial sporting personality. The former number 9, in this documentary, is revealed in a different light, as a father, a footballer, sharing his experience of being at the top level. Because everything comes back to football.
In the film that covers 40 years of his life, for the first time ever, Anelka revisits the entirety of his career. He describes the life of a professional footballer at a time when football and business join together -- the pressure, the money, the glory, the betrayals, the sobering reality of the trade process, relationships with coaches, competitiveness, and even hatred between players. The path of Nicolas Anelka, Netflix says, paints an “unsettling picture of the reality of modern football”.
In the film, he revisits episodes that transformed his career. The great moments of a sportsman, coming from Trappes in the impoverished Parisian suburbs, who very quickly became a phenomenon, as he played for Arsenal, Les Bleus, and Chelsea. He also talks about the lowest moments in his life -- the 2010 World Cup, the insults he allegedly directed at his manager, and his “immature tough guy” image.
Subject
Nicolas Anelka
The 41-year-old French professional football manager and former player was born Nicolas Sébastien Anelka in Le Chesnay, Yvelines, in France to parents who had migrated from Martinique. He was raised in Trappes, near Paris. Anelka began his football career at Paris Saint-Germain as a youth player at age 16.
A year later in 1997, at the age of 17, Anelka joined the Premier League club Arsenal under then-newly-appointed manager Arsène Wenger. In 1999, Anelka moved to Real Madrid. But barely a year later, he returned to Paris-Saint Germain, where he would stay for two-and-a-half years.
In December 2001, he joined Liverpool on a short-term loan deal until the end of the season. Mid-2002, Anelka joined Manchester City. After brief stints at Fenerbahçe and Bolton Wanderers, Anelka joined Chelsea in 2008. Following his long stint there, Anelka then joined Shanghai Shenhua, Juventus, West Bromwich Albion, and finally Mumbai City FC where he was eventually named the team's player-manager in 2015.
Anelka is married to Barbara Tausia, and together, they have two sons: Kais and Kahil.
Trailer
The trailer for ‘Anelka: Misunderstood’ dropped on July 22, and it begins with the footballer scoring a goal. Full of floating head interviews, footage of old matches, videos of his press conferences, and records of his past controversies, the film promises a rich look into the life of the footballer.
One thing that Anelka says in the documentary particularly stands out: “If you really want to be like me and do what I have done… you’ll only make enemies.”
If you like ‘Anelka: Misunderstood’, you will also like
‘Icarus’, ‘Diego Maradona’, ‘Next Goal Wins’, ‘The Short Game’, and ‘I Am Ali’.