Next Goal Wins 2025 Movie Review Trailer

 In 2001, the American Samoa soccer team achieved horrific immortality by suffering a world-historical 31-0 defeat to Australia. Ten years of misery followed with no discernible improvement, and then the team hired a foreign coach with his own problems: the troubled and temperamental Dutch-American Thomas Rongen, whose unofficial charge was to save American Samoa’s honor with a single goal.

Bland photography and shallow writing are the least of my problems with “Next Goal Wins,” a movie-like blemish on the kind of entertainment known as sports underdog comedy.

Director: Taika Waititi
Writers: Taika Waititi, Iain Morris
Stars: Michael Fassbender, Oscar Kightley, Kaimana

Inspired by Mike Brett and Steve Jamison’s 2014 documentary of the same name, New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi has concocted something so lazy, offensive and comically sterile that the only deserved response is bemusement. Whatever Waititi’s past sins (I’m thinking of you, the embarrassing “Jojo Rabbit” (2019)), his work has generally been polished and, yes, funny; this degree of sloppiness is something new.

A terribly miscast Michael Fassbender stars as Thomas Rongen, a bellicose Dutch-born soccer coach whose off-field tantrums have earned him professional banishment to American Samoa. Ten years earlier, the island’s soccer team had suffered a 31-0 defeat in its 2001 World Cup qualifier against Australia, and has failed to score a single goal since.

Mike Brett and Steve Jamison’s 2014 documentary about all this, Next Goal Wins, is a much-loved and moving film. Maybe it needed a fictional comedy remake, and maybe it didn’t. But director Taika Waititi and co-writer Iain Morris have already made one anyway, and the result, while necessarily sacrificing the documentary’s stranger-than-fiction value, is broad, affectionate, and often funny in a goofy way. But the underdog sports comedy genre can’t really absorb the devastating revelation of tragedy contained in this real-life story (not to have included or acknowledged it, however, would have been a misstep).

David Fane plays the outgoing, unhelpful coach Ace; the team’s talented trans player, Jaiyah, is played by nonbinary actor Kaimana; but the film’s most surprising casting choice is Michael Fassbender as Rongen, an actor known for brutally noncomedic roles and currently playing the killer in David Fincher’s The Killer. Fassbender is no Ricky Gervais and he’s no, say, Chris O’Dowd. But as the intensely committed professional actor that he is, Fassbender works hard to craft a comedic performance and more or less makes it work.

In some ways, the strangest turns are from Elisabeth Moss and Will Arnett as Rongen's ex-wife and new partner, who are both very insecure in tone, but that grim backstory was always going to cause them difficulties. The whole movie is a little rough around the edges in the way it's constructed, but it's kind and well-intentioned and the laughs are real.

Watch Next Goal Wins 2025 Movie Trailer