Over the course of any football season, there will be ups and downs for every supporter of every team. No team wins every week, so the highs and lows must be negotiated with equal heart and resilience.
That is, possibly, unless you’re a Leeds United fan.
The latest in our Sports on Screen series focuses on the previous two seasons in the history of Leeds United Football Club, the 2018/19 season and last year’s COVID-interrupted 2019/20 campaign.
Broadcast on Amazon Prime across two seasons, the series is an incredible look at what it’s really like to be inside the dressing room, boardroom, manager’s office and fan’s homes – all narrated by Academy Award winner and celebrity Whites fan, Gladiator himself, Russell Crowe.
There are so many highlights that to list them all would be to provide an episode guide. The two series dovetail perfectly as the fall and rise of the club, but the point to take is that whoever you support, it could be your club. From the highest height of domestic dominance in English football to the perils of League One, Leeds have been to the bottom and the top of the game and suffered the slings and arrows of that fortune and misfortune along the way like few clubs could claim.
The vox pops with the Leeds United fans are terrific and one of the best things ever in a sports documentary. Every fan seems to have been plucked from a different world, yet all have the key factor in common that every Leeds United result affects them deeply. There’s the passionate Dad who overbears his children to be as ardent a supporter as him, the see-every-positive Mum who can’t bear to see the team lose and the nervous bystander, who fears the worst until the 90th minute and beyond.
All the despair of the first season is paid back with the crowning glory of the follow-up as Leeds, who blow an automatic place in the final few weeks of Season 1, reign supreme in Season 2.
Under Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds are an exciting Premier League side now, but in the first season of Take Us Home they are the flawed fallen giants. While COVID-19 comes into play in Season 2, the purity of glorious failure in the first season is the very heart of not only the programme but supporting a football team in microcosm. It’s so much fun to watch and re-watch and of all the sports documentaries out there, it’s right up there with the best.
You can watch all of Leeds United: Take Us Home on Amazon Prime right here.
