Next Goal Wins tells the true story of the American Samoan soccer team in a unique type of sports film. It’s not about a team that wants to win a big game or tournament. Instead, they have the more modest goal of not being the worst team in the entire world. In 2001, the team gave up 31 goals to Australia marking the most lopsided victory in the history of World Cup qualifying.
Michael Fassbender plays Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen who (in one of many instances of dramatic embellishment) has been fired from three previous jobs meaning that this is the end of the line for him. His life is in turmoil. He lost a daughter in a crash, and his wife (Elizabeth Moss) separated from him. When he wants to return to the States, she levels with him there really isn’t anywhere for him to go. Ouch!
Next Goal Wins follows the beats of a typical sports movie, but only to a certain extent. It’s a travelogue that has pedagogical appeal in teaching us about the blip in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that flies an American flag but feels like a world all its own. More importantly, it portrays the culture with an overwhelming sense of joy. In fact, American Samoans’ priority for fun in sports is a refreshing contradiction to our cultural drive for victory (past Little League, at least).
The film is marked by three central relationships. Despite the fact that Rongen was happily married through it all, Waititi felt it gave him more of an arc to be separated or divorced but aiming to find amiability with his ex; The Soloist, Moneyball, and Begin Again are other films that have gone down this road. Secondly, Oscar Knightley plays the federation chief of Samoan soccer who serves as a foil (of the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” variety) and comic relief. Lastly, there’s a transgender player named Jaiyah who is currently within the legal bounds of eligibility for a man’s team but will soon transition to a woman.
With increased sensitivity to portrayals of identity, filmmakers risk coming under fire today for putting together a White character and a marginalized person if they lean more on one or the other, whether it’s the White Savior trope or the equivalent of a Magical Negro character.
This film has faced a small amount of backlash (here and here) over the fumbling of its trans character. It’s certainly something that needs to be examined: In the case of Polygon’s criticism, they claim Rongen doesn’t apologize to Jaiyah for dead naming her. The article also faults the film for having a homophobic character in the first place, without accounting for the context that most people in 2011 would be far more uneducated on transgenderism than the present day.
Esther Zuckerman at Indiewire writes that the film “highlights (and tries to get some laughs out of) her otherness and seems unequipped to handle discussions of hormones and other facets of transness.” I’d challenge Zuckerman to find an instance where any jokes are in the script about her otherness. There are jokes about culture clash, but nearly everything in the script from the musical tone to the gravity of Jaiyah being misgendered is treated with solemnity.
We can quibble about these vague definitions, but the larger point might be that Taiki Waititi has a long history of highlighting LGBTQ visibility in his work. In an interview with Out Magazine:
Taika Waititi loves telling queer love stories.
The director, star, and co-writer of Marvel Studios’ new film Thor: Love and Thunder has been known lately for his romantic LGBTQ+ storytelling, both in the HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death, and in the latest Thor, where he plays gay characters who get to fall in love.
Why does he love getting to tell these kinds of stories? Because he says he can relate to them on a personal level.
“We’re all queer,” Waititi tells Out when asked why he likes telling LGBTQ+ love stories so much. “Just to varying degrees of where we are on the [sexuality] spectrum, I think. I think, innately, humans have all got some degree of queerness in them.”
Because of that, he was excited to bring that queerness to his new movie. “With Thor, it’s great to be able to finally get Tessa’s character, and my character as well, where we’re both queer,” he says.
While Valkyrie getting her love interest was the dream that didn’t happen in Love and Thunder, we should remember that this movie is a Disney movie, and Disney is exceedingly slow when it comes to queer representation.
In much of his work. He mentioned that for a GLAD survey, that all of his characters in What We Do in the Shadows are queer in some ways. He added a queer element to the story Our Flag Means Death midway through and confirmed in an interview that Jojo Rabbit has a queer storyline. Some might consider each of these moves unnecessary. In the case of the former, the nature of the vampires on WWDITS is pretty clearly depraved and ravenous and might better be viewed without traditional sexual boundaries rather than as political talking points.
Perhaps, the recent WWDITS fifth season episode “Pride Parade” highlights the absurdity of the box that Waititi’s work is put in by others. In the episode in question, neighbor Sean is running for city comptroller and decides to put on a pride parade featuring his vampire neighbors, because they’re all gay. Despite the fact that Nandoor and Lazslo’s relationship has included casual hand jobs and Lazlo has a crush on Sean himself, being labeled as “gay” comes off as odd to the vampires.
This might be seen as very similar to Waititi himself, who publicly came out in 2022.
In his press statement, he said, “I’ve never really put a label on myself. I’ve never really felt the need to. I think if you’re attracted to someone, it doesn’t matter what gender they are.”
It’s fitting that in the episode, Nandor and Lazslo are not particularly cognizant of Sean’s definition of queer, but agree to it anyway.
In Next Goal Wins, Taiki Waititi made a conscious choice to elevate the character. The real-life Jaiyah was a high schooler who rode the bench and got 10 minutes of playing time in the entire tournament. Her on-screen counterpart was the team captain, Rongen’s best friend, and made two of the key plays to secure a win.
Furthermore, the film has a clear thesis. The legitimacy of the two-spirit principle — the idea that transgenderism has a Native American historical basis and is not a recent invention — has become a contested theory even among Native Americans. Waititi takes careful care to explain that gender fluidity is part of Samoan culture and even has a name (“fa’afafine”).
Next Goal Wins is an inherently political film. Many might call the embellishments of the historical record within the bounds of typical dramatic license for this film. What should be acknowledged is that Waititi chose this culture because he wanted to tackle the two-spirit theory and that the media praised and elevated this movie because of a transgender character.
Acknowledging this bias certainly doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong or right about the two-spirit movement, transgenderism, or the fa’afafine.
In fact, I found it to be narratively effective and a beautiful story. Since forever, sports films like Bad News Bears, Mighty Ducks, A League of Their Own, and Hoosiers have relied on cranky coaches who’d rather be anywhere else learning to meet their teams halfway and accept a different team culture. In a narrative sense, Jaiya is as far away from Rongen’s experience so it’s an ideal relationship that thematically ties in deeper to the traditional coach’s journey.
Critics on the right would do well to acknowledge the bias behind the film’s purpose and enjoy it. Critics on the left who use their platforms as gatekeepers of cinema to enforce standards of marginalized representation (often, by their narrow definitions) would do well to not put someone who aligns with their goals, like Waititi, into an increasingly conscripted tight-wire act with so few options as to what a positive LGBT film can be.
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