The film is set in Palmi, Calabria, the hometown of the Manetti Bros.' mother and where the duo spent their childhood summers.[1] The idea for the film came from a childhood memory of the Manetti Bros.: at an amateur football match, a man joked that if everyone in town pooled their money, they could raise enough funds to buy Diego Maradona for the local team. Marco Manetti stated, "This was a formative memory for us, this crazy old man wanting to collect enough money to buy the best player in the world."[2]
Further, the directors wanted to tell a story set in Southern Italy "away from the Gomorrahs".[3] They stated, "The South is always told with a negative rhetoric: crime, negative constraint and even folklore. But we want to tell something else, because sometimes the South self-destructs with a self-destructive story."[4]
Filming
As the Manetti Bros. wanted their actors to speak the Palmese dialect, the cast studied the dialect in Palmi in the weeks before filming.[5] Principal photography began on 22 May 2023. Filming took place over eight weeks in Palmi, as well as Paris and Milan.[6] Filming was completed on 11 July 2023.[7]
Valeria Maiolino of Mymovies.it gave the film three out of five stars, writing, "It is not a film of the head, but above all of the heart. For this reason it is contagious with its cheerfulness and positivity."[12]
Valerio Sammarco of Cinematografo gave the film three out of five stars, writing that "the spirit that has always animated [the Manetti Bros.'] various works does not fail, the ambition to make oneself loved by chasing apparently impossible stories, like this one of Etienne (a curious mix between Balotelli and Leão...) and of Palmi.[13]
Damiano Panattoni of Movieplayer.it gave the film three out of five stars and called it "[a] lighthearted work, at times distracted, which, if it doesn't work on the humorous level, instead gains on the football factor, explaining the reasons why sports cinema always works very well."[14]
Valeria Maiolino of Cinefilos gave the film three out of five stars, writing, "The Manetti Bros., with genuine writing, demonstrate that they know how to touch the right narrative chords to excite and make even those who understand little or nothing about football feel actively involved."[15]
Federico Gironi of ComingSoon.it gave the film two-and-a-half out of five stars, calling it "a feel-good movie that is a bit confused and not very original", drawing parallels with Taika Waititi's Next Goal Wins.[16]
