The Homeless World Cup is an annual global tournament that transforms lives for the better. Now its extraordinary story is being told in Netflix’s The Beautiful Game. Its star Bill Nighy is onside
By Adrian Lobb
It is early October 2021 and The Big Issue is in Haggerston, East London, where the final scene of The Beautiful Game is being filmed. The new Netflix film follows the England team, featuring rising stars Micheal Ward (Small Axe: Lovers Rock) and It’s a Sin’s Callum Scott Howells – and their manager, Mal, played by Bill Nighy – to the Homeless World Cup in Italy.
On our way to the football pitches of today’s location, we walk past St Chad’s church, where a large group of men and women are waiting for food at the community kitchen. The stories in the film may be fictional, but they are rooted in the very real housing and homelessness crisis that’s visible all around us. The Homeless World Cup is also real: dreamt up in a conversation between Big Issue in Scotland co-founder Mel Young and Harald Schmid, who ran a street paper in Graz, Austria.
Since the inaugural tournament in July 2003, it has offered life-changing inspiration and opportunity to people from 70 countries. And it’s needed now more than ever.
Out on the astroturf, Nighy is in the centre circle. He’s surrounded by young players. Director Thea Sharrock marches over, issuing a final word of advice, before Nighy rolls a neat, side-foot pass to get the ball and the scene rolling. Nighy is not a tracksuit manager. Instead, he wears one of his own vast collection of Fred Perry shirts.
“They’re retro ones, with the exploded logo,” he says. “I also wore my own Fred Perrys in a film called Sometimes, Always, Never, where I played an ancient mod. Honestly, it’s a full-blown fetish. Something about that logo goes straight to my heart.”
But it wasn’t the chance to wear his favourite fashions that made Nighy sign up to The Beautiful Game.
“It’s about something really fabulous and important,” he says, when we meet again in early March 2024, ahead of the film’s release.
“Homelessness is a huge problem worldwide. And it’s one of those things where people don’t know what to do, because there’s such a variety of things that might render somebody homeless.
“The Homeless World Cup is such a smart mechanism. An incredible enterprise that works on so many levels, in so many ways. It gives people a sense of community. They ge
