10 Best Football TV Series To Stream While The Season Is On Hiatus
Being stuck at home is bad enough. But being stuck at home with no football?
With the continued global uncertainity leaving virtually all of us basically unable to leave our homes for the foreseeable future, people need their traditional sources of entertainment now more than ever.
Unfortunately, those same social distancing and isolation rules that are keeping us stuck at home are doing the same for the people who would normally provide our diversions. Yes, the suspension of the regular football season for another month at the very least is leaving a lot of football fans bereft just at the time when they need the beautiful game the most.
The lack of any ongoing live action doesn't have to leave you completely without football content on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, though. Not in the age of TV streaming.
That's because the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime have more hours of football programming than in Liverpool's unbeaten run and in enough different styles for even someone with a Claudio Ranieri-level of tinkering changeability to find something to settle on.
So, whether you're after the blood, sweat and tears of a real-life relegation battle or the kind of sheer escapism that puts the fantasy in fantasy football, here are ten of the best factual and fictional long form TV series to keep you occupied until real football returns.
10. The English Game
Available on: Netflix
Conveniently timed in being released just at the point in which real football has been taken from us, this dramatisation of the Victorian origins of the professional game compensates for the lack of football in the present by taking as way back into its past.
Coming from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, The English Game presents the conflict between former public school boys wanting to maintain an amateur game for gentlemen and Northern and Scottish working-class players recruited for pay.
The writing and characterisation is both broad in its stereotypes of nineteenth-century working and upper-class environments and a little too on the nose when making blunt points about Victorian values. It also takes some liberties with how early football was played and the real stories of the historical figures featured.
It does, however, provide the requisite scenes of people with fantastic moustaches in knitted jerseys chasing an enormously heavy thick leather ball.
So, if classic football is your thing, you can't really get more classic than the FA Cup in 1879.