The whole world is watching the World Cup. They’re reveling in triumphs like Argentina’s win over England, the heroics of star players like Argentine team captain Lionel Messi and France’s top goal-scorer Kylian Mbappe, and fun assertions of national identity like Scots putting traffic cones on the heads of every statue in Boston. If you’re a cinephile, though, looking to continue the mood of the World Cup through some choice cinema, you definitely need to take a trip back in time to 2002 with Saipan.
An airtight 90-minute sports docudrama directed by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, Saipan dramatizes the immortal row between Republic of Ireland national football team captain Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) and manager Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan). But it’s also so much more than that, luring you in with the promise of a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most famous rivalries in sports but blindsiding you with an unexpectedly emotional assertion of Irish identity, turning Roy Keane into a living, breathing monument of Irish pride and resilience in the face of England, FIFA — hell, the whole world.
The Saipan Incident
If you’re a bit lost on the minutiae of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, don’t worry — I didn’t know the details of the titular Saipan incident before watching the film, either. (In fact, I don’t watch football at all, and my only cultural awareness of Roy Keane was the vague sense that he inspired “He’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where” Roy Kent in Ted Lasso.)
Basically, in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, the Republic of Ireland national team was flown out to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands to train before its first big match in Japan. But where team captain Keane was expecting a rigorous training regimen to prepare the team for the greatest professional challenge of their lives, he was greeted with a shitshow.
They were given cheese sandwiches for breakfast rather than robust, protein- and carb-rich meals. The hotel was about as good as your average Travelodge. The practice pitch was full of gravel and loose stones. For a while, they didn’t even have footballs to practice with. And his teammates were more content to party and drink to excess than train. Keane was vocal about his disappointment throughout the team’s time in Saipan, resulting in several public (and probably several more private) spats with the team’s manager. After a 10-minute tirade against McCarthy one night, Keane left Saipan.
In the wake of Keane’s departure, his team did fine. For a while. The Republic of Ireland drew in Round of 16 matches against Cameroon and Germany, then lost decisively to Saudi Arabia and Spain, finally getting knocked out of the tournament. Brazil went on to win the whole thing in the final match in Yokohama, Japan, cementing its legacy as the most successful national team in the history of the World Cup while Ireland returned to lick its wounds. The country’s football team never recovered.
A Football Rivalry That Means So Much More
In the hands of screenwriter Paul Fraser and directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, this white-hot rivalry becomes a personification of the tensions between Ireland and England. Fraser is a savvy screenwriter, known for his collaborations with Shane Meadows centering on working-class England, and he pumps Saipan full of class anxieties and decades-long colonial conflicts — Mick McCarthy was born and raised in England yet leads the Irish team, which gets him no abundance of love from his fellow Irishmen or his star player, Roy Keane. Every indignity McCarthy subjects his team to becomes just the latest intolerable cruelty from a colonial power that has been plundering Ireland for the past thousand years. This conflict becomes all the more poetic for taking place on Saipan, an island that had been passed around to all the major global powers — Spain, the United States, Germany, Japan, and finally the U.S. again — since the 17th century.
Saipan is a movie about sport, but it’s also about all the mechanisms that lie beneath the surface and keep the wheel turning. Its greatest gift is to let the viewer into the psychology of McCarthy and Keane. Mick isn’t just a foolish manager with an inflated ego — he’s a man in his twilight years, his professional football career far away in the rearview mirror, who has just been handed the desperate dreams of an ailing nation only five years into his new role as manager.
Roy is more than a headstrong player who wants the best for him and his team — he’s perhaps the only person on the team who seems to be willing to shoulder the massive weight of his country’s expectations. He grew up working class, his parents in the very kind of jobs that Thatcher destroyed in the 1980s. He’s the embodiment of every Irishman breaking their backs at work wondering if everything since the 1980s has been a long nightmare where once there was a hopeful, promising dream. Keane carries that dream with him — editors Gavin Buckley and John Murphy show in many breathless sports montages that Keane’s carried it his whole life. He’s killing himself on the field to prove to himself and his country that they, their work, and their hopes all mean something.
Conclusion
Saipan promises an inside look at one of the most famous controversies in modern football. But at a time when discussions of the World Cup are joined by allegations that FIFA is using the games to engorge themselves, that the United States is using the tournament to obscure its fascist government, and that abroad, FIFA is ignoring human rights emergencies in countries like Qatar, films like Saipan also help to recontextualize football as more than just FIFA, more than just a World Cup title, and more than just a soccer match. Saipan shows a country at a crossroads. A champion in the midst of the greatest fight of his life. And the curtain slowly falling on the dreams of a whole country — the Republic of Ireland has not qualified for a World Cup since 2002.
That Saipan can pack so much thematic weight and historical and cultural context speaks volumes about its power as a story. I do not watch football. I do not care about it. And I certainly didn’t know about the very specific beef between these two people in 2002. And yet the editing, the storytelling, the performances, and the direction all create such a compelling and flawless blend of verisimilitudinous drama that I came away understanding that this was more than just a sports film. This is an ode to one man’s entire life, the honor of an entire country, and an era for an entire sport beloved by hundreds of millions around the world.
If you love football and you’re looking for some cinematic indulgence before or after the final World Cup match this Sunday, you owe it to yourself to check out Saipan.
Saipan is currently showing on Mubi in the United States and is available to rent on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video.
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