With football (soccer if you’re wrong) being the world’s game, innumerable people grow up with fantasies of playing for their favorite team or their national side, and many of them achieve great success, so it’s no surprise that there is the air of a true story around Netflix’s 2024 sporting drama The Champion.
Even on a human level, the film’s subject matter is relatable. It concerns parental relationships, and teacher-student dynamics, and unpacks multiple forms of learning and intelligence, all of which apply to someone. Misunderstandings around conditions like dyslexia, which the protagonist suffers from, are very common and often go unidentified in a rigid school curriculum that rarely accounts for differences in how people best learn, communicate, and excel.
So, while The Champion is not based on a true story, it resembles one in a few important ways. However, it also fails to represent reality in several others.
Diego Is Not A Real Player
The protagonist of Diego is not a real football star and doesn’t seem to be based on anyone in particular. Football isn’t short of young prodigies, so he could technically be inspired by many hundreds of great players throughout history, but his specific circumstances are fictional.
Diego is known for having an extreme temper — he’s suspended for headbutting another player — and also suffers from extreme dyslexia, though he’s a near-genius in other areas like tactics and pattern recognition. He’s aided in realizing this by a researcher-cum-therapist, mimicking the dynamic of something like Good Will Hunting.
While it’s worth noting that the club Diego plays for in the movie is real — Atlético de Madrid is a successful side in the Spanish La Liga, though overshadowed by the twin titans of Barcelona and Real Madrid — he is not intended to be an analog of any of that team’s players.
Alex Is Not Based On A Real Person Either
Diego’s therapist, Alex, is also fictional. It could be argued that he’s a composite of many sports psychologists who have become an increasingly core part of sports including football over the years, but, again, he’s not intended to resemble anyone in particular.
Alex largely exists as a counter to many prevailing attitudes in football, especially overbearing parents and coaches, and the often misunderstood spectrum of intelligence.
The Champion Gets A Lot Wrong
Ironically, The Champion gets many of its footballing aspects wrong and also indulges in some flights of fancy towards the end that slightly undermine the core drama.
For instance, a key plot point is Diego’s father Tito trying to force a transfer to Man City that is handled in a strange way, with the trade seemingly dependent on another character answering a phone call and making sure Diego doesn’t play a totally unrelated game with an injury.
Speaking of that injury, Diego does indeed play with it, and that’s weird too. It’s by no means out of the ordinary for players to dull injury pain with cortisone injections and risk exacerbating the injury by playing through it, but he’s so blatantly compromised on the field that he’d have been subbed off in a heartbeat were this true — supposing he’d been brought on at all, which is unlikely.
The Champion also has quite a fanciful view of football wherein a single player like Diego can massively influence an entire game in a very unlikely way. This might be true of smaller clubs, but certainly not of Atlético de Madrid.
