Summary
Football Parents is a well-intentioned and often heartwarming celebration of difference, but it’s sometimes pitched to be a little too grating for its own good.
I am, for my sins, a football parent, so there’s a lot I find familiar about the Dutch Netflix comedy Football Parents. The general inability of a grassroots club to function, mothers and fathers supposedly knowing more about football than the coaches, referees, and FA, overbearing parents, the one kid on the team who isn’t quite as good as the others, and the politics surrounding it all, about what to say and how to say it – it’s all very reminiscent of my average Sunday morning. In theory, anyway.
The point of Football Parents is to blow these sideline staples into extremely exaggerated proportions, with the ultimate intention of making quite a heartwarming – and certainly well-intentioned – argument about the value of difference and team spirit. And it almost gets there. Correction: It does get there on several occasions. But the problem is that it frequently holds itself back by making the point too obviously and forcefully, having the unfortunate effect of making us sometimes root for the parents who’re supposed to be the unreasonable bad guys.
The story is told across six episodes, primarily from the perspective of two new players on a struggling Under-13s team. Levi is a star striker, the son of a former professional whose father seems mostly uninterested in him and whose mother, Lilian, isn’t sure she wants him to be there, especially given how dysfunctional every aspect of the team is. And then there’s Vito, an eccentric young lad with even more eccentric parents, Marenka and Wietse, who become the team leader and the linesman, respectively, mostly against everyone else’s wishes.
Because Vito isn’t very good at football, the other parents, particularly two awful mothers named Sandra and Arlette, want to get rid of him. And they’re not subtle about it, coming up with a range of reasons why he should be benched and overlooked, and loudly excoriating him in front of other parents, sometimes in open earshot of Marenka. But Marenka is too excited about everything to notice, and treats her team leader responsibilities incredibly seriously – though not seriously enough to do a good job of them, a problem worsened by the fact that nobody is willing to help.
It becomes obvious very quickly that Marenka and Vito are both neurodivergent; the lad struggles with separating fantasy and reality, while his mother is completely unable to pick up on basic social cues. She can’t take the hint about how annoying she’s being, and she’s sometimes so forthright that it’s actively harmful to people around her. But Levi quickly forms a bond with Vito, and Lilian gradually becomes more understanding of Marenka, which gives Football Parents its narrative arc as the team struggles to avoid relegation.
The problem here is that Marenka really is annoying. Her personality is absolutely relentless, and by the time she has inadvertently poisoned the entire team and cost them several key results in myriad other ways, you’re on the side of Sandra and Arlette more than her. This clearly isn’t the intention, and it’s a real shame that the show never quite finds the right balance between emphasising how Marenka is different and not aggravating the viewers.
Of course, Marenka isn’t the only one, but the focus on her is so overwhelming that other characters feel short-changed. Lilian’s relationship with Levi’s father is only touched upon lightly, as is her blossoming romantic connection with another parent, Edwin. Even Sandra and Arlette seem to have a bit of depth that isn’t properly explored, which would have been helpful in making them come across as real characters instead of cartoon villains. It’s the same with Boris, a hotshot lawyer whose son was the star player before Levi arrived and can’t quite accept his demotion.
In terms of the comedy, Marenka’s overblown slapstick is also the least effective. Football Parents is better with some of its barbed political commentary – Levi is Surinamese and another new player, Ela, is the Muslim daughter of Coach Yusuf’s no-nonsense sister, Leyla, whose headscarf doesn’t go unremarked upon – and smaller recurring gags. Those gags are actually real highlights, including one player who keeps telling his fussy, overprotective mother to f*ck off, Edwin constantly going on about an ACL injury, and Boris equating everything to World War II and fascism.
Eventually, School Parents gets where it’s going, and the finale is a pretty upbeat affair that nonetheless comes down on the condemnatory side of things, making the broader point that the parents, however well-intentioned, should just let their kids play football. It’s a nice climax – and sets up a second season – that provides payoff to the show’s themes. I just hope that enough viewers can put up with Marenka for long enough to get there.
