CRITICS have derided Goal! as implausible. Certainly the idea that a Latino hunk can graduate from being a gardener in Los Angeles to a hero at Newcastle United in a matter of weeks is pretty unlikely. But the plotline involving a big-name star who turns out to be a nightlife-loving troublemaker and scores more often off the pitch than on it? That’s satire, with a moral lesson at the end.

The first of a trilogy made with the support of Fifa and adidas, it is an odd mix of the naturalistic and the contrived — Mike Leigh meets Mike Bassett: England Manager. It could have been set on Merseyside, but “Newcastle wanted it more than anyone else”, Mike Jefferies, the producer, said.

“I talked to Liverpool a year before I talked to anyone else and they just weren’t up for it,” Jefferies said. Despite rumours, Jefferies said that adidas and Fifa had paid “not a penny” towards the film.

Alessandro Nivola plays Gavin Harris, the hedonistic striker. “I sort of had Ian Wright in mind,” Nivola said. “I was looking for someone who had a wildly uncensored delivery and said daft and wonderfully vain things but was somehow likeable.

“They sent me on the Real Madrid Far East tour and filmed me stepping off aeroplanes sandwiched between Beckham and Ronaldo into a sea of 5,000 screaming, weeping, fainting women pawing at our clothes. Beckham was a real gent.”

Match scenes are impressively authentic. Actual Newcastle games were filmed, then moves recreated afterwards and images spliced together. “They had me crouch behind one of the advertising boards by the pitch until the final whistle at which point I came bouncing up on to the pitch and threw my arms round unsuspecting players as if I’d just won them the match,” Nivola said. “While we were there they won eight straight matches; a week after we left, Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer were beating the hell out of each other. Maybe they should have us back.”

Andy Ansah, a journeyman footballer who is now a football consultant, choreographed the play. “I try to make the actors live a footballer’s life,” he said. “I take them out with footballers I know, let them watch how a footballer carries himself, how he is treated by other people, how when people greet him they semi-bow to him.”

It is all expertly done, with fine performances and amusing one-liners. The budget may be bigger than any previous football film, but like the rest of them, the plot is as black and white as Newcastle’s shirts.

Jefferies is open about his tactics. “The main market in the cross-hairs is the US,” he said. “Fourteen million Latinos in the US, that’s a huge market for us to target. That coupled with the kids. To be able to reach into the marketplace and connect on a cross-gender, cross-demographic and cross-territorial basis.” So it is no surprise that every frame seems to be so efficiently calculated — for marketing reasons as well as artistic ones.

It is also appropriate that the film climaxes with Newcastle winning a place in the Champions League. Years ago, it would have ended with the hero lifting the FA Cup. Sporting triumph in the service of profit: it would be naive to imagine that a film built so precisely on the Hollywood model would seek anything else.

Goal! sells sugary and impossible dreams of fulfilment, belonging and glory. But that is precisely what football does. That is part of its beauty. Somehow it seems less manipulative when you are sat in a stadium, not a cinema.

• Goal! is out today, cert. 12A

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