Now Streaming: Captains of the World

Captains of the World, a behind-the-scenes Netflix docu-series about the 2022 FIFA World Cup, lets you relive the major events of the tournament in Qatar through the first-hand lens of some of the teams’s captains. 

The series is made by the same production company behind another popular Netflix soccer docu-series, Sunderland ‘Til I Die, and was also made in cooperation with FIFA. The sport’s governing body and its digital platform FIFA+ are both listed as co-producers, and the FIFA connection feels clear from the start, due to both the behind-the-scenes access and the quality of footage.

You don’t spend a ton of time with a wide variety of World Cup team captains, but the series avoids falling into the trap of only highlighting the biggest-name international captains who were in Qatar: Like, say, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. 

Those two players-turned-lightning rods of endless “who is better?” debate do feature prominently in the series, which has to be expected, given Messi and Argentina won the whole tournament. Ronaldo, for his part, gets a big chunk of airtime in the series’s fourth episode, when he was benched by Portugal’s manager while also being ensnarled in controversy at the club level with Manchester United. 

The Messi and Ronaldo bits were at times interesting but not overly revelatory or groundbreaking, though Messi does speak more in Captains of the World than he has to the press in America since becoming an MLS player last summer. 

The real quality of Captains of the World comes in the segments dedicated to players like Senegal’s Kalidou Koulibaly, Brazil’s Thiago Silva, and Denmark’s Simon Kjær—and in the visually stunning World Cup highlight footage that the series revolves around. 

The match footage really is of an excellent quality, and will look great viewed on your best and biggest possible screen. That’s likely thanks to FIFA’s cooperation with the making of the series. It gives the episodes something of an NFL Films feeling, to mix footballs and behind-the-scenes series. 

Captains of the World at times is a bit too on-the-nose with its British origins, too obviously presenting the World Cup and global soccer through a British lens. There’s a ton of airtime given to Piers Morgan and his controversial interview with Cristiano Ronaldo, and Gary Lineker is brought in to explain some of the nuances of Japan and its soccer history when Japan national team captain Maya Yoshida, or perhaps an actual soccer journalist from Japan, could have probably done the same job. 

The series, despite being produced directly by FIFA, does delve in to some of the off-field controversies of the World Cup. You see Simon Kjær’s discomfort with having to comment on the politics of Qatar and human rights during the tournament, and the IR Iran team’s attempts to advocate for its people back home without running astray of the country’s leadership. 

The drama gets dialed-up well by the makers of the series, with potential goosebump-inducing moments aplenty for fans of any of the World Cup’s participants, and the tournament gets retraced basically in chronological order across the six episodes. The series feels like it can drag at times, as it’s on the longer side with those six episodes all running between 42-56 minutes, and some of the dramatic moments don’t feel quite as dramatic when viewed two years later. 

Nitpicks aside, Captains of the World is easy on the eyes, emotionally moving at times, and not as superficial or sanitized as you might expect a FIFA-backed documentary series to be.