• Player Rating: 7.2
• Stream: Netflix
• Running Time: 6 episodes, each 42-56 minutes long
• Audience: Ages 13 and Older
A visually stunning, comprehensive retelling of some of the many highs and lows of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. It’s co-produced by FIFA, and 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. Captains of the World is held back a bit by at times being too obviously presented through a British lens, and it drags a bit as it retraces the entirety of the World Cup, but it’s an easy-on-the-eyes way to revisit the most recent men’s World Cup.
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.
