Director Rob Sloman and producer David Wooster speak to Broadcast Sport about the new three-part docuseries
The Long Walk comes to FIFA+ today, 1 November, examining the stories around the dreaded penalty shootout in World Cups through the years.
Director Rob Sloman (Howard’s Way) and executive producer David Wooster from Worldmark Films spoke to Broadcast Sport about the latest docuseries to come to the streaming platform. The pair worked with producer Ashley Clark, executive producer Jonathan Sadler, and executive producers for FIFA Studios, Paul Redman and James Reilly on the three-part series.
The Long Walk arrives right before the Qatar 2022 World Cup, and shortly after the launch of Captains - a behind-the-scenes series following eight national team captains through qualification for the big competition. However, Wooster says that The Long Walk, “wasn’t specifically pitched for the World Cup. FIFA was looking for content that took advantage of its archive.”
Although, he added: “The FIFA archive drove it towards World Cup content. World Cup shootouts have the greatest significance, and we didn’t want to be shooting around from competition to competition. It also meant with FIFA on board there were no restrictions on the use of archive in terms of cost or otherwise.”
Conversations about the documentary began in 2019, but the pandemic meant that it wasn’t until the last year that FIFA commissioned it.
39 interviews were conducted with players from over 18 countries for the series, including with the likes of Lothar Matthaus, Andrea Pirlo, and Asamoah Gyan. Sloman admitted, “you can almost tell who struggles and who embraces it.” Antonin Panenka even recreates his famous penalty.
Sloman explained: “We go through World Cup shootouts and see how they’ve progressed through the psychology, technique, and everything else.” England’s trials and more recent success with shootouts feature in the series, as well as plenty of other nations - including the very first shootout in the World Cup, between West Germany and France in 1982, which the West Germans won.
When it came to choosing which stories to dig into, it was “half and half” tales they had pinpointed before production and those they discovered while interviewing and collecting footage. Sloman added: “We had stories we wanted to follow through with, plus as you’re talking sometimes there’s lines or stories you want to go into.”
One they did discover, Wooster mentioned, is that, “calling it a lottery is rubbish.”
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