For this documentary, prize-winning filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu shadows Laurentiu Ginghină, a Romanian provincial bureaucrat, as he explains his self-appointed mission to “revolutionize” soccer. For sports scholars and fans, his ideas about how to transform the game may seem eccentric, but they invite reconsideration of the sport from a new perspective. The film is about much more than sport, however, as Porumboiu and Ginghină take the audience on a journey of humor, existential introspection, and social commentary, encouraging the viewer to reevaluate their own ideas about sport, post-communist society, freedom, democracy, and the meaning of an individual's life.
The film opens in a disused multi-sport complex where, in 1986, Laurentiu Ginghină broke his fibula during a soccer pick-up match. The wound never healed properly, and after reinjuring the same leg's weakened tibia the following year, he began to reflect on how soccer's “imposed rules [and] norms, which weren't the best,” might be improved. Undaunted by criticism that his changes would eliminate “the beauty of football” and “bring [nothing] new” to the game, he insists that his version would increase the “freedom” of the ball by slowing down the players, easing its movement down the field, and encouraging more passing while making the sport less violent. While Porumboiu dismisses Ginghină’s vision as “utopian,” Ginghină sees himself in American superhero comics. Comparing himself to Clark Kent and Peter Parker, whose mundane lives mask their heroic identities, he notes “I'm here, filing documents, but in my double life I revolutionize sport.”
For scholars of the former communist bloc, however, his mundane real life may be the more fascinating one, highlighting the slow transformation of Romania since the 1990s and the daily realities of a society that remains highly bureaucratized. In one of the more revealing scenes, a gentlemen escorts his 92-year-old mother into Ginghină’s office. The woman wants to reclaim property taken by the state over twenty years ago to build a polyclinic so that she can pass it down to her children. The son explains their so-far futile attempts to overcome the “legally dubious tricks” employed by the authorities to delay their case. Finally reaching someone at the Land Registry office to take the case off his hands, Ginghină finds out that the file has already been sent to Bucharest for approval by the National Authority for the Restitution of Properties. For Ginghină this is “usually how it goes” in his role “to help people solve their problems,” but Porumboiu muses, “still, twenty-seven years after the Revolution, and to still not have her land back.” Ginghină later admits that progress had seemed to stall since 2007 when Romania entered the European Union, when he believed “that life here would change for the better … in a very short period.” The fact that the sports field where he experienced his first accident, and the decrepit mill where he sustained his second are both still standing in disrepair instead of having been replaced by something newer and more functional speaks to the slow progress of political and economic transformation.
Yet the film also reminds the viewer not to fall back on cold-war assumptions that equate the west with progress and freedom and the east with regression and decay. At the end of the documentary, Ginghină muses: “I realized that if you start from the idea that you can always find rules, norms, and a general framework in which people can be less violent, it's possible for people to live in greater harmony. And this also applies to sport.” In order to transform soccer, Ginghină would have to take on the multi-billion dollar enterprises and labyrinthine bureaucracies that control the sport. Eliminating violence from society would be even harder. The 9/11 attacks and the ensuing rise of xenophobia in the “country of freedom” undermined Ginghină’s dream of leaving his “boring job” for America, “the Land of Opportunity.” Brexit and the rise of anti-EU, nationalist parties across the continent support his view that nationalism remains stronger than a shared sense of European identity, endangering European unity.
Infinite Football speaks to a number of themes that preoccupy scholars of sport, the former eastern bloc, and Europe. As recent research examines concussions in soccer and corruption in its governing bodies, Ginghină’s quest highlights the power structure behind high-profile sport in contrast to one man's quixotic attempt to change it. Porumboiu's documentary also contributes to ongoing debates about nationalism, globalization, post-communist transition, and European integration, shedding light on the intersection between sport, politics, and society.
