Back in the old, pre-cable days, “Wide World of Sports” on ABC used to promise “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” That famous catchphrase contained an implicit recognition of a fact seldom acknowledged in America’s triumphalist sports culture, namely that failure can be as compelling as success, sometimes even more so.

 

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Maybe England is different. In any case, “The Damned United” is the rare sports movie that deals with — indeed positively relishes — humiliation and disappointment. Its real-life protagonist, the soccer coach Brian Clough (who died in 2004), was, over his long career, a winner with an extraordinary record of accomplishment. But the film, directed by Tom Hooper from Peter Morgan’s script (based on a novel by David Peace), is much more interested in the dramatic flameout that disrupted and almost ended his rise to football glory.

 

 

You’ve probably seen a dozen movies — “Hoosiers,” “Glory Road,” even “Slap Shot” — in which a tough coach takes a squad of misfits and underachievers and turns them into champions. Clough (Michael Sheen), perhaps uniquely in the annals of sporting cinema, reverses the process. Hired with great fanfare in 1974 to manage the mighty Leeds United club, he alienates players, fans and management and sends the team into a tailspin. At his very first practice he tells the Leeds stars, who play a rough, mean brand of football, that they are not champions but thugs and cheaters. Oddly, they resist his invitation to reform their ways.

 

 

One theme “The Damned United” explores is the difficulty of filling the shoes of a beloved, charismatic leader. Clough takes over Leeds after its longtime manager, Don Revie (Colm Meaney), assumes the leadership of the British national team. Over the years, Revie has become the personification of his team and a hero of the Midlands. A hard act for anyone to follow, but especially vexing for Clough, whose obsession with Revie — a combination of rivalry and idolatry, visceral loathing and disappointed love — turns out to be as much a driving force in his career as his own ambition.

 

 

The two men are a study in temperamental and generational contrasts. Revie, solid and phlegmatic, is an English bulldog of the old school, while Clough is more like a rooster, crowing and strutting in pursuit of his own celebrity. He is a complicated fellow, and while the filmmakers are fascinated by his self-aggrandizing motives and his self-defeating behavior, they are not entirely sympathetic.
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