Take the Ball, Pass the Ball

Duncan McMath's Take the Ball, Pass the Ball was released in November 2018, a decade after Pep Guardiola took charge of the Barcelona first team with almost no senior coaching experience. Produced in Spain by Zoomsport and Versus Entertainment, it is built on the conviction that the four seasons that followed produced the finest football any club side has played.

The film's method is testimony. McMath secured extended interviews with nearly every member of the squad, including Lionel Messi, Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, Gerard Piqué, and Sergio Busquets, and lets them explain, often with real tactical precision, how the team's positional game worked and where it came from, from Johan Cruyff's legacy to the academy at La Masia. Around the football is the story of the era: the bitter rivalry with José Mourinho's Real Madrid, the young Messi's near-rejection as a boy, and a teammate's return from serious illness. The title comes from the simplest statement of the club's philosophy.

McMath, an English director working with a Spanish production team, keeps the structure simple and chronological, and the archive of the matches does much of the persuading. It is less formally ambitious than the best sports documentaries, but few are as illuminating about how a great team plays. It makes an ideal companion to A Beautiful Obsession, which finds Guardiola a decade and a half later at Manchester City, and to Mourinho, which tells the same rivalry from the other dugout.