Continuing with the soccer trend in my life lately, Kelsi and I watched an interesting movie last weekend entitled The Two Escobars.
This movie is part of the ESPN 30 for 30 series. The 30 movies are part of a documentary series about unique stories in sports history from 1979 to 2009. In essence, they were created for ESPN to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary of existence. However, the unique thing is that ESPN didn't just choose the top 30 stories from those years. Instead they chose the stories that people didn't always hear about, or that people didn't always know every detail of. They cover everything from rugby in post-apartheid South Africa to Michael Jordan's short minor-league baseball career.
You can view the trailer for the series here:
The movie we watched is about the rise of the Colombian national soccer team as they worked their way towards the World Cup in 1994 and how this coincided with the rise of well know narco-king, Pablo Escobar. Led by captain, Andres Escobar, the Colombian national team left for the 1994 World Cup as the favorites and were expected to win the whole thing. After losing their first game, the team also lost the second game when Andres accidentally scored in Colombia's own goal. For this, he was murdered in Medellin only weeks later, not a full year after the death of Pablo in the same town.
The most interesting part of the movie was the extensive discussion about something known as "Narco-soccer", or basically the idea that Colombia's national team had many more direct ties to Pablo Escobar than one might expect. The movie definitely makes you think about the relationships between businesses (legal or not) and sports, as well as the terrifying history that is still very much a part of Colombia's present.
Whether you are into sports or soccer this movie is definitely engaging to watch and I highly recommend it.
Here is an exert from the movie:
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