The in-house sporting documentary genre really began in football with the series on Sheffield United in 1990 – in the lead-up to the sudden increased global love for the game that then kicked off at the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
It helped lead to the infamous An Impossible Job Channel 4 documentary in 1994, charting Graham Taylor’s ultimate downfall as England manager during the failed attempt to qualify for the 1994 World Cup.
Sunderland’s in-house Premier Passions series also proved very popular in 1996 – a prelude to the hugely successful Sunderland ‘Til I Die , externaldocuseries on Netflix.
Other have followed, from the six-part Being Liverpool in 2013 to Amazon Prime’s All or Nothing series featuring Arsenal, Manchester City and Tottenham.
But it is the massive global success of the award-winning Welcome To Wrexham series that has super-charged the genre.
The docuseries, first launched in 2021 for an American market, charts the remarkable progress of a fallen former Football League club from non-league back into the third tier of the EFL thanks to the millions of Hollywood stars and owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.
Cricket’s first big off-field production was Fire in Babylon, which was first shown in cinemas in 2010, acclaiming the record-breaking West Indies team of the 1970s and 1980s.
The England men’s Test side’s rise to number one in the world in 2013 was charted in the BBC-shown film The Edge before the rehabilitation of the Australia men’s Test side following the ball-tampering scandal in 2018 was used as the premise for Amazon’s The Test docuseries.
But a major production involving a county cricket club is a potential gap in the market. Worcestershire could be the ones to fill it.
