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IMDbPro

The Damned United

  • 2009
  • 15
  • 1h 38m
IMDb RATING
7.5/10
47K
YOUR RATING
Michael Sheen in The Damned United (2009)
A look at Brian Clough's 44-day reign as the coach of Leeds United.
Play trailer2:09
16 Videos
99+ Photos
DocudramaSoccerBiographyDramaSport

The story of the controversial Brian Clough's 44-day reign as the coach of the English football club Leeds United.The story of the controversial Brian Clough's 44-day reign as the coach of the English football club Leeds United.The story of the controversial Brian Clough's 44-day reign as the coach of the English football club Leeds United.

  • Director
    • Tom Hooper
  • Writers
    • Peter Morgan
    • David Peace
  • Stars
    • Colm Meaney
    • Henry Goodman
    • David Roper
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.5/10
    47K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Tom Hooper
    • Writers
      • Peter Morgan
      • David Peace
    • Stars
      • Colm Meaney
      • Henry Goodman
      • David Roper
    • 105User reviews
    • 156Critic reviews
    • 81Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 5 nominations total

    Videos16

    The Damned United -- U.S. Trailer
    Trailer 2:09
    The Damned United -- U.S. Trailer
    The Damned United - UK Trailer
    Trailer 2:01
    The Damned United - UK Trailer
    The Damned United - UK Trailer
    Trailer 2:01
    The Damned United - UK Trailer
    The Damned United - The Dossier
    Clip 1:06
    The Damned United - The Dossier
    The Damned United - Team Talk
    Clip 1:39
    The Damned United - Team Talk
    The Damned United - On the road
    Clip 0:51
    The Damned United - On the road
    The Damned United - Management
    Clip 0:58
    The Damned United - Management

    Photos117

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    Top cast71

    Edit
    Colm Meaney
    Colm Meaney
    • Don Revie
    Henry Goodman
    Henry Goodman
    • Manny Cussins
    David Roper
    • Sam Bolton
    Jimmy Reddington
    • Keith Archer
    Oliver Stokes
    • Nigel Clough
    Ryan Day
    • Simon Clough
    Michael Sheen
    Michael Sheen
    • Brian Clough
    Mark Bazeley
    Mark Bazeley
    • Austin Mitchell
    Timothy Spall
    Timothy Spall
    • Peter Taylor
    Maurice Roëves
    Maurice Roëves
    • Jimmy Gordon
    Stephen Graham
    Stephen Graham
    • Billy Bremner
    Peter McDonald
    Peter McDonald
    • Johnny Giles
    Mark Cameron
    Mark Cameron
    • Norman Hunter
    Frank Skillin
    • Younger Nigel Clough
    Dylan Van Hoof
    • Younger Simon Clough
    Sydney Wade
    Sydney Wade
    • Younger Elizabeth Clough
    Elizabeth Carling
    Elizabeth Carling
    • Barbara Clough
    Jim Broadbent
    Jim Broadbent
    • Sam Longson
    • Director
      • Tom Hooper
    • Writers
      • Peter Morgan
      • David Peace
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews105

    7.547.4K
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    Featured reviews

    8lastliberal

    We're from the north, Pete. What do we care about Brighton? Bloody southerners.

    Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge! , Longford), Timothy Spall (Michael Sheen), and Colm Meaney (How Harry Became a Tree) are all great actors, and their presence means that this film is worth watching even if you don't particularly like football. I doubt however, you would be watch if you weren't a fan.

    Brian Clough (Sheen) brings Derby out of obscurity to the top and ends up managing his archenemy Leeds United. He hates the team, he hates the style of football they play, and yet, he signs on to manage them. A recipe for disaster, and a disaster it was.

    The film is not so much about football, as it is about Clough. He makes enemies everywhere he goes. No wonder he only lasted 44 days.

    A fantastic film with brilliant performances by Sheen and Spall.
    8the_rattlesnake25

    Michael Sheen is Brian Howard Clough...

    Brian Howard Clough. "The greatest English manager never to manage the English National side." Whether you agree with that sentiment or not, everybody knows Brian Clough was one of the great personalities of the game. Based around David Pearce's bestselling novel 'The Damned United' (which Johnny Giles called: "fiction based on fact"), the films narrative follows the events preceding and during those fateful 44-days of management from the perspective of Cloughie (played by Michael Sheen).

    Sheen turns in, yet another brilliant performance as the arrogant, stubborn, distant, bitter, intelligent, yet highly flawed man who went on to become a legend of British football. From his mannerisms to the way he speaks, Sheen projects the outward personality of Brian Clough through to the audience to a tee. And more importantly he takes the film away from the touchlines of simply being 'another football film', and instead creates a human drama about one man's battle with jealously, bitterness and ambition and how that can destroy everything around you, quicker than Billy Bremner could break your legs. While Morgan's script keeps up the dry wit and humour, and Hooper's direction carries the colourful scenery of 1960's and 1970's Britain, the film could have spent more time centred around the other players on the pitch, more specifically Clough's second in-command in Peter Taylor and the Leeds United side of the Revie era. They are shown to be Revie's surrogate sons and nothing more. With that said however, I found it a hugely enjoyable film that went way beyond the stereotypical association we have football films today and instead created a profile of a man who encompassed everything that was good, bad and all that in between about the beautiful game.
    8JamesHitchcock

    The Beautiful Game

    Brian Clough (1935-2004) has some claim to be regarded as the greatest ever club manager in English football. Others, such as Bob Paisley and Sir Alex Ferguson, may have won more in terms of trophies, but they did so after taking over clubs which were already wealthy, successful and established. Clough's unique achievement was to take over a struggling, unsuccessful Second Division club, Derby County, turn them into English champions, and then to repeat this feat with a second struggling, unsuccessful Second Division club, Nottingham Forest, who went on to become not only English champions but also European champions.

    Clough's career in football management, however, was not an uninterrupted success story, and "The Damned United" tells the story of his greatest failure, his 44-day tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Over the past decade, under the management of Don Revie, Leeds had become one of the leading clubs in England, and in 1974 were reigning League champions. They were, however, also the most hated club in England, having become notorious not only for a cautious, defensive attitude to the game but also for gamesmanship and violent play.

    Although Clough and Revie loathed one another, they had much in common. Both came from the same town, Middlesbrough, growing up only a few streets apart. Both had enjoyed successful playing careers, playing at centre-forward, both had been capped for England, and both had played for the same club, Sunderland. Revie had also taken over Leeds United as a struggling Second Division club and had turned them into champions. Yet they had very different attitudes to the game. In contrast to Revie's "win-at-all-costs" attitude, Clough was an idealist with a firm belief in fair play and open, attacking football; he frequently referred to "the beautiful game", long before this phrase had become the cliché it is today. When Revie was appointed as England manager, Clough therefore seemed a strange choice to replace him as Leeds manager, especially as he had been one fiercest critics both of the club and of Revie. (Many other managers, in fact, agreed with Clough's opinions in private, but few had dared to express them quite so publicly).

    Clough's main weakness as a manager appears to have been his lack of tact and diplomacy. He was fond of speaking his mind, and despite winning the Championship with Derby had been ousted as manager of that club following clashes with the club chairman Sam Longson. According to this film, Clough's first act as Leeds manager was to tell his players to throw away all their medals and trophies, "because they won them by cheating". Given this attitude, it is hardly surprising that Clough was disliked by the Leeds players, most of whom had idolised Revie. They were determined not to take Clough's message of "good, clean attractive football" to heart; during his first match in charge of Leeds, the Charity Shield against Liverpool, the club captain, Billy Bremner, was red-carded for brawling on the pitch with an opponent. (He received an 11-game suspension and never played again under Clough's management). Discontent among the players was a major factor in persuading the club's directors to dismiss Clough after a run of poor results.

    The film is not a comprehensive biopic of Clough; it concentrates on his brief spell at Leeds, with the story of his days at Derby being told in flashback. It does not deal with his early life or playing career at all, only briefly touches on his private life outside the game, and his successes with Nottingham Forest are only mentioned in passing in an epilogue at the end. It presents a fictionalised version of his life and occasionally takes liberties with the facts. (Contrary to the impression given here, Dave Mackay, a one-time Derby player who succeeded Clough as manager, was not on the club's playing staff at the time of his appointment).

    The film's main virtues are an excellent script from Peter Morgan and some equally excellent acting. Michael Sheen seems to specialise in playing real people, and although he bears a certain physical resemblance to Clough he avoids the mistake he made when playing Tony Blair in "The Queen", that of trying to imitate his subject too exactly as though he were a Mike Yarwood-style impressionist rather than a dramatic actor. The other excellent contributions come from Colm Meaney as the self-righteous Revie, genuinely unable to understand why anyone might object to his team's playing style, from Jim Broadbent as Longson, a self-important small-town businessman who has attached himself to the town's football club despite an almost total ignorance of the game, and from Timothy Spall as Clough's assistant, Peter Taylor. Unlike Sheen and Meaney, Spall bears very little resemblance to the man he is playing, but as Taylor generally kept a much lower profile than Clough this does not really matter. Taylor, a more substantial figure than most assistant club managers, nevertheless played a key role at Derby, so he is an important character in this drama. He did not follow Clough to Leeds; had he done so, Clough's appointment might have been a greater success.

    Despite its international popularity, football has inspired surprisingly few good films, and virtually no great ones. In the 2000s, however, the British cinema managed to produce two very good films about the sport, of which this is the second. (The first was "Bend It like Beckham"). The film's main appeal will, I suspect, be to sports fans and to those with an interest in football history, especially those who, like myself, are old enough to remember the events of the 1970s. Nevertheless, there is enough human drama in "The Damned United" to appeal to film-lovers who have only a passing interest in football. 8/10
    8thependragon-1

    Whether or not it's fact or fiction it's certainly entertaining!

    I went to see this film with a certain trepidation as I don't always understand the true workings of the so-called beautiful game. I'm often rather lost by the offside rule, not too sure what actually constitutes handball and can't quite understand why a good friend can kiss a poster of George Weah and refer to the Liberian as a God. However, I can recognise what a worldwide phenomenon football has become and the massive status that the late Brian Clough held within in the sport.

    Clough was one heck of a character and very much of his time and this is where 'The Damned United' really succeeds. You feel like you are truly watching the 70s when men were men and modern players like constant diver Cristiano Ronaldo would have been laughed (or even kicked) off the pitch. Sheen gives an excellent performance and Clough is portrayed as a complex individual with the sort of charisma and wit, which may endear him to cinema-goers who have little knowledge of football or the man himself.

    However, I saw this film with a friend who is a huge soccer fan and who confessed afterwards to having certain problems with the accuracy of the story. The film is after all based on a book by David Peace, which merges the facts with his own fiction to show what he thought might being going on behind the scenes during Clough's reign as manager of Derby County and his infamous 44 days in charge at Leeds United. Having recently watched some TV dramatisations of Peace's other novels involving the real life Yorkshire Ripper murders it is easy to see why some people find his particular way of merging fact with fiction lacking in credibility. I personally didn't have such a problem with this film as I felt it really got to grips with who Clough was as a football manager and his probable motives for how he went about the job at Leeds.

    While the film's narrative sometimes veers confusingly back and forth between Clough's time at Derby and his short spell at Leeds, 'The Damned United' is a really enjoyable piece of entertainment full of great actors bringing to life intriguing characters. The ultimate strength of the film is that the story manages to become more about friendship (the relationship between Brian and Peter Taylor) and the destructiveness of vanity rather than how many football matches Clough won.
    9iandfleming

    Excellent character study of depth and resonance. A great Brit-flick.

    I am currently two thirds of the way through the novel. I'm finding it to be a great discovery. Peace's writing has all the energy and pace of Irvine Welsh at his best and having just caught the Red Riding trilogy, he's captured my imagination. What he has truly captured in The Damn United is the true spirit of the 70's and the days when I would watch football dressed in the kit of whatever team I was supporting that week, on my Dad's knee. My Dad loathed Brian 'Bigmouth' / 'Bighead' Clough! But even as a boy I loved him, thought he was hilarious. Reading the novel and seeing the film, we discover a man truly out of time ... more a man / celebrity of the future. The first celebrity football manager? If he'd been a manager in the Britpop era, he'd be a national treasure now ... and may even have been given the England job he so coveted and that the fans longed for him to have. watching Sheen (yet again!) faithfully recreate voice, mannerisms ... inhabiting this character, makes this film (for it is a 'film' in the truly British sense) all the more compelling. Cloughie is complex, sensitive, probably with an inner shyness that he masked outrageously with his outspoken diatribes. He was everywhere when I was a kid ... TV, papers, magazines ... always with a controversial line that makes Noel Gallagher look like he minces his words. The on screen footie from actors is mercifully kept to a minimum, as - as always, actors don't make for convincing footballers. Even the moments from them we do get, they look clueless. But it doesn't detract from the story ... a story of obsessive desire, absolute drive and male relationships, in a time when male bonding usually meant trading a punch or two. This is a good if unfaithful adaptation of the novel. Why in the film do Cloughie and Peter Taylor fall out with a row on the Malaga harbour? In the novel, they trade punches and Cloughie makes a real show of himself ... thus making the reunion all the more difficult. But it's a small gripe. The thing I really took from this was although times have changed for football - when did Man Utd dressing room last have ashtrays??? - essentially, things have changed little. Big star players, vast amounts of money (£150,000 was considered a fortune back then), teams fortunes spinning on their positions in the old division one, the league being dominated by one or four big clubs. And the cheating, and the ref baiting ... little has truly changed.

    Good to see a strong Brit-flick that doesn't resort to mockney gangster schlick or the current plethora of cheap horror schlock. This is a character study of depth and resonance. Beautifully, stylistically photographed and wonderfully performed. GO SEE IT!

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The film has been criticized by the Clough family as they state it was not an accurate portrayal of events.
    • Goofs
      The tie against Leeds shows Derby being so badly fouled by the Leeds players they have to field reserves against Juventus. While Derby did suffer some injuries in the tie against Leeds that year, it actually came before their quarter-final match against Spartak Trnava, which Derby still won despite missing some key players. Moreover, the injuries were not as serious as implied in the film, and all the injured players had recovered by the time of the eventual 3-1 defeat by Juventus which was with a near full-strength Derby squad minus two players who were suspended.
    • Quotes

      Brian Clough: [to the assembled Leeds players] Well, I might as well tell you now. You lot may all be internationals and have won all the domestic honours there are to win under Don Revie. But as far as I'm concerned, the first thing you can do for me is to chuck all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans into the biggest fucking dustbin you can find, because you've never won any of them fairly. You've done it all by bloody cheating.

    • Connections
      Featured in De wereld draait door: Episode #4.124 (2009)
    • Soundtracks
      Leeds, Leeds, Leeds (Marching On Together)
      Performed by Leeds United A.F.C. (as Leeds United Team) and Supporters

      Written by Les Reed / Barry Mason

      Published by Universal Music Publishing Ltd / Dick James Music Ltd / Barry Mason Music Ltd / MCS Music Ltd

      Licensed from Chapter One Records Ltd

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    FAQ20

    • How long is The Damned United?Powered by Alexa
    • Who was managing Derby in the match that Brian Clough snuck into, if Dave Mackay hadn't been appointed yet?

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • March 27, 2009 (United Kingdom)
    • Countries of origin
      • United Kingdom
      • United States
    • Official sites
      • Sony Pictures (France)
      • Sony Pictures (United Kingdom)
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Đội Bóng Đáng Nguyền Rủa
    • Filming locations
      • Recreation Ground, Saltergate, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, UK
    • Production companies
      • Columbia Pictures
      • BBC Film
      • Screen Yorkshire
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Budget
      • $10,000,000 (estimated)
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $449,865
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $32,065
      • Oct 11, 2009
    • Gross worldwide
      • $4,091,378
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 38 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby Digital
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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