YMMV / United Passions

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Many critics, including John Oliver, wondered why anybody would want to make a sports movie where the executives were the heroes instead of the athletes, as well as being funded by FIFA, which was already notorious for its rampant corruption. The fact that it was released in the US when the 2015 FIFA corruption scandal hit didn't help either, and it failed to even make back even 1% of its budget (or break $1000 in its US opening weekend).
• Bile Fascination: The only reason that makes some people watch the movie was the unanimous bashing it got, particularly as it was released around the time of the FIFA corruption scandal. A Philadelphia film reviewer went to see it on a whim, and was amused when it turned out to be a de facto private screening — he was the only one in the theater, and the only one who ever attended a screening in Philadelphia.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Though only in the most superficial way, since FIFA's rampant corruption was an open secret. In a more specific instance, Sepp Blatter's promise in the film that "the slightest breach of ethics will be severely punished" came across this way a few months after the film's release, when FIFA hit him with a suspension designed to take him out of action until a new president could be elected, and then followed it up with an eight-year suspension a few months after that. In November 2021, Blatter was charged with bribery in Switzerland.
• Narm: The scene where Brazil loses the World Cup is totally ridiculous. It's the combination of the slow-motion shots of people crying, Rimet looking on in shock, and the announcer making a hilariously melodramatic speech about how Brazil has forever lost its pride as if this is a Despair Event Horizon for the entire country. It's unclear why we're supposed to root for Brazil over Uruguay, and yet their loss is being painted as some horrific tragedy. What makes it even worse is that this is completely historically accurate; had the film been purely a biopic of Rimet it would probably have had the time to give proper historical context to the events, but without that context, the reactions simply come across as incredibly wangsty.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The film is much more well known for releasing right around the FIFA corruption scandal and for its record-breaking box office failure than any contents or merits of the movie itself.
• Special Effect Failure: Tim Roth's Sepp Blatter is in an obvious green screen clumsily handing a cup to Nelson Mandela.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: More precisely, they somehow managed to waste two potentially good plots in the same film - the creation of the first World Cup, and the corruption that engulfed FIFA over the years. The former was widely agreed to be the best part of the film comparatively speaking, but still very clunkily written and far too short, and the latter is only shown in a ham-fisted attempt to depict how Sepp Blatter "cleaned up" the organization.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: A truly bizarre case of this. Tim Roth hated the film's efforts to deify the notoriously crooked Blatter as a figure of unimpeachable integrity and was only there for the paycheck. So he played the role of Blatter being dishonest and corrupt, leading to him nailing the real man and his personality in a film intended to portray him in the exact opposite light, as Roth is doing and feeling like he's making an entirely different and far more compelling film than the one he's actually in.

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