‘Next Goal Wins’ Fails Its Most Interesting Character

Trans folks are amazing. We come in all shapes and sizes, we’re in every country on the planet, and best of all… there is no one way to be trans! “Being trans” can be whatever you want it to be if it makes you feel comfortable in your identity. There’s such thrilling limitlessness in the world of trans identities…which is why it’s so frustrating that mainstream movies have such limited ideas of what trans existence looks like. No two trans individuals are alike, yet if you go by movies, all trans folks are sad-sacks defined solely by their hormones and genitals existing solely to help cis-gendered folks. These stereotypes still crop up in modern motion pictures; like Taika Waititi’s new directorial effort, Next Goal Wins.

There are lots of problems with Next Goal Wins. For one thing, Michael Fassbender is unignorably miscast in the lead role while any of the inventive camerawork from Waititi’s earlier films like Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople is woefully missed here. Then there’s the handling of Jaiyah Saelua (played by Kaimana), a football player in American Samoa who identifies as fa’afafine, a non-binary gender identity unique to Samoan culture. In real life, Saelua (who uses she/her pronouns) was a trailblazer who broke new ground for what trans women could accomplish in the World Cup. Unfortunately, the depiction of Saelua in Next Goal Wins is hurtfully standard and retrograde, an approach that proves insulting on many fronts.

One caveat before moving forward in this piece: Jaiyah Saelua herself attended the premiere of Next Goal Wins at the Toronto International Film Festival and has not, to date, raised qualms with the movie’s depiction of her. This does not exclude the project from criticism from other people, but it’s an important note for the larger context.

‘Next Goal Wins’ Aims to Confront Transphobia — But Bottles It

Within the first few minutes of Next Goal Wins, cantankerous football coach Thomas Rongen (Fassbender) is sent off to American Samoa to coach a team of players considered the absolute worst team on the planet. When he first shows up to watch over the players at practice, everyone seems to be there, until Jaiyah strolls in wearing a gorgeous red dress, apologizing for her tardiness. Rongen immediately assumes that Jaiyah is the “team masseuse” and instructs her to wait on the sidelines. That’s when assistant coach Ace (David Fane) steps in to inform Rongen that Jaiyah is part of the team, a development Rongen is shocked by. The camera lingers on him cackling in disbelief at Jaiyah, saying phrases like “this is a guy?” It only gets worse from here.

After this, Rongen grills Ace on the backstories of the various team members, including Jaiyah. While he just wants to know the physical strengths of the rest of the athletes; for Jaiyah, he wants more personal information. He insists Ace reveal to him her dead name while shortly afterward, Rongen barks at Jaiyah to stop twirling her hair on the field. Any viewer with eyeballs will see that Jaiyah is enjoying a moment of gender euphoria playing with her hair, a slice of gender-based joy capsized by Rongen. The duo’s fractured relationship reaches its most tormented climax once Rongen, exasperated with Jaiyah’s actions on the field, calls out to her using her deadname. After she protests this repeatedly and begs him to stop, Rongen drops the deadname again, inspiring Jaiyah to push him to the ground.

Already, Next Goal Wins is dabbling in some dark and cruel territory for what’s basically an inspirational sports movie Disney could’ve put out in 2005. There are ways for movies to grapple with transphobia and how powerful white people so nonchalantly dabble in it. But is a wacky sports comedy the best place to do that? Next Goal Wins treats Rongen’s transphobia like a mild character defect so that it can maintain its breezy aesthetic; a bamboozling and ill-advised choice. As if that weren’t bad enough, this confrontation is followed up by Jaiyah traveling to Rongen’s cabin domicile alone. Here, she apologizes first for her behavior before Rongen then apologizes for deadnaming her. Everything about this scene is staggeringly miscalculated, starting with the idea that a trans person would travel alone to the home of someone who verbally abused them in public. The script’s decision to have her be the one apologizing first is also insulting. This choice ensures that the underlying message of the scene becomes that standing up to transphobia is equally as bad as bigotry itself.

It’s a scene that may play as “heartwarming” for cis-gendered viewers since it allows them to think “both sides” of a transphobic situation are equally troubled. That makes such horrific interactions much easier to process for these privileged audience members who don’t have to experience transphobia. Meanwhile, such a dynamic is a nightmare to watch play out for trans folks in the audience. Even worse, Rongen still acts like a cruel figure to Jaiyah even after he “apologizes.” Waititi and Ian Morris‘s script somehow think Rongen explicitly asking about Jaiyah’s genitals (“What’s your business downstairs?” he asks) is a great way to demonstrate the duo bonding. Trans people are more than their genitals, and it’s shocking we have to say that in 2023.

This and the other Rongen/Jaiyah interactions also reflect why Fassbender is such a poor fit for this role. The dark intensity that made him so compelling in 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs just doesn’t work for the lead of this kind of sports movie. When he’s transphobic to Jaiyah, it feels raw and cutting, like Fassbender is portraying a villainous cop in a Marsha P. Johnson biopic. Those qualities are terrible given that Rongen is supposed to be the equivalent to Kurt Russell’s character in Miracle. Even when he’s being “nice” to Jaiyah and talking to her at a picnic table, Fassbender’s underlying edge just makes their discussions uncomfortable.

‘Next Goal Wins’ Wastes Its Most Interesting Character

Even when the relationship between Rongen and Jaiyah improves, the feature still struggles to not lapse into creepy or eye-roll-worthy territory when it comes to their rapport. Chiefly, a moment where Rongen braids Jaiyah’s hair just like he did with his daughter solidifies that his kindness towards her is based on him seeing her as a “replacement” for his deceased offspring. It’s a weird concept that echoes men who oppose sexual assault or the dehumanization of women because “I’m the son of a mother/I have a daughter/I have a lady aunt somewhere.” Your respect for women and their humanity shouldn’t be rooted in seeing them as equivalent to your family members. You can just treat trans ladies as people because they (like all trans folks) are people.

Meanwhile, whenever the viewer sees Jaiyah separated from Rongen, she’s almost always in despair. We only see her in her own domicile once packing for the trip to the big climactic soccer game, a scene that only exists to depict her not bringing her hormones on the excursion. Later, viewers watch her dance to some music with her teammates, only to get mocked by players on the rival team. This cruelty leads her to run away in tears, a sight Rongen watches from afar before returning to what’s important: exuding the bare minimum of support to his team against Will Arnett’s quasi-antagonistic character.

These peeks into Jaiyah’s life separated from her coach that only focus on her medicine and social anguish speak to how Next Goal Wins has such an unimaginative approach to trans existence. Why can’t the film ever show Jaiyah just existing with other fa’afafine members of her community? Early comments from Ace about how “normal” her identity is in American Samoa indicate she isn’t alone in her gender identity, ditto a scene where she remarks to Rongen that she’s concerned about moving off the island because she’d be “lonely” elsewhere. Where are those other trans souls though? Where are the people who could understand Jaiyah’s experiences on a personal level, the folks she’s able to feel comfortable and happy around? Next Goal Wins can’t seem to conceive of trans folks either existing in spaces with other trans people or experiencing a wide spectrum of emotional experiences.

Even a big climactic soccer match meant to turn Jaiyah into a hero (she proves pivotal for her team on two occasions) gets undercut by the weird, overstuffed execution of this sequence. For starters, much of it is framed as a flashback told via Tavita’s (Oscar Knightley) son catching his father up on the game he missed due to heatstroke. This telling of the big game reduces all the actions and players to just being brief bits in what amounts to a montage, thus ensuring there’s never room for Jaiyah’s significant contributions to feel meaningful. Meanwhile, the focus of this match ends up circling around a goalie who, years earlier, ended up ensuring his team suffered a big embarrassing loss. The focus is so heavily on this one guy that Waititi even offers brief flash-forwards in time where an older version of the goalie is recounting his experiences at the game to his child. Jaiyah gets lost in all these digressions and registers as barely a footnote in the finale despite Rongen tasking her with being the “leader” of the team.

There Are Better Sports Movies and Trans Representation Than ‘Next Goal Wins’

Jaiyah’s story deserved better in Next Goal Wins than this. So did general moviegoers. Fans of inspirational sports movies tend to like these films because they lend a distinctly human gaze to the players of games that we can take for granted. Sports dramas let us go inside the heads of pivotal figures from all corners of sports history, with the best of these titles realizing that internal drama so vividly that even people who don’t care about baseball, football, or any other sport end up engrossed by the proceedings. Jaiyah’s shallow treatment within Next Goal Wins is a spit in the eye towards that. She’s only utilized as a prop to help Rongen along his journey. It’s an approach that ensures this motion picture indulges in lots of tired stereotypes pertaining to trans representation in cinema.

Who wants to see that kind of lazy storytelling when you can watch a richly spirited sports movie in the vein of Remember the Titans or Ford v. Ferrari? The waste of Jaiyah’s story here is disappointing on several fronts, but luckily, the world of cinema is vast enough to provide some appropriate counterbalances to its flaws. Not only are there superior sports dramas to watch, but there is also a slew of other movies about indigenous trans folks from cultures all over the world one can support instead, many of them directed by trans artists! The likes of Being Thunder, Drunktown’s Finest, Wildhood, Uýra: The Rising Forest, and others have garnered praise for offering the kind of humanizing portraits of trans lives so often missing in cinema. If one is wondering how that kind of erasure manifests in modern movies, just look at how Next Goal Wins treats a real-life figure as powerful and fascinating as Jaiyah.