Ranking the 10 best football movies of all time (2024)

Draft Day is ridiculous NFL pulp. It’s outlandish that a movie exists about the NFL Draft, but it’s hard not to get swept away with how shameless this film is to entertain.

Draft Day makes no sense from a football perspective, but you can get away with that if you don’t take anything seriously. Hooking up your battery to Kevin Costner’s movie star charisma and revving the escalating tensions can compensate for a lot. This movie has developed a lore beyond itself in the football community, almost as much a meme around draft time as it is a revered totem for something so routine.

National Champions does something that no other college football movie has done quite this well: excoriate the powers that be for their greed. That includes the NCAA, the conferences that govern the teams, the coaches who want for themselves what they won’t advocate for their athletes.

The film came out on the heels of the NIL boom, so it won’t hit quite as hard now in its messaging for fair compensation. However, its fiery sermonizing and the way it dismantles certain college movie tropes (especially the big coach speech) still resonates.

Only loosely about football, this 1990s boarding school drama features one of the most electric young casts of its time (Brendan Fraser! Matt Damon! Ben Affleck!) and hits harder at the institutional antisemitism of its setting than you’d expect. Football is communal, and a team is only as good as the environment it grows in. School Ties took the bold approach to show why being great at sports won’t save you from being exploitation and prejudice. It’s a darn good movie.

Outside of 2004’s hockey drama Miracle, Remember the Titans is the pride of Disney’s sports movies. Perhaps the most quoted and beloved football movie in existence, Remember the Titans is one of the formative works to edify younger audiences on the importance of equality and friendship amid the harrowing societal adjustments of integration.

Denzel Washington gets one of his signature roles as Herman Boone, the man charged with uniting a divided locker room. The film walks a fine line between power and schmaltz, but it rarely loses the right frequency because Washington is setting the tone. To achieve quality and iconography is a rare thing in the genre.

Adam Sandler’s raucous sports comedy gets right about football what so many other likeminded films get wrong. The Waterboy is refreshingly unsentimental about the sport as much as it is in love with Sandler’s goofball Bobby Boucher and the lovable losers at his side. Football is merely a stage for Sandler’s antics.

The Waterboy is a much sharper satire of Saturday mornings in the South than you’d expect. Even at its absolute stupidest, it’s still absolutely hysterical and further supports why Sandler was so dominant during his ballyhooed 1990s run. Also, The Replacements wishes.

Speaking of a refreshing lack of sentiment, Friday Night Lights is still the greatest narrative work about high school football. The 2004 drama filled the gaping need for a film about toxic small-town football culture and gave the sport a much more realistic slant. The ending is an all-timer in the genre, one that pulls you back down in a way that football does most everywhere but the movies.

The Oscar-winning documentary about a Memphis high school’s football turnaround is so, so much more impactful than most of its inspirational narrative counterparts. Rather than fictionalizing a rise from the ashes, there are real stakes, real victories, real setbacks, real people doing real things that move you. It’s hard not to get a little misty during this one. It wields a startling power.

Patton Oswalt’s finest moment as an actor came in Big Fan, a shocking study of unhealthy fandom. If you thought you were obsessed with your favorite NFL team, you will wince once you meet New York Giants superfan Paul Aufiero. A football spin on Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, Big Fan drives home the dangerous mental elasticity of obsessing over something you have nothing to do with. Oswalt does remarkable work to portray Aufiero’s fierce fandom, how it impacts his mental health and the troubling lengths he’s willing to go to sacrifice one for the other. This one lingers.

Tom Cruise is a singular movie star, and Jerry Maguire gave him one of his best-ever platforms to showboat how much better he is at acting than most people. There is no other actor on the planet who could quite make the story of a sports agent seem like such a magnetic subject. Cruise could. While Jerry Maguire hovers more around the business of football and contracts in particular, it’s one of the finest films about sports in general because of how raw the emotions are.

The victories are real and generational as Cruise pulls us into his orbit so closely that it makes us feel we’re the ones negotiating. Transportive cinema is never better when a great actor and director (Cameron Crowe) are, well, showing us the money and letting us go on an emotional shopping spree. This is a stone-cold classic for a reason. This movie… completes this list.

Any Given Sunday is the standard for football movies. Oliver Stone’s masterpiece is a nasty, passionate satire of the NFL, one that goes after the shied with delightfully reckless abandon.

As I wrote back in 2022, “Any Given Sundayis the best-ever football movie because it’s actuallyaboutfootball, and not the other way around. It’s decorated with a black eye and grass stains, but it’s never afraid to get back in the huddle. It’s one of the few sports movies to ever look the beast in the eyes instead of give it a belly rub.”