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Boca Juniors Confidential- Series Review

Where to Watch: Netflix

After watching a lot of sports documentaries on both Amazon Prime and Netflix about teams I knew or heard of, I decided to watch a series about a team I was not aware of. 

“Boca Juniors” is an Argentine Football Team based in Buenos Aires which plays in the "SuperLiga Argentina" and if it does well in this league, it qualifies for the “Copa Libertadores”, the highest level of football in South America. (The equivalent of the UEFA Champions League in Europe).

As both these tournaments are not broadcast in India, I thought it would be a great chance to explore football on the other side of the planet. I was thoroughly disappointed.

This series has 4 episodes, each episode running about 40 minutes, and features parts of the 2017-18 season of the club. While other football series had mostly 5-6 hours of content, I wondered how they managed to show it in less than 3 hours.

This series suffers from pacing issues. The first two episodes show the team’s training sessions along with some interviews and the last two episodes have some content from matches, meaning they have crammed all of the footballing action in less than 1.5 hours.  The content from matches is also choppily edited and you neither get an insider’s view into the team’s discussions nor the intense drama associated with a match. Most of the series I have watched have all the action intertwined - the buildup to a match, the actual match, and the outcome of the match and its effect in the context of the team’s season. This series had an uneven tone which made the first couple of episodes a bore to watch and then whizzed past the next two episodes.

On the whole, it had a story worth telling but the producers have not done justice to it. I would recommend you skip this unless you are a football fanatic.

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