'When I first got to Newcastle, I thought they were speaking German!' The incredible inside story of cult football film 'Goal!' told by Santiago Muñez himself

Santiago Muñez holds the unique honour of being a Newcastle United cult hero, despite never having played a competitive game for the club. That’s because he’s fictional. He’s a character, the protagonist of an underdog story dreamed up by Hollywood film-makers. Two decades later, his name remains synonymous with one word: Goal!

Written by Adrian Butchart and Mike Jefferies, plus renowned duo Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, the brains behind cult sitcoms The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, the 2005 movie told the tale of a young Mexican, whose childhood entry into the United States under the cover of darkness preceded an unimaginable rise from recreational footballer to Premier League star.

After years in the US as an undocumented migrant, Muñez was employed part-time at a Chinese restaurant and as a labourer in Los Angeles, before being spotted playing football at a local park by Glen Foy, an ex-Newcastle player.

Believing he’d unearthed the next big thing, Foy urged his former club to give Muñez an opportunity, but the Mexican’s savings, kept in an old boot, were stolen by his father, who didn’t support his son’s dream of becoming a footballer, perceiving it as a frivolous pursuit.

Just as it appeared his hopes had been dashed, Muñez’s grandmother funded his trip to England, but he struggled to adapt to the British winter and the rough-and-tumble style of reserve-team football.

“I WAS THE WORST AT FOOTBALL”

Foy and his gut instinct persuaded Newcastle’s sceptical gaffer Erik Dornhelm (who sounds like he once managed Zambia to an Africa Cup of Nations semi-final) to extend Muñez’s trial, but the Magpies opted not to sign him permanently – that was until an intervention by star striker Gavin Harris.

By the end of the movie, Muñez was scoring the injury-time stunner that qualified Newcastle for the Champions League on the final day of the season, via tabloid scandal, personal tragedy and a love affair with the club’s nurse, played by Anna Friel. There was even a brief cameo appearance from AC/DC’s Newcastle-supporting frontman Brian Johnson, because why not?

Goal! The Dream Begins, to give the film its full title, holds a 6.7/10 rating on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and was nominated for a Teen Choice Award, alongside Pride and Prejudice. Both lost out to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but Kuno Becker, who played Muñez, picked up the best actor gong at the 2007 Imagen Awards, which recognise positive portrayals of Latinos in the entertainment industry.

That would be its only awards night win, though. Movies about football don’t usually become big screen hits, and its rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes, which collates reviews by professional critics, is only 43 per cent. “The action on the field won’t be enough to sate the most soccer-crazed viewers,” wrote the Austin Chronicle. Time Out went for a backhanded compliment, calling it the “least terrible” of “cringe-makers” like Yesterday’s Hero and Escape To Victory. The former was released in 1979, with Lovejoy star Ian McShane playing an alcoholic who returned from non-league football to help his team win the FA Cup.

In one small corner of the world, however, Goal! became a massive hit. A fish-out-of-water story following an improbable success, rough around the edges from a production point-of-view, stippled with cliches, featuring a cast of little-known stars but championing hard-working spirit, the film resonated massively with Geordies.

It was made with help from FIFA and initially intended for a Merseyside audience. But one of the project’s major financial backers, Adidas, were competing sportswear manufacturers with Liverpool’s kit-makers Reebok, so an alternative team was sought out. Instead, Newcastle were approached.

Two decades on, Becker is based in LA, the city where Muñez’s story began. After the initial Goal! movie, he also appeared in the series’ two sequels – Goal II: Living the Dream (where Muñez joins Real Madrid, rubbing shoulders with David Beckham & Co) and Goal III: Taking on the World (which is based around the World Cup).

Since then, the man from Mexico City has been involved in several other films, many in Spanish, and also appeared in a host of television series, including the relaunch of Dallas.

Today, he’s taking a laid-back approach to life – raising a young daughter, setting up a foundation to help animals and also shining a light on Latino businesses in the Southwestern United States.

Acting has taken a backseat. He’s not an easy man to track down – we can’t help but feel that’s partly by design. “My daughter’s the most important project of my life,” he tells FourFourTwo. “She put everything into perspective. To me, everything else is secondary. All the dreams that I had, a lot of them I’ve now accomplished.

“I had that dream of being in films and becoming an actor, and I’m incredibly grateful to have been in a movie that became a cult movie around the world. Others that I’ve done have been really successful, but nothing like Goal!. I’m one of the few lucky actors that can say that. I’m grateful to the audience and to everybody that keeps watching it – it’s insane how big it became.

“I’ll continue acting in other things one of these days, but I don’t have that obsession with the dream any more. I have a great life. I have a daughter, a family. I did what I wanted.” Becker is keen to talk about his culture and background. “We’re helping Hispanic and Latino small businesses here in the US, promoting them on social media, but most importantly telling their stories about how they started, the challenges they’ve had, the sacrifices they’ve made as immigrants, more than ever,” he says. “I think that’s incredibly important, to raise our voices and to actually show the facts. The facts are that immigrants are an incredible asset to the economy in the US – I can speak to that because it’s what I know.”

He freely admits that he grew up not knowing a great deal about the sport for which he’s renowned halfway across the world. He was trained in the arts as a classical musician, playing the violin and riding horses – a world away from Tyneside. Becker’s family was influenced heavily by his great aunt, Maria Felix, one of Latin America’s most successful actors of the 1940s and 1950s.

On the pitch, Becker’s portrayal of Muñez was sometimes an awkward fit. Despite rigorous training prior to filming Goal!, his on-screen performance as an attacking midfielder wouldn’t have had too many real-world scouts reaching for the phone. One thing he wasn’t was the best breakout talent since “a young Jermain Defoe” – the superb line uttered by Foy, portrayed by Stephen Dillane, to describe Muñez during the movie.

What fans of the film may not know was that Becker almost didn’t get the part. “I was never good at football in school, I was never picked like the guys who were actually good at soccer,” he admits. “I was always the really bad one – really, really bad! I trained incredibly hard for the movie.”

Alessandro Nivola, the American who depicted star striker Harris, found it a little easier. “Alessandro was a good player – he could actually play soccer,” Becker smiles. “He was way better than me, like almost everybody – anybody would have been better than me.

“On the day of the audition, I improved a little bit, but it just wasn’t in me. Some people have it, I just didn’t. The director was disappointed after all the weeks I’d trained for – for the football audition, he asked me to do a few things with the ball with other players. I couldn’t really do it – on top of not being very good at football, I’d broken my ankles because of too much training. He was really disappointed, so I didn’t get the role.”

There’s a chance that what Becker says happened next during his ultimately successful audition has been somewhat ‘Hollywood-ified’, but it does create parallels between his own story and Muñez's triumphant character arc. “The director told me, ‘You’re not going to get it – thank you for trying, but it’s not going to happen,’” Becker continues. “I was like, ‘F**k it. I trained so hard, I don’t want you to think I came here to do nothing. I did my best – I broke both of my ankles because I had a stress fracture from too much training, but I can actually keep the ball. Why don’t you try to get it from me?’ Out of five times, he got it once. The other four, I kept the ball. I went to the car that was going to take me to the hotel and back to Los Angeles, but he called me and said, ‘OK, the role’s yours.’”

The film’s reputation precedes it in footballing circles. Over the past two decades, several real-life Newcastle players – Jonas Gutierrez, Islam Slimani, and Papiss Cisse among them – have said they already knew about the club before signing because of Goal!

For Callum Wilson, it was even a factor in his decision to join the Magpies. “My son is getting to that age where he’s watching more movies – he saw Goal! and I was sitting there watching it with him,” the striker explained shortly after arriving at St James’ Park. “It got the little boy in me excited. I was thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s the one for me.’”

Even one of the Premier League’s most iconic voices recalls with clarity his minor role in the film’s production – albeit he isn’t convinced that he was first choice for the part. “I only had about three days’ notice, so I’m pretty sure someone else couldn’t do it!” laughs Sky Sports commentary legend Martin Tyler, who played himself in the movie. “I was in it with Rob Lee, who hadn’t done much co-commentary, but was very well known as a former Newcastle player.

“The actual commentary was done in a dubbing suite in London later on. In fact, I was called back because they changed the ending. I’d done my bit, with the storyline and the commentary finishing off with how well he was doing. Then they obviously had a rethink, so I was summoned back.”

"ARE THEY SPEAKING GERMAN?"

Some filming for the movie took place after an actual Newcastle game. “It was Newcastle versus Chelsea, I think an FA Cup game – the actors came onto the pitch at the end,” Tyler says. “It was a live game on Sky I was commentating for, and the actors were sprinkled on. We knew it was going to happen, and so did the players.

“It was all cleared with the FA, but we had to make sure our Sky cameramen didn’t show them on our live broadcast. We were wrapping up the FA Cup game and there were suddenly a lot more players milling around. They wanted to make it look like that part of the film was real, so they did it on a real matchday. They put a lot of work into it. It was lovely to be involved, to be honest with you.”

Newcastle fans will be glad to hear that Muñez still loves the club. “When I first got to Newcastle, I thought they were speaking German!” Becker jokes. “It’s a very different accent, but I think it’s beautiful. A lot of people complain that it’s very difficult to understand, but I think it’s really lovely. The people were incredibly warm and nice. They have a great sense of humour.

“There’s something special about Newcastle. I remember the stadium on top of the hill, St James’ Park. To me, it was also a dream. As an actor, I knew that the movie could have the potential to change my life – and it did. “It wasn’t a failure when the film opened, but it wasn’t very successful. It was OK. The people that watched it loved it, but not a lot of people saw it. But then throughout the years, it just became bigger and bigger, and became this one-of-a-kind success that few actors have the chance to experience.”

Becker hasn’t been back to Newcastle since filming wrapped – life got in the way for an actor whose day-to-day existence was dictated for a long time by the next project, the next role. Now that things have quietened down, he hopes there may be the opportunity for a Santiago Muñez homecoming. “I love Newcastle, it’s very close to my heart,” he says. “One day, I’d love to take my daughter and go back there.”

Confusingly, Newcastle did actually sign a Mexican youth international by the name of Santiago Munoz in 2021, drawing much mirth and the inevitable comparisons with Becker’s character. On an 18-month loan from Liga MX side Santos Laguna, the forward featured in a pre-season friendly against Athletic Bilbao but never made a competitive appearance. Now 23, he spent 2025 in MLS playing for Sporting Kansas City.

Munoz may not be remembered fondly by the people of Newcastle, but Muñez certainly is. In the North East, people still talk about Muhammad Ali arriving on Tyneside in 1977, how their cousin once removed used to go to school with Ant and Dec, or how Alan Shearer scored a hat-trick against them for Wallsend Boys Club. Goal! was when Hollywood came to Newcastle, briefly at least. It may not have won over the film critics, but it remains a cult classic that explored family, identity and belonging – it’s a movie about striving for better, about proving people wrong and, last of all, about football. For Kuno Becker, it was the movie that changed his life.