The Backroom Staff - Documentary Director: Josh Gloer

Documentary Director: Josh Gloer

Telling human stories through football

On Global FC’s website, they feature a quote from former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: ‘Soccer is not only the great equalizer, it is a universal sport and language that speaks into the hearts of people around the world.’ For young people arriving in Kansas City from conflict zones across the world, Global FC offered a place to gather, play and belong.

Josh Gloer is an Emmy-nominated documentary director with over 20 years of experience across film and television, with work featured on History, Hulu, A&E, PBS, MTV, and Peacock. But it was a chance visit to a Global FC practice - and a pointed question from his 9-year-old daughter - that pushed him toward the most personal project of his career.

In this interview, Josh shares the story behind Chasing Goals, his documentary following Global FC's refugee youth team as they compete in the USA Cup, the biggest youth tournament in the country. He talks candidly about ethical storytelling, independent filmmaking, the bond he formed with the players and how this project changed the direction of his career.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 

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[ Background ]

I grew up in Kansas City, and I went to LA for 15 years, where I worked in TV, primarily in true crime. I think, while it’s kind of fun to watch, true crime can be difficult to do. It’s a world you never experience and you get a small window into this terrifying environment and working in it, you’re rehashing the worst part of someone’s life over and over and over again. Flying around the U.S. to interview a girl about watching her parents get murdered - that’s not fulfilling, it’s very sad and depressing. As someone who’s done 20 seasons of true crime, it affected me mentally.

I remember I had this shift a few years ago when my daughter - she was 9 years old - walked into the room and I had to minimize all the monitors because there are crime scene photos and a police case file and all these things - and I don’t want her to see all of that. I had mentioned something like, ‘I don’t really like doing this’. She asked me what I was doing and I told her I’m working on a murder show. And she’s like, ‘why don’t you do something you like?’

And it became sort of obvious. Like, that’s a total cliche, ‘from the mouth of babes’, but it was this light bulb moment. We’re here for a finite amount of time, why are we wasting any of it?

[ Global FC ]

I started thinking about what I could do. I have a background in television and film, I’ve done it now for almost 30 years. At the same time, coincidentally, the U.S. was withdrawing from Afghanistan and a lot of Afghan refugees were coming to the United States.

I live in a very conservative part of the U.S, and I kept hearing things like, ‘yeah, as long as they don't come to my neighborhood, we'll be fine’, and that was very disturbing to me. I started volunteering at different refugee resettlement agencies. Then, someone told me about this soccer club Global FC. It’s a club made up of refugee kids playing soccer and it’s a way to get them together, keep them out of trouble, give them tutoring, point them towards resources and just give them a community - the ‘FC’ is actually for football community instead of football club.

I went to a practice and immediately knew this was a story. I thought, here’s my opportunity, I’m going to make a film about refugees and humanize them. I also decided that my daughter needs to see this, you know, as a suburban white girl with no problems - and she couldn’t do a lot of the work like moving people into houses and that kind of thing.

At the time, they had just gotten a new director of coaching who decided what this club is missing is fierce competition. They play in the Heartland League, where they beat all the teams, it’s 10-1 every game! These kids are really good, they grew up all over the world with nothing to do but play soccer. So, they decided to make an U18s team by combining the U15s, U16s and U17s with the goal of competing in the USA Cup.

This was decided about 4 weeks before the tournament - three different teams coming together. I knew this was unique, I’d never heard of anyone doing this before and as a documentarian, I knew this was a documentary. I basically just walked out onto the field with my shooter and a second camera and started filming!

Now, two and a half years later, we have a full documentary that we're going to release during the World Cup in Kansas City. It'll be playing at the Fan Festival and some other cool places.

It shows these kids on and off the pitch and living here in Kansas City, realizing that the ‘American dream’ is different than they thought. People see Kansas City and don’t think it’s violent but per capita, the gun violence is very high, for example. But also, training with no shoes or shoes with holes in them or two different shoes and going to compete against rich white kids from the suburbs who’ve been playing together since they were 4.

The film is really a David and Goliath story, and I won't spoil it, but they go to this tournament and do really, really well.

[ Did you have any background or interest in sports - or soccer specifically - before you got involved in this project? ]

That’s been interesting, my daughter plays soccer but she played rec soccer, and when we got into this, she moved up to competitive soccer. We took her to a Kansas City Current game. We’re the first city to have a (purpose-built) women’s stadium in the world - our city really rallies behind women’s sports. Anyway, my daughter’s a goalkeeper and fell in love with the goalkeeper at the time, AD Franch, and we’ve become superfans.

Part of it was me going to Global FC and watching three practices a week and listening to the coaches. I really understand the game in a way that I didn’t three years ago.

But really, my interest was telling the human story. And soccer is a great way to get people interested but really these are just kids. The whole mission of the film is to do two things - one, make these kids feel like someone cared and followed through for them, and their coaches have been in lockstep with me, they’re amazing, the volunteers, mentors, everybody at the club has been amazing, it’s been a real team effort. And two, to just humanize refugees and immigrants, something that’s been demonized in the United States as a ‘crisis’.

[ Can you talk about the actual ‘logistics’ of filming a documentary? How do you go from idea to a full length documentary? ]

The way we did this was absolutely crazy. We did everything the wrong way!

I’ve done television and film for 30 years, but it’s always been on a big production like Hulu or Netflix or whatever. This was me, with no money, and a friend who agreed to help me film it.

We talked with the club and got permission to start. I mean, they thought it was a great idea because they’re always fundraising. They knew I wanted to do a documentary, but I think they thought I’d come one day and that would be it. 3 years later and I’m still going! We’re done with the shooting but they couldn’t get rid of me. I still help out and mentor the team.

When my shooter and I went out on the first day, we went around and got permission from all the players, most of them were minors, so we got all the parents to sign, but they all wanted to do it. It was kind of amazing.

It’s crazy that they just let me in. We gained their trust in a matter of weeks and they would tell us their life story, they would have us come to their house, they would tell us really horrific - and also really aspirational - things that are really hard for a teenage boy to tell a stranger on camera.

Unfortunately, we lost a kid a couple of weeks ago to suicide, who is a really big part of the film. We’re now dedicating the film to him and trying to do a lot of special things for him. It’s turned into something that means much more to me than a film.

These kids mean everything to me, and my family. My daughter loves them. We all go watch their games - some of them are getting scholarships and going off to college, and we try to watch their college games and their select league games. We’ve turned into soccer superfans, but really, we've turned into fans of these boys.

Watching them go through the trials and tribulations that they go through that we don't even consider, has been a really, really powerful thing.

[ What are some ‘easy’ or common mistakes you think that filmmakers - especially documentary filmmakers - make when telling stories about vulnerable communities? ]

Yeah, you could exploit these people very easily, right? You could make it poverty porn.

We shot their truth, their reality. And we didn’t sell this - we pitched it to Netflix but didn’t sell. I think if we’d made it more sensational or more salacious, we could have sold it. But we chose not to - not because we’re ‘heroes’ but because we want it to be honest.

I think the biggest mistake is trying to make something ‘marketable’. I’ve done a lot of ‘reality TV’ where you manipulate everything and does that make it better? It depends on how you look at it. Is it better if someone freaks out and cries on TV? I mean, if it’s 12 drunk kids living in a house together, sure, maybe.

If it’s a community of refugees living together, just tell their story the way it is and let the chips fall where they may. The only thing you can control is what you do. I can't control whether Netflix wants to see this, whether I manipulate it or not, so I might as well be ethical and tell the right story.

[ You mentioned one path - e.g. Netflix buying it - but you’ve gone another way. How did you get funding for this? ]

I get calls every day - people who have great ideas and they want to know where to get funding. The answer is there's no right answer to how to get funding.

But if you buy a camera - or in our case, we already owned our own gear - you can basically shoot it for free, except for our time. Some of the funding stuff is kind of a misnomer, in that, most people have cell phones that are good enough that you can shoot a documentary with. So, if you have an idea for a documentary, go shoot it. Shoot a small thing and try to sell it, try to get money for it.

There are grants you can apply for. Maybe you have a rich uncle. Every state, every country, and a lot of cities have a film office where they can point you towards grants and all kinds of stuff. Tourism boards often help pay for things. There are a million ways.

For us, it was ‘death by paper cut’, spending a little here and a little there. Because it was over 2 years and not all at once, it didn’t seem like a huge deal because I was still working on TV shows at the same time.

For this, I paid for it myself. I paid for all of the production costs out of my own pocket. Then, I was fortunate enough to have a company called Wavelength - who did the Messi documentary and tons of award-winning docs - with great people on board who helped with the editing, and paid for the editing. Curtis McConnell became our editor, who just won an Emmy for Welcome to Wrexham. We couldn’t have finished without them because I spent all the money on the production!

Our third partner is the Kansas City Chiefs, the American football team, which was really cool for me as a ‘Kansas Citian’. They helped pay for the color and sound correction.

So, the funding came in three phases. But first, it was just me taking a huge risk.

I think that if you find a story that you want to tell, you can do two things. You can shoot a sizzle reel, and then try to get money for it for 17 years, and maybe never get money for it. Or you can just keep filming, and keep trying to get money while you film - and maybe you never get any.

[ I imagine it’s easier for people to come on board if you already have a lot of the work done vs just an idea? ]

100%. We had the whole thing shot, and we had a trailer, so it was like look, we need to finish this, but it's shot, the ‘heavy lifting’ has been done. Still, the editing is not easy. We went through multiple iterations of what this should be but with their guidance, our creativity, Curtis’ creativity, we learned this is not a story about soccer but about these kids and about humanity.

I think it paid off. We’re premiering with FIFA at the Fan Festival in Kansas City for the World Cup. We’re in a new sports film festival - Full Tilt - which should get a lot of eyeballs. And you never know, somebody could pick it up but, for me, the main goal is for these boys to see it.

I’ll never forget the first day we were shooting and somebody came up to me at the end of the practice and was like, ‘can I have my clips?’ And it's like, this is gonna take 2 years! So, it’s been a long journey and the anticipation has really been building for them. I think it’s going to be really powerful, especially with our late brother as a main part of this.

[ How has this impacted the work you’re going to do going forward? ]

I've now pivoted my entire business to filming stories in soccer and sports that aren’t usually filmed - or don’t get the attention they deserve.

For example, I’m working on a story of a woman who walks a mile to a well, to get water for the soccer team - she’s doing this for these kids to be able to do the one thing they love to do. This is a woman who no one will ever know about unless someone tells her story.

If there was a smattering of that across the world, how much better would things be? As a filmmaker, I feel compelled to find as many of these stories as I can and tell them. I don’t know who's gonna watch them, but at least I'm trying. It’s just that simple - if everyone would try one thing to try to make things better - we’d be a lot better off.

[ You’re also doing something new with VICE - is this opportunity related to your work on this documentary? ]

After my part is done, there are a lot of things that are out of the director’s purview. I don’t know how to market a film, for example. My job is to make the film, and then there are smarter people than me in that area and they can handle it.

I started thinking about what I’m going to do next. I had some ideas and just started reaching out to people and asking, ‘what stories do you know of?’ I reached out to a lot of nonprofits and NGOs. I have a friend in Kenya who runs a club in the slums that I help support financially as well as a club in Ghana that I help financially - and I want to tell their stories. But I can’t afford to fly to Africa and try to make a documentary. I need someone to pay me at this point.

In that process of reaching out, I reached out to VICE, kind of on a whim. There were some brief discussions about putting our film up with them but I’m not really involved with that, but they asked me if I wanted to make it a series. Well, it belongs to two other partners too, so I can’t make it a series but I can do something similar and do a mini docu-series.

We just did one on the Kansas City Kings - a wheelchair basketball team - that went to the national championship. It was really cool and in many ways very similar to Chasing Goals - which is not the model I want to stick with all the time but it was a lot of fun and I like to find things that people know exist but never think about. A lot of things, we ‘know about’ but unless it affects you, most people aren’t really ‘aware’ - disability, addiction, foster care, adoption, food insecurity, oppressed people, immigrants, all these things.

I want to find these stories and make people think about them. And VICE is allowing me to explore that area and make a series. We’re wrapping up the first one (about the wheelchair basketball team) and hopefully it’ll drop soon and we’ll see what’s next. In my industry, you kind of never know. It could be, ‘great, we’ll never talk to you again’ or, ‘we’d like 10 more of these’ but you just have to keep as many irons in the fire as possible and keep pushing forward.

[ How does your level of ambition change when you’re working with a big company vs something more independent? ]

It's funny because the answer is really both, but in different ways. To do it on your own, you have to be so ambitious, you have to basically be a crazy person because you’re taking such a risk. I’m risking my family’s money, I’m risking time with my daughter. And, in this case, it really paid off, because we’re all so involved and my daughter loves these boys.

When you're working with a large company, there's a lot of anxiety around, frankly, getting hired again and for better or worse, often puts you in a mindset of trying to keep them happy. A lot of the business is ‘you’re only as good as your last piece’. So the ‘ambition’ is really just the ability to keep doing it day after day when people tell you no 20 times a day.

The only thing I know how to do is tell stories, and I feel that you’re not trying to figure out a way to do something positive with whatever it is you do, then you’re wasting your time. So, for me, this is what drives me more than who I’m doing it for, whether it’s for myself or a big company, I’m going to try to do something positive. I’m sure there are times when I have to pay the bills, where I’ll do a show that I don’t really care about but usually while I’m doing that, I’m doing something for myself on top of that.

[ You’ve been working in TV and film for years, has this experience (filming Chasing Goals) taught you something new? ]

It's interesting because there are things that people tell you your whole life, right? Like, eat right and exercise, you'll probably be in shape - and you’re like, it can’t be that easy or whatever, and then you do it and realize, oh, it is that easy - for most people, of course.

For me, the cliche that people have always told me is, work on what you want to work on, and it will be better. Up until now, I’ve always been ‘hired in’ - and I’m grateful for the work - I’ve worked with a lot of great people and have been part of some really good shows (and some not so good shows!) so it’s no slight on this. But I found out, this film is the best thing I've ever done, and it's because I care about it, it's because I wanted to do it, it's because the whole team around me is passionate about it.

If you do what you want to do, more people will respond to it positively than if you’re trying to do what you think they want you to do. For 20 years, I’ve been trying to pitch things I think will be marketable, thinking, ‘what is A&E looking for?’ They change their mind all the time anyway!

A lot of people are in jobs they don't care about, and can go home, and that's fine, but there's a creative brain that's like, ‘I can't do that’. I can’t shut it off. So the options are, can that be something positive that you want to think about all night? Or is it a show that you hate? Because you’re going to think about it all night either way!

I think Bukowski said, ‘find what you love and let it kill you’, which is a little hyperbolic, but that’s kind of what it is! For me, that’s figuring out a way to tell the stories of people in a way that might help them. I’m not saying I'm going to change someone’s world, but if people treat someone, or a group, differently because of something I’ve done, that will be enough for me.

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