Fever Pitch (1997)

Nick Hornby adapted his own best-selling memoir of soccer obsession into a romantic comedy, with Colin Firth as an English teacher whose devotion to Arsenal strains a new relationship with a colleague. It arrived just as following English soccer was turning from a working-class habit of the standing terraces into something people talked about at dinner parties, and it catches that shift with real affection. Firth is likable and the north London fandom rings true, though the romance is the thinner half; the film comes alive whenever the season does. Pick this, not the 2005 American remake, which swapped Arsenal for the Boston Red Sox.