Though the football is thrilling, this documentary about England’s former goalkeeper plays it too safe
Male sports stars are the subject of sanitised hagiographies all the time – so it is probably unfair to expect more of Mary Earps: Queen of Stops, a slick, shallow profile of England’s Euro 2022-winning goalkeeper.
She certainly deserves the praise. Earps is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest shot-stoppers, playing a crucial role in England’s Euro 2022 win – that once-in-a-lifetime occasion where the England football team lived up to the “It’s Coming Home” hype/nonsense. As her Paris Saint-Germain coach, Mickael Grondin, says: “Very few goal keepers – and I’m talking about men – have that intuition. That’s what makes Mary one of the world’s best goal keepers”.
But while there is no doubt about either her talent or her determination, the film nonetheless has the fluffy aura of a puff piece. There is nothing about her abrupt retirement this May from international football, just 36 days before the start of the 2025 European Championship (which began on Wednesday). Fair enough – it’s only just happened and Queen of Stops may well have been in the can. Still, it was a major postscript that could have been acknowledged.
Nor is she asked any potentially controversial questions about the women’s game and how it remains the literal poor relation to the men’s one (attendances have sky-rocketed, yet female players still earn a fraction of what their male counterparts take home).
Such reticence on the part of the filmmakers is a shame as Earps knows her mind and seems up for answering anything thrown at her. Touring a swish clothes store where her likeness is emblazoned on a screen – one of the many endorsements that came her way post-Euros – she tells her mum that she has “always struggled with body confidence”. It would be intriguing to hear her opinion on how female sports stars are perceived compared to men. Are they objectified more?
It isn’t as if she doesn’t have views on these subjects. “You have a sports person who doesn’t look like your typical model – young sporty girls get to have representation in that way,” she says of her experiences of the spotlight. “You’re very much open to criticism, especially when you put your personality out there. It’s the consequence of having the courage to be yourself.”
But Queen of Stops doesn’t have much of an interest in tackling any heavy-weight issues – even when they have impacted Earps. Instead, it settles for a straightforward profile of her early career that feels more like an extended report on the evening news than a stand-alone documentary. Former team-mates including Ella Toone, Alessia Russo, and Ellen White sing her praises and there are some nice scenes of her irreverently bantering with her brother, Joel, who struggles to see this global sports star as anything other than his older sibling.
The football, at least, is thrilling. Tracing her journey from playing for her local amateur side in Nottingham to her international career, there’s lots of satisfying footage of Earps exerting acrobatic leaps to stop the ball from flying past her. We also revisit the heartache of England’s loss at the 2023 World Cup, where she saved a penalty in the final against Spain, only for the Lionesses to ultimately lose 1-0.
However, here again, there is a missed opportunity to compare her experience of playing in Paris with that in England. Are attitudes toward female athletes different on the Continent? It would also have been informative to hear about her motives for leaving her previous team Manchester United – and whether it is tied to the continued upheaval at England’s most troubled mega-club (a statement she put out at the time suggested as much).
The only controversy that is addressed is Earp’s public criticism of Nike after it declined to make her 2023 goalkeeper strip available for sale. She publicly called out this global sports brand and, like an iffy centre-half, it buckled under pressure. Nike’s capitulation is a testament to Earps’ unbending will to win. What a pity this by-the-numbers documentary isn’t more curious about that side of her.
‘Mary Earps: Queen of Stops’ is available to stream on BBC iPlayer
