Purely Belter is a 2000 British comedy drama film directed by Mark Herman about two teenagers (Chris Beattie and Greg McLane) trying to get money, by any means necessary, in order to get season tickets for home games of Premier League football team Newcastle United.

Sewell (Greg McLane) and Gerry (Chris Beattie), football-mad teenagers from broken families in Gateshead, break into Newcastle United's St James' Park stadium and steal the "sacred" turf from the penalty spot.

Sewell, who lives with his permanently befuddled grandfather (Roy Hudd), adopts a dog who follows him after wandering away from his owner, a local thug.

At home, Gerry lives with his sickly mother (Charlie Hardwick) and his sister Clare (Tracy Whitwell) who has a baby.

They are separated from their violent father Billy (Tim Healy) who has been sexually abusing Gerry's other sister Bridget (Kerry Ann Christiansen), who has run away from home.

At the Newcastle United training ground at the Riverside pavilion (Chester-le-Street), they briefly meet Alan Shearer and ask him to give them season tickets, but he just laughs.

Having lost all their earnings, Sewell and Gerry decide on one last major crime, a bank robbery that goes disastrously wrong; the lads are arrested.

Critic Robert Shail praised the film for its "toughness", saying that it has "enough grit" to depict the characters' lives "without condescension or recourse to easy solutions".

[3] Adrian J. Walsh and Richard Giulianotti point to a "subtext" in the film, linking the poverty and injustice in the lads' lives to the main motivation for the plot, which arises from the fact that "entry prices in what was once the people's game have become so high as to exclude many of the traditional fan base.