Ninety-percent funded by FIFA,[3] it stars Tim Roth, Gérard Depardieu and Sam Neill, and is directed by Frédéric Auburtin.

The film's North American release on 5 June 2015 was particularly unsuccessful, coinciding with the 2015 FIFA corruption case.

The film was also a major box-office bomb, losing $26.8 million worldwide[1] and failing to obtain theatrical distribution in many markets.

Rimet is at the point of giving up organizing the World Cup due to a lack of funds until he receives an unexpected letter from Enrique Buero.

Havelange sees FIFA as an organization in financial disarray and works to find various sponsors to finance its operation.

Throughout his tenure as the president of FIFA, he has a right-hand man, Sepp Blatter, who impresses Havelange with his unrelenting work.

The film ends with Blatter announcing South Africa as the host nation for the 2010 World Cup.

"[12] The film also faced criticism from the media concerning the £16 million cost of production, more than the annual turnover of most of FIFA's national associations.

[15][18] It opened on Friday, 5 June 2015, and grossed a mere $319 on its opening day from 10 theatres in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Kansas City, Miami, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia, followed by an even worse $288 on Saturday.

[6][19][20] The FilmBar theatre in Downtown Phoenix reported a gross of $9, indicating that only one person bought a ticket to see the film.

In North America, it ended up becoming the lowest-grossing film of all time,[21] surpassing the previous record held by I Kissed a Vampire ($1,380) in 2012.

The film has been criticized for the poor quality of the drama,[25] the unsuitability of the topic of administrative matters for a movie[26] and the perceived biases of the film, with The Guardian describing it as "cinematic excrement" and "self-hagiography",[25] and others calling it a "cringeworthy, self-aggrandizing affair",[9] and "astonishingly crass".

Sara Stewart of the New York Post described it as "hilariously ill-timed",[28] while Paul Field of the Daily Mirror said that this created "unintentional comedy gold".

[29] Writing in the London Evening Standard, Des Kelly described United Passions as "the worst movie ever made" and "the most extraordinary vanity exercise; a vile, self-aggrandizing, sugar-coated pile of manure where Blatter and Co. manage to make North Korea's Kim Jong-un look self-effacing".

[30] Daniel M. Gold of The New York Times said that United Passions is "one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory, a dishonest bit of corporate-suite sanitizing that's no good even for laughs".

"It's incredibly unusual for a non-studio to put that much money into a film with no distribution or anything already in place … no pre-sales, no sales done on Cannes," he said, adding that "some of my dialogue was cut because [Blatter] didn't like the tone of the way I was asking some of the questions.