I loved GOAL!: THE DREAM BEGINS.  It was a story of a young man, Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker), who acheives his dream of playing on a soccer team in England (it is known as football and not soccer over in most parts of the world except the USA).  He finds love.  GOAL II: LIVING THE DREAM picks up over a year since the end of the first movie.   He hass been living in a house with Roz (Anna Friel), his girlfriend, for ten months.   He gets an offer to play for Real Madrid, a big Spanish team.  He accepts despite misgivings from Roz.  He is first on the bench while his friend from the first one (Gavin Harris) hasn't scored a goal for the last 14 games.  Santiago scores goals from the team while Gavin continues his downturn.   Their roles switch when things go bad for Santiago.   Fame gets to Santi's head too much and causes many things to spiral out of control.  He also finds out the mother that abandoned him is in Spain and he has a little brother he doesn't know about.

GOAL 2 is a follow-up not without problems.   You see the usual melodrama and the film shines when it focuses on the soccer game (or football as everyone else except the USA knows it as).   You have the annoying little kid brother who has a chip on his soldier (the kid needs a good spanking).  The melodrama is a little too high on this one.   Rutger Hauer is great as the coach of the Real Madrid team.  The second of the series manages to combine the real players and the real games into the story like the first film did.   David Beckham and other soccer players make cameos in the film.  The move by the filmmakers to do this make the games and films seem more real.  I can't wait to see the third film come to DVD in the USA and hope the story does overcome the flaws that run rampant in the script for GOAL 2.