Timeliness: Will it help ‘Goal’ score?

“GOAL! The Dream Begins,” which opens Friday, is a classic sports underdog story in the vein of “Rocky,” “Remember the Titans,” “Seabiscuit,” “Miracle” and “Glory Road.”

But there’s one big difference: The protagonist, soccer player Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker), is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who has lived in Los Angeles with his grandmother, father and younger brother for a decade.

Producer Mike Jefferies says the decision to make Santiago an undocumented immigrant was made to “touch on the political issue. I have lived in L.A. for many years and am aware that [the immigrant issue] has been brewing and bubbling for some time and would be contemporary at some point.”

Making Santiago undocumented also served to up the ante for the character. Santiago, who works with his father as a landscaper as well as a restaurant busboy, dreams of becoming a professional soccer player. When he gets the opportunity to try out with one of England’s top-ranked teams, Newcastle United, Santiago knows that he won’t be able to return to Los Angeles. “It sets the stakes incredibly high for him to achieve what he achieves,” said Jefferies, who moved from England to the United States in 2000.

Alessandro Nivola, who plays the bad-boy superstar of the team, said that “Goal” is a very American story. “It is a movie that fits a Hollywood mold: It’s a classic underdog story, and that is sort of something American has defined itself by,” he said.

“It’s interesting,” he added. “Some people are saying that that kind of story should no longer be an American story -- that we should send all [the immigrants] home.”

Nivola’s grandparents were immigrants to America. “My grandparents were refugees” during World War II, he said. “My grandmother was a German Jew and my grandfather was an Italian sculptor. She had grown up in Milan and met him in an art school. During the war, they were spied on and escaped to Paris on fake passports, and with fake documents came to New York. They had something like $5. It was a classic immigrant story.”

Becker, whose great aunt was the famed Mexican actress Maria Felix, also comes from an immigrant family.

“My grandfather was a German immigrant in Mexico in the 1940s,” he said. “My other grandfather was a Spanish immigrant in Mexico after the civil war in Spain. My two grandmothers are Mexican. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be here.

“I consider myself an immigrant [in the U.S.], so if somebody understands [immigrants], it’s me.”

Becker said he was pleased to see so many American flags during the recent demonstrations for immigrant rights. “They want to be part of this society,” he said of those flag-wavers. “I really believe in adapting to a society, rather than adapting a society to you.”

Unlike his movie character, the Mexican-born Becker spent his childhood in Germany and Austria and studied violin from the ages of 6 to 16. Still, he said, he related to Santiago.

“Everybody has dreams,” the 28-year-old veteran of numerous Mexican telenovelas said. “Everybody wants to achieve something. Everybody in my family thought I was going to be a professional classical musician and then I decided to switch to acting. My family was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ I said, ‘I want to change the instrument.’ I wanted to achieve [by] working in these kinds of movies.”

“Goal!’ is the first in a trilogy of films dealing with Santiago and his quest for greatness on the soccer field. The second one, “Goal! 2: Living the Dream,” is scheduled for release this fall; the third installment will begin production next month during the World Cup in Germany.

Jefferies said he and his business partner, Matt Barrelle, realized early on in Hollywood that soccer could be fertile film territory. It “is not only the world’s biggest sport, it is the biggest form of content on television,” he explained. “It seemed to us there was a landscape upon which a journey of a young man could unfold.”

The production team met with officials of soccer’s world governing body -- FIFA, the Federation Internationale de Football Assn. -- in Paris. “They basically gave us access to feature real teams in real competition with real players in return for what would be a wonderful series of three commercials for the game, particularly in emerging markets such as Asia and the USA,” Jefferies said. (A portion of the profits from the trilogy will go to developing football facilities for kids in Third World countries.)

“Once we had that established, we sat down and talked to two of their sponsors, closing deals with Adidas and Coca-Cola,” he said. Besides both companies co-branding their products with “Goal!” advertising, he continued, the film was able to use Adidas properties in the movie -- “not least of which is [soccer superstar] David Beckham, who appears in all three movies. And the football team [in the movie] is the Adidas-sponsored Newcastle United.”

The producers then raised the $100 million to make all three films. “We were editing [the first one] when Disney picked up the rights to distribute the movie worldwide, excluding a few territories,” Jefferies said. There was synergy involved for Disney: It owns ABC, which holds the World Cup broadcasting rights in the United States.

“Goal!” opened in most foreign markets last fall. “We put back the release in the U.S.,” Jefferies said. “The World Cup is around the corner and the USA ... has a great chance of winning.”