The film opens in 1914, on the eve of World War I, a tense moment framed around Gavrilo Princip’s departure just before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The story then shifts to Saint Petersburg, where the heart of the narrative centers on two brothers, Andrei Evgeniy Pronin and Nikolai Danila Kozlovsky. Their family history is a quiet tragedy that fuels their shared love of football. Their father once poured everything into a Russian football team, chasing a dream of glory, but the team suffered a devastating 0–16 defeat against the Germans in Stockholm in 1912. That crushing loss drove him to ruin and madness, and after their mother dies, the brothers end up living with their uncle, a doctor who becomes their guardian. Football remains a bright thread in their lives, a hobby that binds them to a makeshift squad that includes Shust and the goalkeeper Misha—whom the brothers nicknamed Tolstiy—as they cling to their dream.
Andrei Evgeniy Pronin forges a complex bond with Anitsa Chulpan Khamatova, a young Belgrade-born widow who hosts salon evenings where poetry and culture mingle. At her gatherings, the stage feels alive with names like Osip Mandelstam Sergei Bugayev, Anna Akhmatova, and Vladislav Khodasevich, and she remains close with Alexander Blok Gosha Kutsenko, whom Nikolai also knows. The presence of these poets adds a lyrical, fraught backdrop to the brothers’ growing ambitions and the fragility of the era around them.
When the brothers read about British workers in Saint Petersburg forming their own teams, they try out for new clubs, but they are not accepted. Undeterred, they dream of building their own football field, a dream that leads them to purchase an empty plot of land. To raise the necessary funds, they begin playing football for money with local teams, turning their talent into a means of survival and a way to keep hope alive amid mounting hardship.
Into this already precarious world comes Vita [Iamze Sukhitashvili], Anitsa’s sister, who arrives in the city with a small boy and quickly becomes close to Nikolai. She suggests that he marry her, a plan that seems to offer a future even as danger and debt loom large—with Shust delivering the money to Torgash, only for thugs to kill Vita and Shust when debts catch up with them. Vita and the boy leave the city as the storm around the brothers intensifies, and Nikolai is pulled toward the front as war creeps closer.
Back home, Andrei marries Nina [Dana Agisheva], and the couple lives with their child in the apartment of their late uncle—an upbringing shadowed by the losses that have carved their paths. Andrei’s hunger for food and stability brings him to the House of Writers, where he encounters the legendary figure Blok in a moment that underscores how culture and daily scarcity collide in this troubled era.
As famine tightens its grip on Petrograd, the city’s identity shifts; the brothers return to the wasteland where their field once stood as a symbol of possibility. Nikolai returns from the front, and the pair find renewed purpose as they reconnect with their shared dream: to play, to compete, and to carve out a place for their family and friends in a city buckling under pressure. The landscape—once a blank plot of land—is now a stage for resilience, where a football is more than a ball; it is a beacon that unites brothers, lovers, poets, and strangers alike in the face of war, famine, and upheaval.
