You don’t have to love sport to love a great sports movie and so it proved for me with Transforming the Beautiful Game ― The Clyde Best Story.

This is a feature-length documentary about football, yes, but it’s actually about so much more.

The film provides an intimate portrayal of a really quite incredible man, one whose talent with a ball was paired with an inner steel and determination that most of us could only dream of possessing.

It also widens the lens to provide a historical, necessary record of a deeply troubling time in Britain’s recent past and then looks across the Atlantic to a different, but no less problematic, environment in the United States.

The movie also conveys, with gorgeous cinematography and insightful interviewees, an excellent sense of Bermuda: its foundations, its people, its spirit.

I walked away thinking how incredible it was that this tiny island produced a trailblazer like Clyde Best, but also how it made utter sense that Bermuda’s unique environment shaped him.

It helps that Best’s story is undoubtedly the stuff of movies.

We are transported back to 1968, when he flew alone to Heathrow, aged just 17, for a trial at West Ham United, the top-flight London club he dreamt of playing for as a child.

He arrived on a Sunday, having not received a message telling him to come on the Monday, and no one met him at the airport.

Best, logically, caught a tube to West Ham but the club’s ground was actually two stops further along the line. A passer-by took him to the nearby home of Jessie Charles, whose mixed-race footballing sons, John and Clive, were already with the Hammers.

The Bermudian teen was embraced by the Charles family. He lived with them for six years, developing a love of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings and becoming best friends with Clive.

The pair made history in April 1972, along with young Nigerian Ade Coker, when West Ham coach Ron Greenwood became the first manager to select three Black players for a First Division game.

At the film’s world premiere on Wednesday evening, it was when speaking of the Charles family after the screening that Best was overcome with emotion.

Jessie, John and Clive have all passed away and Best told me on the red carpet that the presence of their relatives at the event, opposite West Ham’s London Stadium, meant everything to him.

It was serendipitous that he found such warmth and love at the Charles’s home, because Black players had rarely been seen in the English football league and he was repeatedly met with racial hatred from fans when on the pitch.

Best silenced the jeers and the monkey noises in the finest way possible: breathtaking goals. The rare archival footage in the film illustrates this perfectly.

Transforming the Beautiful Game doesn’t shy away from the fact that football can be ugly and there is nothing uglier than the prejudice Best, and other Black players, encountered at grounds across England.

Interviews in the documentary with former professional players such as John Barnes, Ian Wright, Viv Anderson, Garth Crooks and Paul Canoville really probe the roots of that hatred ― and its impact on those on the receiving end.

Watching as a Brit (one from the north of England, where the racial insults came especially thick and fast in the 1960s and 70s), I felt a sense of shame on behalf of my country.

That we still haven’t laid racism against Black players to rest is as shocking as it is depressing and a key reason why this film is so vital and has the potential to do so much good.

Many spoke on Wednesday night of the importance of Black youngsters — in the UK, US, Bermuda and beyond — seeing this movie about such an inspirational Black role model. It should be required watching for young White people too.

Best is widely loved — by West Ham fans, by North Americans who watched him play in the North American Soccer League (NASL) in the 1970s and 80s, primarily for the Portland Timbers, and, of course, at home.

That comes over a thousandfold in director Dan Egan’s paean to him and to the game.

This is a film about the power of sport, racism, dreaming big, staying the course, and, ultimately, about character and human decency.

Football may not always be a beautiful game, as Best’s hero and friend Pelé once described it, but this is a beautiful film; profoundly so.

Sports fan or otherwise, it’s not to be missed.

• Transforming the Beautiful Game — The Clyde Best Story will be shown at the Earl Cameron Theatre, City Hall, on April 21 and 22, and at the Ruth Seaton James Centre for the Performing Arts in Devonshire, from April 23 to 26. Tickets are available at clydebest.shop