You don’t have to be a soccer expert, or even know much about the sport, to get sucked into the competing personalities and personal dramas depicted here.

Sure, it probably helps in terms of appreciating some of the details and nuances, especially if you’re a fan of British football. But director Tom Hooper doesn’t include very much action on the field: “The Damned United” is more about the larger-than-life figures behind the scenes, mainly Brian Clough, the real-life manager of Leeds United for a brief and tumultuous period in 1974. And you don’t even have to know who Clough was to care about him.

As he did with his brilliant and underappreciated supporting work as Tony Blair in “The Queen” and David Frost “Frost/Nixon,” Michael Sheen brings this cocky coach vividly to life. It is such a joy to see him grab hold of a starring role like this, and to see him work once again with screenwriter Peter Morgan, who wrote those earlier films.

Morgan has an uncanny knack for taking powerful and polarizing leaders and making us see them in a totally new and humanistic light. He did it with Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Nixon and, in “The Last King of Scotland,” Idi Amin.

Clough won’t be nearly as well-known to American audiences but Morgan shows us his foibles, his vulnerability, which should make him compelling to anyone.

Based on David Peace’s novel, “The Damned United” jumps back and forth between Clough’s hiring as the new Leeds coach, after the departure of the beloved Don Revie (Colm Meaney) for the English national team, and the unlikely rise Clough enjoyed with perennial cellar-dwellers.