The players emerge from a modest puff of dry ice in the conference room of a Kentucky hotel. The crowd is no more than a hundred strong, but it sounds like more. They’re all here to establish one thing: the best table football player in the world.

For many of us, our experience of table football (or foosball, a corruption of the German fussball) begins with Chandler and Joey’s apartment in Friends and ends with that bar on Shoreditch High Street. In fact, a century has passed since Harold Searles Thornton, a Tottenham supporter, first patented his concept in 1921 and set in motion the gently oscillating boom-and-bust story that is the evolution of table football.

And where a sport has an even mildly interesting story to tell, a Netflix-style documentary isn’t usually far behind: at last week's Kicking and Screening Soccer Film Festival, Foosballers had its New York premiere. “It started as a conversation in my dining room,” says director Joe Heslinga. “Eventually, we uncovered a piece of sports history that 99 per cent of the world doesn’t know exists.”

After becoming popular in Europe towards the middle of the 20th century, the game was brought home by American troops from the Second World War. By the 1970s, it had grown out of the confines of suburban games rooms and, with the help of promoters, become a phenomenon. $50,000 was on offer at the inaugural World Championships in 1974, Porsches and Corvettes were being offered up as prizes, a tournament was held at Playboy Towers in Chicago, before the tour reached its million-dollar zenith in 1980.