The Final: Attack On Wembley
In July 2021, England took on Italy in the Final of the European Championship, held in London’s Wembley Stadium. Buoyed by the success of a young England team, the game attracted immense interest despite a shortage of tickets, leading to thousands of England fans arriving in the vicinity of the stadium despite having no legitimate means of getting in. Add in plenty of alcohol, and other things, and the result was chaos.
The latest in a sub-genre that seems like we could dub it “Netflix documentary” (you know what I mean: talking heads with no interviewers, no narration, text messages on-screen), The Final: Attack On Wembley is a recordation exercise that documents general insanity, disgrace and lasting embarrassment that occurred for England and the English football-obsessed community in the Summer of 2021, and it does have a very interesting subject matter at its heart. But the problem is that it doesn’t stick with that subject matter. Despite only having 82 minutes or so to fill, this is a documentary that is basically trying to make three points at once, in another instance where the lazy approach of essentially filming a Wikipedia entry is not obfuscated by the few tricks attempted here and there.
So, how does it fare on the main point, namely the hooligan behaviour that threated to turn the titular Final into a catastrophe? Not very great really. Aside from tonnes of re-used footage freely available on social media to fill the time, Attack On Wembley deems that the best use of its time is in allowing some of the malcontents who engaged in that hooliganism to get as much time and space as they need to express no shame or regrets about their behaviour. Indeed, I would go further and say that the main irresponsibility of this documentary is in allowing its criminal subjects the opportunity to glamourise their behaviour. Said behaviour runs the gambit: illegal substance abuse, public property damage, general harassment, drunk and disorderly in public, breaking-and-entering, assaulting stadium officials, assaulting police, racism, and all of it dismissed with-a-and-a-wink by a bunch of cretins only too happy to beam smiles at the Netflix cameras and bare-facedly claim that their behaviour is justified because of Partygate. The absolute troglodyte who claims he is looking forward to telling his grandkids about how he danced on top of a bus, drunk out of his mind, can’t obfuscate the deeper reality, which is that a crowd of drunken morons surrounded a bus, trapped its driver and passengers, and then beat on the windows for kicks while a few especially stupid people climbed on top of it. Do Netflix posit to ask this loser if he has any thoughts for the, at best, inconvenienced, or, at worst, terrified passengers? Of course they don’t. And how about “Dan”, who in the course of Attack On Wembley proudly relates his in-the-end successful efforts to break into the stadium, no matter who was getting assaulted in his wake? The man is literally on camera admitted to breaking a variety of laws and generally boorish, violent, despicable behaviour, and is given carte blanche by their documentary team to do so without anything remotely like a proper challenge (coincidently, is this guy not getting arrested? And if not, why not?)
These testimonials, in line with everything that we see in the course of Attack On Wembley, paints a grim picture of footballing support in England, which is awash in a sea of booze, drugs, barely suppressed violent tendencies, oodles of xenophobia, bigotry and a general lack of care about it all, because it’s all a laugh “innit”. This is not to dismiss the litany of staff failures that occurred that day, with police in short supply and stewards badly outnumbered by the chaotic invaders, and management interviewed here at pains to wave away the possibility that it might all be there fault. But you can’t get away from the rottenness in these crowds, many of whom failed to get into the stadium for the game, and were then happy to not watch it elsewhere in favour of preparing to storm the place if England had won.
Otherwise, Attack On Wembley concerns itself with a rose-tinted remembrance of how the actual English football team did that year, held up as paragon-like representations of the nation, replete as they were with young, exciting talent, many of them reflecting the multi-ethnic nature of the country that the yobbos attacking people outside the stadium seem to hate. It all ends in tears of course, through the documentary doesn’t really have much time to discuss how Gareth Southgate’s tactical naivety was shown up so badly that day. Afterwards, the not-very-restrained racism inherent in so much of English fan culture came pouring out, directed at the three black players who missed penalties in the shoot-out. A discussion of that racism, how it was expressed and how it affected people is a very worthy topic for a documentary, but not this documentary: it treats the ides as more of an unsavoury epilogue to the match, something to touch on for a few minutes before we’re back to Dan and his fellow cretins, desperately trying to make themselves look better by criticising racists. The racism of English football is not something that you tack on at the end of a documentary on this subject, and doing so just feels like a terrible mix of filler and lip-service.
Nothing perhaps better illustrates the dichotomy at play here than the film’s stand-out editing moment, as the cheering happy fans inside the stadium are intercut with the terrible violence taking place outside. What occurred that day should have been the death knell in England’s repeated and arrogant attempts to gain the right to host sporting tournaments, but remarkably we’ll probably end up doing this all again in 2028. If England did progress far in that tournament, is there any real confidence that scenes like those that occurred in 2021 will not be repeated? Attack On Wembley would certainly seem to indicate that there’s no real reason why it can’t: the same idiots remain, the same undercurrent of racism remains, the same stupid people are in charge of stadiums. No lessons appear to have been learnt. But I didn’t really need this documentary to tell me that. I had hoped that instead it would provide the kind of incisive critical analysis that the issue and the figures involved deserve, instead it’s a mix of a Wikipedia page and opportunities for excuse making. Not recommended.
(All images are copyright of Netflix).
Never Felt Better 