‘It was just carnage…’
It used to be that we would have to wait a decade or so for a documentary to be produced about some kind of seismic pop culture event. In this age of instant content, however, competing documentaries are often produced before the event has even concluded. And so, in May 2024, less than three years after the Euro 2021 final, Netflix released The Final: Attack on Wembley. And if you think that the streaming giant is scraping the barrel content wise then you are absolutely correct…
The Final: Attack on Wembley (co-directed by Robert Miller and Kwabena Oppong) takes us through the run-up to the final, the crowd trouble before, the chaos during the match, and the immediate aftermath. The talking heads include Wembley officials, security guards, and regular match-going fans.
One of the many problems with this documentary is that it has absolutely no idea what it wants to be. Is it a ‘Lads Lads Lads’ celebration of absolute bants (we are given an excruciatingly detailed account from one chap who claimed on top of a bus and did a little dance but talks about it as if he stormed the beaches at Normandy)? Is it a treatise on racism in football? Is it a comment on how a national lockdown affected the collective psyche? In trying to cover all of these bases, Attack on Wembley ends up dealing with none of them effectively.
That being said, it isn’t boring (particularly at less than 90 minutes), and their rundown of the penalty shoot-out that eventually decided the Euro 2021 final is excellent (if irrelevant to the actual narrative of the supposed subject matter).
Despite the fact this is not a particularly well-made documentary, it is at least an entertaining one. The perfect film to watch on a long train journey with nothing else to do (as I did).
