A Final: Caos em Wembley

The English Hooligans are well represented and how can they not be? This documentary clearly shows how the behavior is deeply entrenched in the young male England football fan. They have a well deserved bad reputation and this documentary only solidifies that fact. Every single citizen of the country or fan of the team should be thoroughly and completely embarrassed by what happened at Wembley on this day. It's so sickening that despite my previous support of the England club, I now hope they never, ever win any big tournament in the near future. The fans deserve many more decades of football misery for this.

As "The Final: Attack on Wembley" (2024 release from the UK; 82 min.) it is "11th July 2021", and England is set to play in and host the final of the 2020 Euros (delayed by a year due to COVID) against Italy. The movie starts at 8 am (12 hours before kickoff), and people from all over England are descending upon London, already heavily drinking, and many without tickets for the game. What could go wrong? At this point we are 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this movie brings a chilling account of the events on July 11, 2021, leading up to the game. A number of factors were heavily at play: first, this was England's fist chance since 1966 to win a major trophy; second, as in 1966, they would also be hosting the event; third, due to COVID delaying the tournament by a year, this was the first time people would be out and celebrating en masse; and last but not least: the English authorities vastly underestimated what was about to transpire. In short: all elements were in place for a massive for a colossal breakdown of security. The footage makes for absolute compelling if revolting viewing. I cannot readily recall having seen anything like this. The movie makers keep a tight pace throughout, and this documentary just flew by in no time.

"The Final" Attack On Wembley" started streaming on Netflix this weekend. Whether or not you are a soccer fan is frankly irrelevant. This is a documentary that shows what happens when an entire country is frenzied, with thousands of people determined to get into Wembley stadium, ticker or no ticket. SHOCKINGLY (not), pure mayhem and chaos ensues... Highly recommended.

This documentary chronicles the Euro Cup football title match between Italy and England at London's Wembley Stadium in 2021. The London police and stadium officials should have watched a documentary about the 2011 riot in Vancouver after their hockey team lost a Stanley Cup final game. Like Vancouver, the English authorities were totally unprepared, despite the English history of hooliganism, for what occurred before the match: huge crowds of mostly drunken young men gathered for blocks outside the stadium hours before the match starting time. Outnumbered authorities had no choice but to let the hooligans swarm in and watch the game, while terrorizing fans with tickets.

The documentary, like the IMDB trailer, gives way too much screen time to a neck-tattooed twit named Dan, who broke in with the mob and offers no regrets for what he did. Time is also wasted on an unrepentant young drunk who was filmed dancing on top of a bus. Apparently, neither hooligan was arrested. The end of the documentary states that 86 people were arrested, but no follow-up on their cases is offered. In contrast, the Vancouver riot documentary focused heavily on the outing of rioters on social media, and their prosecution.

The documentary loses focus when it shifts to racial insults against black players on the losing English side. A separate documentary on English racism would have made more sense. No hard questions (like why were you unprepared?) were asked of stadium officials and the police. No interviews with London and National political leaders, or soccer federation officials, were conducted. The documentary supplies plenty of information but lacks a coherent focus and is often wrongly focused.

Overall well executed doc with some glaring omissions and missed opportunities. It seems to somehow idealize and normalize English hooligan culture. There's an odd hands off, no judgement here, attitude that pervades the 90 minutes of this documentary. The authors seem to have completely forgotten that in 1985 all English soccer clubs had been banned to play in European competitions for 5 years following the Heysel tragedy, where 37 Italians died following the actions of Liverpool hooligans during the Juventus Italy, Liverpool match. So again, Italy, England, hooligans. Fortunately this time, fate had that England lost the game otherwise there could have been another tragedy. All this escaped the authors and a pervasive moral relativism tells us that there's really no difference between the Italian dad going to the stadium with his daughter and regular tickets and the lovely fella jumping on the bus and getting into the stadium by braking down the barricades and evading the police. They are both fans that love soccer after all .

Whether one is a football fan, or not the behaviour portrayed in this documentary should shock you, it should make you ashamed to be English, it should make you ashamed to be a football fan. Instead by totally ignoring the consequences, by not asking the people interviewed pertinent questions regarding their behaviour what this doc ends up doing is normalising violent horrible behaviour.

See it is OK to drink too much and riot as long as football is involved, there is no morality just ignorance. This documentary confirms what many of us know already, that football is followed by a lot of ignorant men driven by the fear the will ose the respect of their peers if the don't behave like they do in this documentary.

View it as a warning.