The Final: Attack on Wembley, review: will make you ashamed to be an England fan

With the impending Euros and England’s men’s football team hoping to win it, The Final: Attack on Wembley (Netflix) made me simply delighted that the tournament is not being held here. It also made me ashamed to be an England football fan.

There are some heroes who come out of the story of the Euro 2020 final, in which 6,000 ticketless fans stormed Wembley Stadium leaving a part of London looking like Gomorrah, but very few of them were among the so-called supporters. An independent enquiry into how Wembley was invaded spoke of the bravery of the stewards and the “extraordinary aggression” shown towards them.

The worry is that the aggression is not that extraordinary. A part of English football fandom has long had a culture problem. Directors Rob Miller and Kwabena Oppong made a good fist of trying to canvas viewpoints from all sides, including the guy on the roof of the bus who had the day of his life, and one of the break-ins who said that he would do it all again (after all, England had made it to the final of a major tournament, so it was a moral imperative to do whatever it took to get a seat).

The why of the so-called attack on Wembley comes down to what Brent Council’s Chris Bryant described as “A dense crowd in a compact area… that was completely off its face.” For some people, evidently, this was the highest of high jinks, everything you could want in a grand day out. But not for the fan with his 70-year-old stepfather or the Italian with his young daughter. They were admirable in their restraint: as the footage made plain, it was a miracle that no one was killed.

Given that so many of the idiots were filming themselves and tweeting their hilarious exploits, how many were prosecuted, how many banned by their clubs? Likewise, though the film ended with the beginnings of the next tournament, in the form of England’s qualification for Euro 2024, it didn’t ask what we have learned from the Wembley debacle that might stop it happening again.

Undoubtedly, the police should have been on Wembley Way earlier in the day, but then they were in central London where most of the tournament trouble-making had taken place up to this point. What’s certain is that if the ticketless bring-it-homers hadn’t been off their faces then they wouldn’t have been so “extraordinarily aggressive”. It would have been interesting to look at how, or if, you can stop people getting totally blotto.

Mostly, though, the imagery of lashed-up thugs, high on cocaine and lampposts, throwing flares and bottles at anyone in their path and then indulging in a bit of racist chanting after England lost was just disgraceful.

There was a vague attempt in the film to suggest that this was the behaviour of young men who’d been cooped up over Covid and now finally had a chance to let off some steam. Well. Next time they want to do that, could they please go and jump in a skip somewhere with an eight-pack and a baby rattle while the rest of us get to enjoy a day out?