Behind the scenes of any football club has some ghoulish attraction to it. Arsenal has it more than most, presumably because of their disastrous start to the season last year. It was, in all forms, very funny, for those not watching and just seeing it through memes and Twitter discourse. As explained by narrator Daniel Kaluuya, things are “not so good.” Not so good either is seeing KSI show up almost immediately. Still, Arsenal’s latest puff publicity piece, All or Nothing: Arsenal is the usual keynote assembling of an entire season’s worth of the beautiful game. Record scratches and slow motion to tell audiences when to feel and what to do.
Player biographies of players who have yet to prove themselves, another walking advertisement for a club whose best outputs retired years ago. Thierry Henry features, because of course he does. A spokesperson for a club that enjoyed great years during his spell, and has never managed that since. But that isn’t the issue. The issue for All or Nothing: Arsenal is that it has nothing of interest. No characters or descriptions of the highs and lows the club had settled into. If it were in there, it is brushed over far, far quicker than it should have been in the face of promoting players that have no real responsibility. Their interactions are as dull as can be expected, but that is the game of football. It is not a particularly interesting portion of time behind the scenes.
All of this focuses on Mikel Arteta, though. Not as interesting as Jose Mourinho, not as exciting as Pep Guardiola. Even the consistency of mundanity found in these styles of documentaries is nothing to be excited by here. Seeing Arteta draw a heart and a brain with some smiley faces on it summarises not just Arsenal, but the future of football. Smiley brains and happy hearts. It has such a weird, strange quality to it. How anyone can find it inspiring or interesting to see Arteta doodle or pull cameramen into changing rooms is strange. All it boils down to are “I’m a fan” and “please beat the other team”. It’s hard to feel much love for Arsenal as a neutral. Though that is surely the point. All or Nothing: Arsenal hopes to light a fire, but you can’t do that with damp sticks.
Flat lies are spent time and time again in All or Nothing: Arsenal. A sincere belief from commentators that Arsenal v. Tottenham is one of the biggest fixtures in the world. The inability to make much action or direction out of an interesting period for football is more the fault of the production team rather than the events that surround them. Fixating so much on the North London derby, the training of players who would depart the club soon after. All or Nothing has always struggled to be sure of itself, and when it doesn’t have charismatic characters at the heart of it, it’ll struggle to understand what makes football fans tick. All or Nothing: Arsenal, has nothing at all.
