Arsenal to be on All or Nothing on Amazon

Football clubs, all professional sports teams really, are a black box. We only see a highly curated fraction of what goes on behind the scenes on the training ground, in the meeting rooms, etc. Next fall, that curtain will be pulled back just a little bit for Arsenal. Today, the club announced they will be featured on the upcoming season of Amazon’s sports docuseries All or Nothing. The Amazon camera crews will follow the team through this season, and the series itself is expected to air in August 2022.

Arsenal will be the third Premier League team featured on All or Nothing — Manchester City was the first PL club to do it in 2018 and Tottenham was featured in 2020. I’ll admit, I haven’t watched those seasons, but I guess that should be added to the to-do list. From asking around and reading reviews, it seems like the shows are worth watching, even if they aren’t a totally honest, show everything, no-holds-barred journey through the looking glass.

We aren’t going to learn anything groundbreaking about how Arsenal do business, but there will be some interesting tidbits. And it will humanize the players — we’ll see more of the off-field side of them and perhaps better understand them as people as opposed to distant, footballing icons. That’s what happened with Dele Alli. He had a tough season, football-wise, on Tottenham’s show, but came away with people really liking him more because of his personality and attitude.

Said Dustin, editor of Carty Free about Tottenham’s season on the show (and I’m paraphrasing here): it was fascinating, but also clearly produced for TV with an agenda and a narrative they were pushing. There was a lot of focus on drama, bad results, interpersonal stuff and a lot of fun backroom footage that made it enjoyable.

I suspect that Arsenal will get some chunk of change from Amazon for participating in the series, which is also nice. The Gunners have a lot of transfer business still to conduct this summer, so more money will help.

Even though we’ve got more than a year to wait for the series, I’m excited about it and looking forward to watching. Come next August (2022), you’ll need an Amazon Prime subscription to watch.