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The report into the 2022 Champions League final has found that Liverpool fans were not to blame for that day’s chaos, and it all sounds rather familiar.
The contents of the report were certainly damning, and the timing of the release was so suspiciously close to the build-up to a Merseyside derby that it was tempting to believe that the slip-stream to this match was being treated as a good time to bury bad news.
But nevertheless, the results of the UEFA investigation surrounding last year’s near-disaster at the Champions League final in Paris makes for grim reading, not only for the governing body found to be “primarily responsible” for an environment in which it was confirmed that it was “remarkable that no-one lost their life”, but also for supporters who witnessed attitudes and prejudices that they might have believed to have been consigned to the previous century.
While the report places this primary responsibility at the door of UEFA, no-one in a position of authority for the safety of those who travelled to the Stade de France that day emerges with a great deal of credit. The police operation is described as “defective”, ignoring information passed on from Merseyside police confirming that there had been no significant disorder in matches between the two teams in favour of their own apparently pre-determined perception that there would be. This, it would appear, was the driving factor behind the way in which the police behaved that evening.
READ MORE: Liverpool’s official response to the independent review
It is also reported that the Paris Préfecture de Police failed to prevent or remedy congestion on a problematic access route to the stadium, using “weaponry” such as teargas and pepper spray without sufficient justification, failing to engage with the local community, and “standing by” while supporters were being mugged or physically attacked. “The dangerous conditions on the concourse outside the turnstiles”, the report found, “were compounded by the police deploying teargas at disorderly groups of locals, as well as using pepper spray on supporters trying to gain entrance with valid tickets”.
The French Football Federation don’t fare much better either. The report states that the “FFF failed to establish effective interoperability with multiple partners, including the transport networks, Préfecture de Police, SDF and UEFA”, and that it was “a significant failure” to have no contingency plan in place to deal with the congestion at turnstiles, which in turn led to “an obviously dangerous crush situation”.
The report concludes that: “All the stakeholders interviewed by the panel have agreed that this situation was a near-miss: a term used when an event almost turns into a mass fatality catastrophe.”
On top of all of that comes the part that really sends a shiver down the spine of anyone old enough to be able to remember the Hillsborough disaster of 1989: that the authorities – that’s to say, UEFA, the police, and politicians up to and including senior government ministers – repeatedly lied about the behaviour of English fans in what can only realistically be considered an attempt to exonerate themselves for this almost complete breakdown in crowd management.
The commission found that an announcement made on the big screens inside the stadium that the kick-off was delayed due to late-arriving supporters was “objectively untrue”, that claims of thousands of Liverpool supporters trying to get inside the stadium was without evidence, and that there may even have been some degree of collusion to push these lies into the media.
This paragraph, on the press release issued by UEFA immediately after the match, stands out in particular, and should be highlighted:
‘Firstly, it blamed supporters with fake tickets. Secondly, its original draft noted that locals had contributed to the problems. The first assertion was incorrect and should not have been made. The second was correct, but was edited out of the version that was published, at the request of the French authorities.’
The attempts to deflect blame onto Liverpool supporters are described in the report as “reprehensible”, including UEFA, UEFA Events, the FFF, the Préfecture de Police, government officials and French ministers.
If all of this sounds rather familiar, there’s good reason for that. The immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster saw a concerted effort to blame Liverpool supporters for their own fate that day. The inquests that were finally held in 2015 found that police officers were told to put the blame for what happened on “drunken, ticketless Liverpool supporters”. The lie that a gate had been forced open was perpetuated by the day’s match commander, David Duckenfield.
And in the days after the tragedy, these lies were disseminated into the public realm by sections of the news press, with the most infamous, a front page splash in The Sun entitled “The Truth”, based on a story filed by a news agency in Sheffield that quoted “unnamed officers” as well as the Conservative MP for Sheffield Irvine Patnick. The Sun remains boycotted throughout Merseyside more than 30 years on, but it should also be remembered that they were absolutely not the only media outlet pushing this false agenda in the days following the tragedy.
If anything, this report demonstrates how little many attitudes seem to have changed over the last three and a half decades. Liverpool supporters were treated as a problem to be solved rather than visitors to their city, the exact same culture that existed around the game in this country in the late 1980s. And on both occasions when a complete failure of control occurred, the first, second, third and fourth instincts of those responsible was to seek to blame the powerless for what happened for this breakdown. If that included barefaced lying, then so be it.
It is sometimes half-forgotten that, in England at least, the Hillsborough disaster took place away from the mass gaze of live television coverage. The world has moved on since 1989, and reports were coming through from well before the 2022 Champions League final’s scheduled kick-off time, not only that there were significant issues surrounding the crowd management for this game, but also what the exact nature of these issues actually were. The vast majority of us carry video cameras in our pockets these days, and it is somewhat surprising that all concerned seemed to believe that they could lie their way out of it despite the wealth of evidence coming through loud and clear that what was being officially announced was essentially a pack of lies.
Lives were almost lost in Paris at last year’s Champions League final, and it should be a scandal that not only was this loss of control allowed to happen, but that it was allowed to happen because of ingrained prejudices which ignored actual information being passed from police force to police force, and with an attempt to blame the victims of this hopeless mismanagement for the predicaments in which they found themselves.
That this should have happened to a support which lost 97 people to such mismanagement before, to people who witnessed that first hand in 1989, is just the final insult. Resignations should be inevitable, but as established in 1989 as well as last year, those with the responsibility for ensuring safety reflexively turn to victim-blaming when things go wrong. There’s little to suggest that fans of any club should trust those charged with this responsibility any more than we should have done almost 34 years ago.
