As the fallout from the chaotic scenes at the Champions League final continues to gather pace, it is worth considering one major question: how did this happen?
Liverpool fans were kettled into bottle-necks by the Parisian police. They were forced to pass through tight spaces for so-called security reasons. They were crushed by the weight of those around them, forcing many to climb fences to escape. They were teargassed and beaten with batons. Disabled fans and children were caught up in the panic. And then they were blamed by the French government for causing the problems.
Organisers UEFA initially blamed fans for turning up late. The French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said “thousands” of Liverpool fans “forced entry and assaulted stewards”. The French sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera then blamed "30 to 40,000" Liverpool supporters for arriving at the Stade de France without tickets, or with fake tickets.
The UK government, Liverpool Football Club, journalists who were on the ground and the supporters themselves have rejected these allegations. Liverpool chairman Tom Werner has demanded an apology , while the government has demanded a full independent investigation into what unfolded in Paris. Liverpool fans who survived the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989 have experienced terrible flashbacks. “I am in pieces again,” Hillsborough survivor Kevin Cowley told The Guardian . “It took me years to get over Hillsborough and I feel like I’ve just relived Hillsborough again.”
The blame game will continue. Thankfully for Liverpool, there is plenty of video evidence taken to corroborate their version of events and contradict the narrative France is trying to push. In the meantime, we can zoom out and consider the events from a historical and political context.
Mirror Football has spoken to Professor Clifford Stott , an expert on crowds and policing football events, to get an idea of the full picture.
Why did this happen?
Football stadium disasters like Hillsborough and Heysel prompted a serious effort by governments to change the way major events were policed. Professor Stott worked with UEFA and the Council of Europe to create a platform to develop a protocol for effective international police cooperation for football fixtures.
He says the framework, which aimed to upskill football commanders’ training, was implemented at Euro 2004 in Portugal, and at subsequent UEFA tournaments, and was extremely successful. The problem is that now it is not being followed universally.
“The problem is that it (the framework) has died away and doesn’t exist anymore,” he explains. “What we see here is a framework that’s available but isn’t properly supported and doesn’t provide a consistent way through which police commanders come to understand how to police these events.”
Has there been problems in France before?
Rewind to 2016 and the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjorn Jagland, was launching an effort to improve policing around football matches following widespread problems in France at Euro 2016. “What happened in Marseille is absolutely unacceptable. Europe can and must do more to prevent this kind of violence. Governments must spare no effort”, he said. Unfortunately, governments haven’t gone far enough.
The 2022 Champions League final was merely a high-profile example of the issues around policing sports fixtures in France. The Stade de France was only given the fixture in late February after St Petersburg was stripped of the game following Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine. According to Steve Rotheram, the Liverpool City region mayor who attended the final, this was used as an excuse by UEFA chief Aleksander Ceferin, who reportedly told him: “We’ve only had three months to organise this, we’ve killed ourselves to get this game on.”
Stott says, while UEFA is in charge of the game itself, it can only do so much. “UEFA only has jurisdiction within the stadium. Outside the stadium, beyond the operational footprint of the stadium it’s the police who call the shots,” he says.
“UEFA basically compels local police organisations to follow this guidance as far as they can, in order to give them the fixtures in the first place. It does create a framework of pressure and influence that can be very, very useful. But in big cities like Paris that is going to be a lot less. The political imperatives are going to be greater, so the local police commanders and how they choose to police it are primarily the framework through which this happens and are the powerful arbiters of what happens on the day – and I think that’s what’s gone wrong here.”
Stott says the framework he helped design, which was proven to work at many major tournaments, is now being ignored by countries like Italy, France, Spain, Greece and some in Eastern Europe.
Why do authorities blame fans?
The Champions League final is a football fixture. But it is actually much more significant than that. It is about prestige. It is a major boost for a city’s tourism. It is a political statement. When such fixtures go off without a hitch, politicians are quick to celebrate them and take credit. When they go wrong, like in Paris, excuses have to be made.
“What we’ll see is a level of political embarrassment,” Stott explains. “It’s usually the case in circumstances where it’s going disastrously wrong like that somebody will be held responsible and potentially lose their position of authority, like the police commander, but we roll on and nothing really changes.
“And let's be clear about how often this sort of stuff happens and how dangerous it can be and why it is that we constantly have to revisit these sorts of circumstances and in part, I think, it’s because of the lazy stereotyping that exists around football fans. They’re essentially a stigmatised community of people who it is easy for the authorities to level blame at.”
In short: it is all about politics. “In the context of French and Parisian political life, the authorities are closing the shop and putting forward the vision that it was all about ticketless and forged fans causing the problem and that is the advantageous political position for them to take and they’ll continue to take it,” Stott adds. “And Nadine Dorries is perfectly happy to step into the fray now and criticise the French because it’s in her political interest to do that as well, so the whole thing gets mired in politics.”
How can we prevent it from happening again?
As Stott has explained, the framework for safe policing of sports fixtures already exists and is used at many successful events every year. The problem is that not everybody is on board. Communication across borders and organisations is lacking. To fix it requires political will – and that is more difficult now the UK has left the European Union. “That’s it, yeah, to go back to that political will for international collaboration that we used to call the EU – and we’re not in it anymore,” Stott says.
“I’m not being flippant. It is actually the EU – that is the structure by which that collaboration takes place. Brexit has broken down all the sorts of channels of information exchange. I understand it’s still operating fairly effectively, because the UK is still operating that, but the extent to which we can then motivate the political will internationally to reinvigorate that structure is lost. The UK fundamentally led pulling all this stuff together and now it’s not around the table anymore to do that leading.”
