The Heysel disaster embodied what were the darkest days of football. Four decades on, there are still lessons to be learned.
The catastrophe took place on the game’s biggest stage: the 1985 European Cup final, contested between Liverpool and Juventus. On that tragic day in Brussels, 39 fans lost their lives while 600 were left injured after fans were crushed against a wall that collapsed. Abject failures in crowd management and poor stadium design were at the heart of the disaster, as they were for the calamities of Hillsborough and the Valley Parade fire that same decade.
