The review commissioned by Uefa into the appalling chaos that beset the Champions League final last May has reached devastating conclusions that in a decent, responsible culture would lead its president, Aleksander Ceferin, to resign.
The review panel’s report concludes that Uefa has “primary responsibility” for hosting a catastrophic failure of safety at the final of the competition which is its core purpose to organise, the very reason why it was founded as a confederation of Europe’s national football associations in 1954.
More recently Uefa has invested the modern-day Champions League with much grander significance than purely an elite sporting competition, presenting it as central to the European, community-rooted, ethical “model” of sport. It was the principal cause for which supporters, leagues, governments and the European Union supported Ceferin and opposed the 2021 super league breakaway, to keep the top clubs and full value of the Champions League within Europe’s “football family”.
Last season’s final at the Stade de France between Liverpool and Real Madrid was the second organised by Ceferin’s Uefa since that super league battle was won and the marvellous competition, and its glittering revenues, were secured. Yet supporters who had campaigned wholeheartedly for Uefa were put through an extended dystopian nightmare, during which Uefa also sought to disclaim its own responsibility by issuing classic instant smears alleging that the Liverpool fans were to blame.
The report repeatedly condemns this blame-shifting effort, describing it as “reprehensible”, and it was truly, spectacularly disgraceful. By making statements falsely alleging lateness and mass ticketlessness by Liverpool fans, Uefa also displayed unforgivable ignorance of football’s tragic history, and the almost identical lies told by South Yorkshire police to cover up their failures that led to 97 supporters being unlawfully killed at Hillsborough in 1989.
Uefa’s unfeeling response to supporters in Paris, and ignorance of the Hillsborough disaster and the 33-year justice campaign bereaved families and survivors had to fight against those similar lies, were perhaps just further symptoms of the central failure identified by the panel. Uefa’s safety and security specialists, in the unit headed by Ceferin’s close friend from home in Slovenia, Zeljko Pavlica, have been sidelined and “marginalised” by Uefa’s more commercial events arm, the review has found, and it took no effective role in the planning or running of the final.
This finding, that safety has been marginalised at Uefa, is sickening and painful to contemplate. It is an institutional failure that, the panel states, senior people at Uefa have been aware of for some time – the events arm delegating safety considerations to local organisers, in this case the French Football Federation (FFF), and deferring to the police.
“Senior officials at the top of Uefa allowed this to happen, even though the shortcomings of its model were widely known at senior management level.”
The panel's 21 recommendations to improve safety and security at finals
1. Uefa should set up a process to ensure that the panel’s recommendations are implemented, including by other stakeholders. Uefa should publish an action plan on its website and regular updates on progress.
2. Uefa should always require that all stakeholders responsible for hosting a Champions League final follow the 2016 Council of Europe “Saint Denis Convention”. It agreed an approach towards supporters based on “safety, security and service” rather than one based on preparing for disorder.
3. Uefa should ensure that its safety and security unit has oversight and primary responsibility for the safety, security, and service component of Champions League final operations.
4. Uefa’s safety and security unit should develop its capacity to “ensure that mobility and access arrangements are as safe and secure as possible for supporters with any disabilities or special needs, and that service to them is optimised”.
5. A host stadium’s safety team should be directly and more fully involved in the planning for a match and making risk assessments.
6. Host stadiums must all have “well-managed security perimeters, welcome services and crowd guidance and orientation”.
7. Uefa should have a formal requirement in the host bidding process that police commit to compliance with the “engagement-focused” approach towards supporters agreed in the Saint Denis Convention.
8. Uefa’s safety and security unit should engage with host police commanders in advance, support access to relevant expertise and invite them to observe quarter- and semi-finals, gaining experience of clubs’ supporters. If problems are identified in the planning phase and cannot be resolved, these should be “escalated to government authorities”.
9. Uefa should move as rapidly as possible to solely digital ticketing, and ensure host venues are fully capable of supporting this. Having both digital and paper ticketing at the Paris final was a factor in causing the long delays and access problems.
10. Uefa should “optimise” its communications and messaging toward supporters regarding the match facilities, mobility, routing and access arrangements. “Above all else it should embed the involvement of supporter organisations and finalist club stewards in its communication strategy, to effectively spread information and urgent messages.”
11. Finalist clubs should have their supporter liaison officers acting as the key contact for supporters. This is already an obligation under the Uefa club licensing regulations.
12. Football Supporters Europe and its affiliated supporter organisations “need to be involved as meaningful stakeholders throughout the planning process” and their representatives need to act as “integrated observers” at the final. They should also be involved in post-match analysis.
13. Uefa should require the host FA to deploy customer service stewards at key parts of the transport network and across the final approach to the stadium, to give guidance to supporters and also provide information to control rooms.
14. Medical and first aid personnel should be always visible and accessible, including at access points, gates and in the stadium concourse.
15. Uefa’s post-match analysis process should be “more analytically and objectively robust”. Uefa should involve external “operational, academic, and supporter-based expertise”.
16: The Council of Europe monitoring committee should review how compliance with the Saint Denis convention can be better monitored and the obligations “more comprehensively enforced”.
17. The panel encourages the authorities in France to follow Council of Europe recommendations and those made by the French government official Michel Cadot, to improve management and oversight of major sporting events across ministries.
18. The French ministries of interior and sport should institute their own review of the policing model at sporting events. This should involve supporters’ representatives, experts and academics. Policing authorities should guarantee they will operate a “supporter engagement” model, and that riot police, teargas and pepper spray will only ever be used, proportionately, where deemed necessary due to a risk to life.
19. French authorities should review policy relating to retaining CCTV footage and other material for the purpose of investigations likely to improve security and public safety. Uefa should address this as a requirement from hosts.
20. Host stakeholders should “undertake robust scrutiny” to ensure their arrangements will comply with the Saint Denis convention. Uefa’s safety and security unit should be involved to ensure that compliance is being achieved during the planning process.
21. Uefa and the Council of Europe monitoring committee should look closely at their capacity to apply some of the above recommendations at other Uefa-governed fixtures besides the Champions League final, to avoid similar dangers developing. David Conn
Ceferin, president of Uefa since 2016, should take responsibility for such failures that caused enduring trauma and put the lives of supporters at risk. Among the senior Uefa executives who should also consider resigning is Pavlica, who was found to have escalated “the structural problems and sidelining” of his safety and security unit. Uefa must then urgently restore a safety culture to the head and heart of its operations, as called for by the panel.
Probably against initial expectations when Uefa announced it would hold an “independent review” conducted by a Portuguese MP it appointed, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, the panel was expanded to include genuine, conscientious experts, who have clearly maintained their independence. Alongside seasoned supporter groups including the Football Supporters’ Association for England and Wales, members included Clifford Stott, a long-term expert in effective crowd management and policing, and Pete Weatherby KC, who represented 22 bereaved Hillsborough families at the 2014-16 inquests whose verdicts ultimately vindicated the families’ fight against the lies. Kenny Scott, a former Strathclyde police chief superintendent, Rangers safety officer and head of Uefa’s safety and security unit from 2017-21, retained his Uefa links after retirement but the report demonstrates that he too reviewed the Paris horror show with independence and invaluable insider insight.
To condense the exhaustive results of this panel’s review, they found that the vacuum of safety leadership led to terrible failures of a sporting body’s most fundamental duty: to keep people safe at its events. The built-up environs of the Stade de France make it a notoriously fraught venue for safe access, but accumulated experience was seemingly forgotten or ignored, and thousands of Liverpool supporters were sent to the stadium down a known dangerous route.
The Paris Prefecture de Police tooled up for an invasion of nonexistent hooligans, and for a mirage of ticketless supporters trying to gain entry in numbers never seen in football’s modern history. It emerged that the police even referenced the Hillsborough disaster internally as a reason to arm themselves for trouble – a blunder of intelligence almost too bleak to contemplate.
So thousands of people who paid the eye-watering prices Uefa charges went to Paris for the game of their lives and were instead plunged into a hell of disorganisation, near-fatal crushing, attacks by local men and ludicrously hostile policing, surviving with injury and trauma. Then Uefa colluded with the police and French authorities in falsely blaming the Liverpool supporters, while agreeing to keep silent about the trouble caused by locals.
The report details the calamity step by step, and identifies the failures, making the case for urgent remedial action, and the panel have truly done football a service.
But it is also clear that much of this was already apparent; 80,000 people lived through it and many filmed crucial evidence, there have been inquiries in France, and vast, strong media reporting. Yet Europe’s football associations, including England’s, who all had senior people at the match, have done the opposite of calling on Ceferin to go. Not a single rival candidate has been proposed for the Uefa presidential election, so despite the Paris debacle Ceferin is set to be “elected” in April for another four years, unopposed.
All of this presents a devastating picture of Uefa and the state of the European football “model”, a catastrophic absence of leadership, democracy and accountability which cannot be allowed to continue.
