“UEFA, as the owner of the rights to the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool, is primarily responsible for the organizational failure that almost led to disaster”. This is the main conclusion of the independent report commissioned by the football institution itself to investigate what happened in the decisive match of the club final that was played on May 29, 2022 in Paris. The start of the event was delayed for more than half an hour due to the incidents that occurred in the run-up to it.
At first, UEFA blamed Liverpool supporters for the “blocking of the turnstiles, because they had bought false tickets that did not work”something that the report headed by Tiago Brandao Rodrigues, former Portuguese Minister of Education (in charge of Sports) and who is currently a deputy in the Portuguese country. The investigation, to which this newspaper has had access, rejects “the exaggerated account” of thousands of fans without tickets for the match and does so based on all kinds of evidence, ranging from visual records to testimonies from the forces and bodies of security.
inaction of Madrid
“There were fewer counterfeit bills than, for example, during the Madrid final in 2019”the parties point out in a report “where Liverpool’s cooperation has been of great help, while Real Madrid was not able to provide a substantive response to our requests for information“. Despite the fact that the main victims were the supporters redsMadrid fans, unlike their club, did collaborate in the preparation of a document in which they participated, among others, the National Police and the Federation of Spanish Soccer Shareholders and Partners (FASFE).
Emilio Abejón, secretary of this last organization, values for THE SPANISH NEWSPAPER, from the Prensa Ibérica group, the result of the investigation of the final in Paris, the venue that hosted the duel between Real Madrid and Liverpool after the Russian city of Saint Petersburg was dispossessed by the invasion of Ukraine. “Once again it is shown that We fans have suffered from errors in the design of police devices and have been unjustly accused“, explains Abejón, who, like Brandao, demands that the Convention of Saint-Denis in the next final in Istanbul (June 10, 2023).
This agreement lays the foundations for collaboration between the different groups involved, “where the most important, due to their number and imprint, are the fans.” Precisely, the audit detects failures in the communication of the different actors involved in a match where security was delegated, by UEFA, to the French Football Federation. As a result of the dispersion of the functions, the problem of the supposed false entries arose, which “existed, as in any event of these characteristics”, but the problem was in the duplicity that was generated between physical and digital tickets.
“Access with digital tickets, both on paper and with technology blockchaincomplicated the situation of a large number of fans,” says the independent inquiry, which vehemently criticizes French police action. “A model led by a non-existent threat such as ‘hooligans’ was adopted, despite intelligence reports of UEFA and FIFA, as well as the security forces and bodies of the cities of the clubs reported that there had been no significant problems of violence between fans“, collects the report.
The dangers of Saint-Denis
The documentation speaks of the assaults suffered by some English followers, “due to the activities of large groups of residents of the area, some of whom were involved in attacks and attempts to breach perimeters to be able to enter the stadium”. In this sense, the investigation delves into the fact that the environment was not properly supervised beyond the last ring, nor was the route of the fans planned correctly by metro to the Stade de France stadium .
“The fief is located in an area (Saint-Denis) with high crime rates. There has been a history of civil unrest and trouble between sections of the local community and the police, as well as other authorities. It is something that accompanies the main football matches that take place at the Stade de France (where the French football and rugby teams play)”, the report states, which insists that “there was a lack of contingency plans related to the additional perimeter that forced the indiscriminate use of pepper spray in confined spaces”.
The chaos and lack of foresight lead the authors of the independent report commissioned by UEFA to present a stark comparison. “Many Liverpool fans in that crowd were survivors of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster that happened in the game against Sheffield where 97 fans died.. Other supporters were vulnerable, such as disabled, elderly or children. The parallels between Hillsborough 1989 and Paris 2022 are palpable,” say the authors of an investigation that concludes “Both could have been foreseen and both were caused by failures by those responsible for citizen security. They were not the result of any ‘perfect storm’.
This leads Tiago Brandao and the group of experts to rule that “the different outcomes between one event and another were a simple matter of chance: in one almost a hundred fans died and in another none, but without any merit of it on the part of those in charge of the event”. Therefore, the independent investigators urge UEFA and all those who may be involved in the organization of the end of Istanbul to “joint work to solve the loophole that was created in Pariswhere there was no adequate supervision”.
