The organization of May’s Champions League final by European football’s governing body Uefa was “an abysmal failure”, a panel of experts has said.
Fans were robbed and teargassed outside the match between Liverpool and Real Madrid at the Stade de France in Paris and kick-off was delayed 36 minutes.
Organizers initially blamed fake tickets and supporters, but their claims were widely criticized.
UEFA said it would not comment until its own inquiry was completed in November.
Experts told that the calm reaction of the fans was the main reason that overcrowding outside the stadium did not result in fatalities.
More than 480 testimonies from supporters and journalists at the final on 28 May were examined by an independent panel, including Professor Phil Scretton, who previously reported on the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.
The panel said fans were “held for several hours in a bottleneck” near the stadium, before finding themselves “again in static queues at malfunctioning turnstiles”.
“On leaving the stadium, they were attacked at knife-point by gangs who stole their possessions,” they added.
Their report found there had been:
- inadequate pre-match preparation by Uefa and the Paris agencies
- aggressive policing
- inadequate provision for crowd safety and event management
- unprovoked assaults on fans by the police and local gangs
The panel added that there had been an “abject failure by Uefa in meeting its responsibilities”.
The Paris police did not respond to a request for comment from JEE News, but have previously said they regret using tear gas against vulnerable people or those who did not cause trouble.
They have also said they regret the failures outside the stadium after the match.
Uefa issued an apology to both Liverpool and Real Madrid fans in June and has commissioned its own independent review into the event.
‘Couldn’t breathe’
The report said that before the game, about 15,000 Liverpool supporters were caught in a bottleneck near an underpass, after a decision to take down signage meant fans were only directed down one route to the stadium.
The panel found that as the build-up outside the Stade de France became increasingly dangerous, a ticket checkpoint was removed, releasing fans on to the concourse, but event organisers had shut some stadium gates to control the situation, which had been exacerbated by hundreds of local people trying to enter without tickets.
French authorities used tear gas, with children, elderly and disabled people caught up in the chaos, and riot police were deployed, despite Merseyside Police’s pre-match intelligence report stating that Liverpool fans were well-behaved in Europe and did not appreciate the use of heavy-handed policing.
