UEFA ‘primarily responsible’ for nightmare scenes at 2022 Champions League final, Liverpool fans vindicated – report

UEFA are “primarily responsible” for the “near disaster” that saw thousands of Liverpool fans suffer a nightmare ordeal ahead of the 2022 Champions League final in Paris, according to a review commissioned by European football’s governing body.

The damning report uncovered a catalogue of errors from UEFA and the French authorities, including the police for “indiscriminately” firing tear gas and pepper spray that led to crushes outside the Stade de France before the showpiece match with Real Madrid.

The report also revealed a failure of organisations to work together and said “there was no Plan B when things went wrong”.

“It is remarkable that no one lost their life. All the stakeholders interviewed by the panel have agreed that this situation was a near-miss: a term used when an event almost turns into a mass fatality catastrophe.”

Liverpool fans were blamed on the night for arriving late and having ticketless fans in their ranks – but this was found to have been “wrongly inflated and exaggerated” by the report.

“The Panel draws the inference that they have been made [ticketless fans claims] primarily to deflect from responsibility for planning and operational failures. This is reprehensible and has involved UEFA, UEFA Events SA, FFF, the Prefecture de Police, Government Officials and French Ministers.”

The match was moved to Paris in February 2022, three months before the final, after St Petersburg was stripped of the hosting rights due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

No venue risk assessment for the Stade de France took place, with the plan used by UEFA instead based on the French Cup final.

“The late change of venue meant that the normal timetable for organisation had to be truncated, and planning for the event had to be adapted to the circumstances,” continued the report.

“Compromises could be made to many areas of the event, but safety and security were not among them. Whereas there could be no bidding process or development of a concept, full attention should have been paid to the formulation and agreement of venue and event risk assessments, and proper operational plans. That did not happen.”

The report repeatedly referenced the 1989 Hillsborough disaster that caused the deaths of 97 supporters – and said the panel was “astonished that the policing model was influenced by a view of Liverpool hooliganism based on Hillsborough”.

“The parallels between Hillsborough 1989 and Paris 2022 are palpable. The similarities include the fact that both events were preventable, and both were caused by the failures of those responsible for public safety. Neither was a ‘black swan’ event, or the result of a ‘perfect storm’.

“Both events were foreseeable. In the judgment of the Panel, the different outcomes were a matter of chance: in one nearly a hundred died, the other none, but through no merit of those in charge.”

The eight factors which ‘almost led to disaster’

The independent review identified eight factors “which caused or contributed to the conditions which almost led to disaster”:

• a. A substantially larger number of Liverpool supporters were directed to arrive via the ‘Stade de France: Saint-Denis’ station, on train line RER D, which was closest to the south-west of the stadium, compared to the volume of people attending other major events at the stadium by that route.
• b. Defective route planning between RER D and the stadium, resulting in too many people being directed by police toward the stadium via the south-west ASP3 entrance.
• c. Defective access arrangements at the ASPs. The effect of this was particularly acute at ASP3 because of the increased pressure created by the flawed routing, and that it was positioned on a restricted access ramp: a bottleneck.
• d. Ticketing: the use of two different forms of tickets, without extra measures to maintain throughput rates, exacerbated access problems at ASPs.
• e. Defective turnstile arrangements, which failed to ensure a sufficient throughput rate to guarantee safe entry.
• f. The activities of large groups of locals, some of whom were involved in attacks on supporters and attempts to breach the perimeters and turnstiles to gain entry to the stadium, and a failure to police them.
• g. The use of tear gas and pepper spray in the confined space on the concourse.
• h. A lack of contingency plans relating to both additional perimeter and turnstile access: there was no Plan B when things went wrong.