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40 years from the Heysel tragedy, the day that changed football forever

The European Cup final on May 29, 1985, between Liverpool and Juventus, ended in a tragedy that took 39 lives.

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May 29, 1985 is one of the darkest days in the history of football. What was meant to be a celebration turned into one of the worst tragedies on a football stadium, with 39 casualties and 600 injured. What followed was an unprecedented ban on English football by UEFA, and a turning point against hooliganism, although there were many more failures in that fateful day 40 years ago.

Liverpool and Juventus travelled to Brussels to play the European Cup final. Local supporters for each club were placed on different sides of the stadium, to avoid conflict. However, Section Z, located right next to Liverpool ultras, separated only by a fence, was left as a neutral zone, that was occupied mostly by Juventus fans who had bought tickets. An hour before kick off, Liverpool hooligans started throwing objects at Juventus fans in block Z, and some began to charge towards them, leaving the few police officers helpless.

When Juventus fans tried to get away, they were crushed with the wall, trapping them inside. Eventually, the walls collapsed and dozens of people fell, were crushed by the concrete or by other people, suffocating to death. Authorities were overwhelmed, trying to avoid a larger confrontation stopping Juventus fans witnessing it all on the other side of the stadium.

Why was the match was not cancelled?

Despite the large number of casualties (most of them Italians), the match did take place after some delay. UEFA officials, English, Belgian, and Italian football associations, and law enforcement agreed that the match should take place to avoid larger incidents, fearing that the number of casualties could be much larger if the over 60,000 fans had to be taken out of the stadium, likely resulting in fights between both fandoms.

"What I remember most are the cries of pain from those people who were suffocating to death and the cries of joy from the supporters celebrating Juve's victory, unaware of the tragedy that had just unfolded", said former former police commissioner Roland Vanreusel on RFI. The match ended 1-0 for Juventus, with a penalty goal by Michel Platini, while authorities were still treating injuries from block Z. "The Frenchman jumped for joy even though he knew there had been deaths. That put me off football for life".

The huge repercussions of the Heysel tragedy

A lot of things failed that day, starting with security officials. According to Vanreusel, a gendarmerie commander had stepped in at the last minute to replace the officer in charge, who had fallen ill. "He had placed just 10 unfortunate men between the supporters of the two sides, when at least a platoon of 30 men would have been needed, as I had done in the sector under my responsibility."

The Heysel stadium was clearly not fit for hosting a high risk match like that, with many structural deficiencies that caused the wall collapse, which caused many more deaths. Reportedly, the stadium's official inspection before the match took just thirty minutes, and UEFA had ignored pleas of choosing another stadium.

However, unlike other tragedies in football stadiums, like the Hillsborough disaster four years later, where 97 people died due to crowd congestion, the Heysel incidents happened because of violence from hooligans, and specifically Liverpool hooligans. That led UEFA to act against all English football, banning all English teams from UEFA competitions for an indeterminate period of time, that ended up being five years, and six for Liverpool.

While initial reports put all the blame on Liverpool fans, the police and authorities were also found partly responsible, and Belgium was eventually banned from hosting European finals for ten years.

The disaster also made the fight against hooliganism more strict, and Margaret Thatcher asked for more serious prison sentences for violent football fans. More security measures were put into place to avoid ultras, but deep, structural changes on stadiums did not take into effect in England until after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, where 97 people died in an crush.

40 years from the Heysel tragedy, the day that changed football forever

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SportsfootballLiverpoolJuventus


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