The wagons are circling again, as the French government and police start blaming Liverpool supporters in a manner reminiscent of 32 years ago.
Surveying the wreckage of the 2022 Champions League final, it’s difficult not to feel dispirited. Familiar issues, familiar attitudes and familiar prejudices, all manifesting themselves in bold new ways for the 21st century. Furthermore, there is a troubling theme emerging of blind deference to authorities that look very much as though they’re telling lies to cover their own backs following a day of policing that seems to have been equal parts incompetence and savagery, and of very online fans who are so bound up in their stupid, childish tribalism that they will go out to bat for any organisation that will confirm their worst prejudices.
‘Why does this always happen to Liverpool?’, some will ask. Well, it wasn’t them at Wembley last summer, it wasn’t them in Sevilla or Tirana, and it hadn’t been them in the previous 30-odd years of Liverpool playing European football. ‘What about their ticketless fans?’, they ask, as though the issue of thousands of people turning up ticketless to cities hosting big matches has never been an issue at matches before. ‘What about HEYSEL?’, they cry triumphantly, overlooking the fact that, setting aside everything about that equally dreadful day (and it really is a whole other story), that was 37 years ago.
Of course, most of these questions are being asked in bad faith, because the attitudes that blamed Liverpool supporters for Hillsborough – which similarly began almost the moment things started to go wrong – haven’t really gone anywhere, really, have they? It’s hardly even as though those behind them and those questions are really even interested in answers. For them, the question itself is the answer.
One of the things that we know most assuredly about the Hillsborough disaster is that warning signs had been there for years before it happened. It could…
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