Irish Examiner view: Uefa primarily at fault for Champions League final chaos

Fans waiting outside the gates to enter the stadium as kick off is delayed before the UEFA Champions League Final at the Stade de France, Paris, last year.

An independent report into events at last year’s Champions League final, when many Liverpool fans were squeezed into pens and endured dangerous crushing, has laid the blame for the chaotic scenes outside the Stade de France in Paris at the door of Uefa, the competition’s organisers.

While the French police and the French Football Federation do not emerge unscathed from the investigation either, the report states that Uefa bears primary responsibility for an incident which almost turned into a “mass fatality catastrophe”.

The findings provide a sobering read for two reasons. The first is the abject failure of the crowd management system which led to an extremely dangerous situation for many supporters, one which had ghastly echoes of the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy which left 97 Liverpool fans dead.

The litany of ineptitude detailed by the report contains such illustrative gems as the fact that Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin was asked to decide on delaying the kick-off despite not being in contact with security officials (he was with the king of Spain in a VIP area).

Liverpool fans stuck outside the ground show their match tickets during the UEFA Champions League Final at the Stade de France, Paris. Picture: Adam Peck

The second point is the appalling attempt to blame innocent supporters for the chaos — while it was still happening.

The authorities were unable to organise safe entry to the stadium but did contrive to blame spectators’ late arrival for the match being delayed, using screens in the stadium to convey that message before kick-off.

This allegation was described as objectively untrue, but its appearance has some value in retrospect because it shows how supporters are truly viewed by an organisation such as Uefa, which was able to focus on assigning blame for the mismanagement which endangered people’s lives — while that very mismanagement was going on.

One would have thought that addressing the problems caused by that mismanagement would take priority, but clearly not. The fact that innocent parties were blamed only underlines Uefa’s haste to abdicate its responsibilities.

Lost in the noise was one more interesting revelation. The game was played in May 2022 and the French senate was able to issue a report within two months which found Liverpool supporters were being wrongly blamed for the mess at the Stade de France. 

Impressive speed by the French legislators, and a model for other jurisdictions to follow perhaps.