Irish Examiner view: Uefa own goal after Paris match

Champions League debacle

Liverpool fans stuck outside the ground showing their match tickets during the Uefa Champions League Final at the Stade de France, Paris. 

When considering responsibility and accountability in sport, Uefa must come close to topping the league table. Just not in the way any team or organisation would want.

Earlier this year, an independent report into events at last May’s Champions League final in Paris offered a blistering indictment of the European soccer governing body. 

Many Liverpool fans were squeezed into pens and endured dangerous crushing that night, and the report laid the blame for at Uefa’s door for an incident which almost turned into a “mass fatality catastrophe”.

Yesterday, Uefa confirmed that all 19,618 Liverpool fans who bought tickets for the game from the club’s allocation for the game are eligible for a refund. 

It is almost a year after the fact, which doesn’t reflect well on the organisation’s desire to make amends to those it blamed wrongly. 

More important, is this anything more than an transparent attempt to buy off justifiably outraged fans? 

That’s how it appears, and lawyers representing Liverpool supporters caught up in the chaos of Paris have already warned Uefa that more substantial compensation may be sought than that offered by a ticket refund.

Sports governing bodies seem no different, unfortunately, to other large organisations in that the need to protect the corporate body seems always to be the primary impulse. 

An unfortunate by-product of this attitude is a drive to relocate the responsibility for errors as quickly as possible, with the contemporaneous rush by Uefa to blame Liverpool fans in Paris last May a good example of that mindset.

The right course of action would surely be to offer a blanket refund to anyone who attended that this particular game. 

As it stands, does a primary focus on the Liverpool supporters’ refunds give the impression that this was an issue for those supporters alone? It is true that some others in attendance can apparently also apply for a refund — but only if they meet Uefa’s criteria for same.

This represents yet another misstep by Uefa, botching a paltry attempt to make amends to people with serious grievances and underlining the lack of accountability and self-awareness within the organisation.