Newcastle fans’ ordeal shows French police and Uefa have not learned the lessons of Paris | OneFootball

After 39 fans lost their lives at Heysel in 1985, a perception began to take hold that English football supporters were hooligans. This blanket stereotype should have expired before the turn of the millennium. Instead, 40 years on from that tragic day in Brussels, it has become transgenerational.

Travelling Newcastle supporters are the latest to endure the trauma. The club will issue an official complaint to Uefa over the treatment of its fans following the team’s Champions League defeat in Marseille, when they were allegedly attacked by batons and pepper-sprayed by the French authorities in a bid to subdue the seemingly cooperative away contingent who were trying to get back to their hotels. The Independent has reached out to Uefa for comment.

The supporters, moving in groups of 500 at a time, were said to be waiting “patiently and without incident” as they were held in the Stade Velodrome for up to an hour to ensure their safety when leaving the stadium. But after the first group was released, police began to “indiscriminately assault” supporters to stop the remainder of the fans from moving any further. Visible fan distress led to “crushing becoming apparent” in the upper concourse area of the away sector – an incredibly dangerous situation that, as history has taught us, can turn fatal.

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Newcastle players applaud their fans at full-time (Reuters)

“We will be calling on Uefa, Olympique de Marseille and local authorities to formally investigate this matter to ensure lessons are learned and this behaviour is not repeated,” a Newcastle statement read. Such a plea has been made before. But this four-decade-old problem feels no closer to being solved.

The apparent need to show “unruly” English fans the iron fist began to fester in the aftermath of the Heysel disaster. Ahead of the 1985 European Cup final, contested between Liverpool and Juventus, 39 fans died and 600 were left injured in a crush after a wall collapsed. While abject failures in crowd management and poor stadium design were at the heart of the disaster, there was a widespread belief that Liverpool fans were solely responsible, and that the crush had been the culmination of crowd disorder sparked by Reds supporters crossing a fence separating them from a neutral stand that contained mostly Juventus fans.

Fourteen were later found guilty of manslaughter and jailed. It resulted in English clubs being banned from Europe for five years, and fuelled the notion that there was a problem of English hooliganism on the continent.

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The Heysel disaster fuelled the perception that English fans were bringing hooliganism to European matches (AFP via Getty)

That reputation stands to this day, and has effectively become the knee-jerk justification for European authorities – most prevalently the French police – to subject fans to unnecessary and disproportionate force. This actively ignores the systemic negligence of the authorities at play, heightening fan danger and hindering progress.

On the 40th anniversary of Heysel earlier this year, The Independent spoke to Professor Clifford Stott of Keele University, a specialist in crowds and policing and the co-author of the independent report that delved into the chaotic scenes at the 2022 Champions League final in Paris. Probed about the persistent tendency to blame hooliganism for this sort of incident, he said: “It is completely useless as a narrative to help us to understand the nature of the problem. What we’re dealing with isn’t hooligans, it’s crowd management, crowd dynamics and crowd psychology.”

Liverpool fans were famously embroiled in pre-match troubles involving Paris police ahead of the Champions League final in May 2022, when police funnelled supporters into a bottleneck near the Stade de France that was not fit for purpose. Crowds inevitably began to overwhelm the police, which led to the use of teargas. Ticketless supporters were then blamed for the ordeal by French authorities before an independent report exonerated the fans and confirmed the police’s responsibility in the ordeal.

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Liverpool fans were famously embroiled in pre-match troubles with Paris police ahead of the 2022 Champions League final (Getty)

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Liverpool fans cover their faces after police deployed teargas outside the Stade de France (Getty)

Manchester United fans were also teargassed by French police last season – this time in Lyon, after their Europa League quarter-final first leg. The post-match scenes were nearly identical to what was seen in Marseille, with the local authorities claiming that the measures were “proportionate” given the need to restore calm.

However, these incidents of rogue, excessive policing do not adhere to the Saint-Denis Convention – the legislation ratified by the Council of Europe in 2016 that effectively set the framework for how major sporting events should be managed across the board. On paper, this was the solution to years of toil undertaken in the effort to make football universally safe; to prevent future disasters or cases of crowd mismanagement. But its essence – the requirement for international police cooperation around each and every event that goes beyond country lines – was, and evidently still is, idealistic, as well as massively difficult to implement. “The ideal situation is the policy agreements that were reached in 2016, and they’re still not being realised,” adds Stott.

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The Saint-Denis Convention set the framework for how major sporting events should be managed – but it is incredibly difficult to implement at scale (Getty)

With English fans still faced with the prospect of peril every time they cross the Channel, football remains tasked with putting into practice the lessons the game has learnt – and written into law. Stott believes that vast improvements could be seen if Uefa took a more hands-on approach to regulating match policing in its competitions. “It’s really their failure to oversee the delivery of the safety and security operations in these locations that lies at the heart of the problem,” he says.

But, as demonstrated in Marseille, progress isn’t being made, and the same problems keep cropping up. There is still so much work that needs to be done to ensure the safety of travelling supporters, because with every one of these incidents, disaster is a potential outcome.