20 years ago today: Hillsborough changes English football forever

[Syt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

The Hillsborough Disaster was a deadly human crush that occurred on 15 April 1989, at Hillsborough, a football stadium home to Sheffield Wednesday in Sheffield, England, resulting in the deaths of 96 people (all fans of Liverpool Football Club). It remains the deadliest stadium-related disaster in British history and one of the worst in international football.[1] It was the second of two stadium-related disasters to feature Liverpool supporters, the other being the Heysel Stadium Disaster in 1985.

The match was an FA Cup semi-final clash between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. It was abandoned six minutes into the first half.

The inquiry into the disaster, the Taylor Report, named the cause as failure of police control, and resulted in the conversion of many football stadiums in the United Kingdom to all-seater and the removal of barriers at the front of stands.

On 15 April 2009 fans of all sides gathered at Anfield to pay their respects twenty years on, and starting at 3.06pm there were two minutes' silence in respect. This included public transport coming to a stand-still. Nottingham and Sheffield[2] also gathered for two minutes' silences to pay their respects.

[Drakken]

Titanic owns Hillborough in the April 15th Rumble.

[Grey Fox]

What happened? & What did it change?

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Sounds like the Heizel-drama here in Belgium. A part of the stadium collapsed (iirc) and many death came to pass. A bit over 20 years ago iirc.

[Syt]

Sounds like the Heizel-drama here in Belgium. A part of the stadium collapsed (iirc) and many death came to pass. A bit over 20 years ago iirc.

And also Liverpool involved.

@GF: besides what you read on Wiki it led to the Premier League stadiums you see today: almost exclusively seats instead of no stands, no fences, higher ticket prices, thus end of hooliganism in upper leagues etc.

[Iormlund]

What happened? & What did it change?

A lot. Heysel and Hillsborough signaled the transition from standing stadiums to all-seaters, with much tighter rules. Basically, it made going to a match much more civilized.

[Syt]

What happened? & What did it change?

A lot. Heysel and Hillsborough signaled the transition from standing stadiums to all-seaters, with much tighter rules. Basically, it made going to a match much more civilized.

I recall that going to a match in Hamburg during their Eurocup phase (they won Champions' Cup in 1983) cost about the same as a meal at McDonald's if you were prepared to stand and didn't mind mingling with skinheads. These days you pay the price of 6 or 7 McDonald's meals for the low categories when it's not a top game.

[Richard Hakluyt]

An important consequence was the nancification of English football due to the loss of the overcrowded terraces. Half the people at a premier league match nowadays are bloody accountants and lawyers (who should be watching cricket or rugby  ), meanwhile many of the fans can't afford to buy tickets.

[jimmy olsen]

Ugh, sounds like a particularly awful way to die.

[Cerr]

Here's an article about the effect it had on English football:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/apr/13/liverpool-hillsborough-disaster-anniversary

That English football was transformed for ever by the events of 15 April 1989 is beyond dispute. Whether all the changes that followed were for the better continues to be debated over post-match pints up and down the country, but there remains a firm consensus that the final report of Lord Justice Taylor, published in response to the Hillsborough disaster in January 1990, belatedly dragged the sport into the modern age.

It drew an overdue line under a century during which supporters had often been crammed into crumbling, unsafe grounds behind fences topped with spikes. As has been repeatedly noted since, the tragedy was that it took the deaths of 96 men, women and children to bring it about. Some go so far as to say that Taylor saved English football from both itself and from a Tory government that had come to see it as an embarrassing nuisance. The Premier League and the ensuing revolution would not have been possible without it.

There were in fact two Taylor reports. The first, the interim report, dealt directly with the tragedy and largely laid the blame on the police and the stadium. It was his second and final report that effectively acted as a blueprint for the future, dealing with issues from stadium safety to hooliganism and Margaret Thatcher's controversial ID card scheme, which he effectively curtailed.

"What was extremely positive about Taylor was that he identified and strongly criticised the appalling way the football industry had treated spectators until then," says Malcolm Clarke, chair of the Football Supporters Federation.

"We'd been killing football fans for a century, the bodies stacking up every decade," adds Professor Rogan Taylor, head of the Football Research Group at Liverpool University, in reference to earlier disasters at Ibrox, Valley Parade and elsewhere.

That changed with Taylor's report, with all teams in the top two divisions required to convert to all-seat stadiums and given £31m a year of public money to do so through the levy on the pools that was channelled into the Football Trust. For a sport that jealously guards its independence, it is worth noting that it was an influx of public money and a government review that forced the game to upgrade its antiquated infrastructure.

"The game died and was reborn. Some people might not like the new creature that it has become," says Professor Taylor. "[But] Taylor wrote a future for the game at a time when the government was seeking to consign it to the same dustbin as the miners and anything else that smelled of the smoke–stack industries and flat–capped working classes."

Even those who queried the report's insistence on all-seat stadiums, insisting that a safe standing solution could have been found and suspecting that clubs used it as an excuse to raise prices, acknowledge Lord Taylor did football a huge service. Hooliganism was drastically reduced, with CCTV and seating making the prospect of large-scale disorder inside grounds recede into history.

Transport a fan from 25 years ago into one of today's Premier League grounds and they would be astonished that you could take your seat five minutes before the game, enjoy a clear view for the duration and get out of the ground without the prospect of injury. They would also be astonished at the cost of entry. In his report, Lord Taylor cautioned that fans should not be priced out and suggested a fair ticket price of around £6. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around £14 or £15 today. Instead, £40 and up is the norm.

Clubs stopped treating supporters as "terrace fodder" and started treating them as consumers – for good or ill. Last week's Manchester United accounts, which revealed annual turnover had soared to £256m, stated that one of its four main mission statements is to "treat supporters as customers".

It is tempting to view Hillsborough as a definitive turning point, but the seeds of the Premier League revolution were arguably sown at Heysel four years earlier, with the subsequent European ban leading the big clubs to start considering a breakaway. And it would have been stillborn without the Football Association's backing – which had nothing to do with Hillsborough and everything to do with football's internecine internal politics.

Gazza's tears, Nessun Dorma and the adoption of football shirts as leisure wear played a part, as did the growing middle class respectability for which Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch became convenient shorthand. And if Rupert Murdoch had not been inspired to bet the farm on Premier League football to rescue his then ailing satellite television business, things would have been very different.

One of the remarkable things about the transformation was how quickly it happened. It was not long before the first wave of foreign imports were marrying flashes of genius with the traditional passion of the English game to create a formula that would prove popular around the world. The latest wave of overseas owners, globalisation and the Champions League have raised the stakes, and the rewards, still higher. But without Taylor's report and the enforced uplift in standards it precipitated, it is unlikely the story would have evolved in anything like the same way.

The changes have not all been positive. "The make-up of crowds has changed," warns Clarke. "People on low incomes and young supporters find themselves priced out. The big danger for the football industry is that the average age of people going to a Premier League game has been steadily increasing."

Many children of the Sky era have grown up experiencing football on television and video consoles and now pack into pubs, he argues, standing with a pint and their mates in front of a big screen in the way their fathers once stood on the terraces.

Kenny Dalglish, the Liverpool manager at the time of the Hillsborough disaster, made a similar point in his autobiography, published in 1996. "One legacy of Hillsborough is that the game has become less accessible to the working classes. The prices are too heavy, particularly for a family wanting to go. All clubs must have their commercial side, but there has to be a place for ordinary supporters," he wrote. "With smaller capacities, no one standing and a wealthier audience, grounds have become quieter."

The money that poured into English football has largely gone on players' wages. "The industry is characterised by amazing debt levels," says Clarke. "History will not judge lightly the people who squandered that money. Premier League clubs failed to appreciate that if you want a strong apex to a pyramid, you need a strong base."

But while there is much criticism of football's "prune juice" economics, without those wages the best players in the world would not be attracted to our shores. Without them, the Premier League would not be the huge global attraction it undoubtedly is and would not bring in billions in rights fees.

The Premier League points to figures that show stadiums are largely full, that football is proving resilient in a recession and that, while there may be fewer younger faces as a proportion of the crowd, there are more of them in absolute terms because overall crowds are bigger.

Football is more pervasive than ever before. Other sports look on with envy at the saturation coverage it enjoys and it continues to inspire devotion in new generations of fans – whether they experience the game live or through their TV.

The money flooding in from Sky and season-ticket sales has made English clubs the strongest in Europe and made the Premier League itself envied around the world as a model for other countries and other sports. And in recent years, there are signs some clubs have started to think more strategically about the make-up of their crowds and their long-term future.

In 1990, Taylor wrote: "Boardroom struggles for power, wheeler-dealing in the buying and selling of shares, and indeed of whole clubs, sometimes suggest that those involved are more interested in the personal financial benefits or social status of being a director than of directing the club in the interests of its supporter customers."

It would be interesting to know what the late Lord Taylor would have made of the latest wave of takeovers and the boardroom battles at Liverpool and elsewhere.

Football, by its nature, is a short-term business – owners, managers, players and fans rarely look much beyond the next match, the next round of the cup, the next season. As the English game pauses this week to remember the human cost on the anniversary of its worst tragedy, it might be a moment for football to look to its past for lessons in constructing its future.

[Cerr]

The whole section on the disaster on the guardian site is worth checking out if you're interested.
Here's a personal account of what happened on the day:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/14/hillsborough-post-traumatic-stress-disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a cruelly circular condition. According to the British Medical Journal, a frequent symptom is "trying to avoid thinking about or talking about what has happened. If you have this symptom, it may make it hard to ask for help." Exactly 20 years on from Britain's worst football stadium disaster, trying to talk about what happened at Hillsborough is still too difficult for many who, like me, were unlucky enough to be present on that sunny April day.

Even for those of us who have started along the path, coming to terms with what we saw is a long and difficult journey. In my case, it meant spending a part of every day for nearly a year listening to a recording of myself recounting the experience. The process of acceptance moves at glacial pace. At the start it induces wild-eyed panic; by the end it makes talking about what happened merely deeply unpleasant.

Every year I follow the media coverage of the anniversary, hoping it will focus on the heroism and stoicism of so many who were present. As Sheila Coleman of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign recalls, "After escaping with their lives from the pens, fans immediately transformed into rescuers, ferrying the dead and injured across the pitch on torn-down hoardings that they utilised as makeshift stretchers. But for their heroic actions, the number of dead would undoubtedly have been greater."

I wonder if there will ever be recognition of the thousands of lives that are still terribly affected. Ninety-six Liverpool fans died in the Leppings Lane crush; 730 more were injured inside the stadium, and 36 outside the gates. A total of 54,000 attended the game. "In many respects," says Coleman, "the survivors of the Hillsborough disaster are forgotten victims."

I have watched Liverpool since 1973. A season-ticket holder for decades, by 1989 I had visited dozens of football grounds, including Hillsborough, many of them antiquated and in states of serious disrepair. The journey over the Pennines seemed routine. We parked a mile from the north-west end of the stadium, then set off to look for extra tickets for family and friends.

Ninety minutes before kick-off, we found a ticket for my father in the South Stand, side-on to the pitch. I had to walk around three sides of the ground, past the enormous Spion Kop where the rival Nottingham Forest fans gathered, to reach my turnstiles. As I approached, many hundreds of Liverpool fans were converging on the West Stand and Leppings Lane standing area beneath it.

A piecemeal design over several decades, the West Stand and its entrance was a major cause of the disaster. As the interim report by Lord Justice Taylor would later observe: "At many other grounds, turnstiles are in a straight line, adequately spaced and with a sufficient waiting area for queues to form. Not so at Leppings Lane ... The pairs of turnstiles were close together, and the forecourt provided little space for a waiting crowd."

With the kick-off still more than half an hour away, the seven operating turnstiles already could not handle the Liverpool fans pressing forward outside. As queueing became impossible and hundreds more fans crossed the forecourt to the turnstiles, I found myself sweating and in discomfort. I had no control over my direction of movement. A man next to me was in obvious pain; mercifully, a young girl was hoisted above the crush.

As the minutes passed, my fears increased. I had been in many a push-and-shove to get into football grounds before, but this felt very different. A mounted police officer, his horse apparently motionless in the crowd, was attracting criticism. The police just did not appear to have a plan. Serious injury or worse seemed inevitable; the pressure increased. Unable to move my arms and facing a metal gate, I saw others begin to struggle. Sweating, panicking, I felt the metal gate open briefly. I fell through it. Moments later, it closed again.

I believe I was the second person to get through. The calmness inside the concourse, compared with the bedlam outside, was staggering. But, disastrously, there was a similar absence of organised police or ground stewards inside. Aware of the distress outside the gate, I pleaded with police to open it. I shouted at a young PC. Although a command to open the gate was, in fact, given from the police control room, it felt as if officers were reacting to events without any authority or chain of command.

Approaching the tunnel that led down to our standing area behind the goal, and still shocked by the previous crush, I bought a carton of Kia-Ora near the tunnel's entrance. Hundreds of fans started to approach, and my fear returned. This was the only entrance to the pens directly behind the goal. "Don't go down there, mate, it's gonna be packed," I told a group of fellow fans. Like many others who thought they had come through the worst, they passed me without comment. I remain convinced that just one steward or police officer directing fans to the side entrances, away from the central pens, could have saved many lives that day. Every day since, I have wondered if I could, and should, have done more.

As more fans passed me, I panicked. I hurried from the tunnel entrance to the steps at the side of the Leppings Lane terrace, expecting to see too many people in too small a space. What I saw pushed me into shock. I ran to the gates of the South Stand, shouting, "People are going to die!" at police and football club officials. They looked at me in silence.

The terrible images of dying fans being lifted over the fences on to the pitch are now well known - but at the back of those crowded pens, away from the cameras, I witnessed more horrors. Behind the West Stand, bodies were laid out behind and to the right of the tunnel. The injured lay with the dead. Unable to administer help or determine the extent of injuries, I panicked and vainly tried to attract help.

It was here that I saw real heroism. Some fans attempted resuscitation. Many others pleaded with the police for access to ambulances, not knowing that 44 ambulances had been parked outside at the opposite end of the ground on the orders of South Yorkshire police. I watched fans reason calmly and logically with the hapless authorities while their friends clung to life. Amazingly, several police officers denied fans access to the bodies. I saw fans being pushed and blamed by police for the grotesque scene I was witnessing. Several young men, little older than me, appealed for calm, aware that the police would welcome any excuse to blame fans. Their self-control was remarkable - their friends were lying dead and injured yards away, yet they were denied access to them while being provoked physically and verbally.

"Many [of these fans] have lived their lives to date without acknowledgment of what was probably the most traumatic experience of their lives," says Coleman.

As the bodies were belatedly attended to, I made my way from the ground. Car radios screamed the growing body count. Now in shock and unable to speak, I found myself in a local house. I phoned home but was unable to talk. My unknown host confirmed to my family that I was alive. This was how my Hillsborough ended. Mute, in shock and lost.

My father arrived hours later. His Hillsborough included being refused access to the bodies by a senior police officer, who told him without irony that, if he entered the pitch, the police could not take any responsibility for him. Among the bodies and rescuers, my father turned around a young man dressed in clothes identical to mine. After searching the pitch and stadium, he returned to his car to find me crumpled up next to it. No one spoke. We drove back to Merseyside in silence. There were no tears.

You may feel that, 20 years later, all the talking about Hillsborough has been done. I think, for many, it has barely started. There are thousands of survivors and witnesses who can't "move on" because their reality has not yet been made public. The absence of justice, of any acceptance of blame for the terrible misjudgments made that day, is the most important barrier, but the long-term guilt and shame are also factors. Even now, I am commonly asked about what I saw in a roundabout way. It is often raised as, "Were you at Sheffield?" or, "Were you at the game?"

For me, and for so many, it was the years afterwards that were problematic. After several months of shock, thankfully protected by good pastoral care at work and university, and several years of denial, the impact finally made itself felt. Triggered by who-knows-what, the tears arrived. Walking down a road, in a restaurant, at home, on a train. Eight to 10 years later, no amount of denial could hold back my emotions any more.

"Any feelings of relief at escaping the carnage of Hillsborough were very quickly replaced by feelings of guilt," Coleman says. "In many cases, this guilt led to people suppressing the feelings they were experiencing - almost as if they had no right to label themselves victims."

Several suicides have been ascribed to Hillsborough, including one Nottingham Forest fan who witnessed events from the other end of the ground. Alcohol and drug addiction are not uncommon. But what is needed now is a proper, comprehensive study by the Football Association of the long-term effects on survivors, witnesses and families. As Coleman says, "The FA got off lightly after Hillsborough - they owed the fans present a duty of care. It would be a fitting tribute to the survivors if the FA were to fund research into the long-term impact of the disaster. Let that be the FA's legacy of Hillsborough, rather than the loud sigh of relief that reverberated when they were let off the hook."

Tomorrow we will rightly mourn the 96 victims who died on 15 April 1989. But we should also celebrate those fans whose heroic behaviour and dignity was in stark contrast to the antipathy and ineptitude of the South Yorkshire police, and the mercilessly inhuman press coverage by the Sun. Most of all, we should reach out to those who are still locked in a needless and damaging cycle of guilt and shame as a result of attending a football match. It is time they stopped walking alone.

[Neil]

Leave it to the fucking Guardian to take the FUK DA POLICE line.

[Josquius]

Terraces ruled.