Jurgen Klopp has revealed how his family were caught up in the chaos outside the Stade de France before the Champions League final.
And the Liverpool manager has also explained how as many as 47 of the 50 people he knew inside the ground on the night encountered trouble attempting to take their seats for the European showpiece on May 28.
The Reds ended their 63-game campaign in disappointing fashion last month when they were beaten 1-0 by los Blancos in Paris, but the final itself was overshadowed by the thousands of supporters, from both sets of fanbases, who were subjected to horrendous treatment when trying to access the stadium.
Liverpool CEO Billy Hogan confirmed on Thursday that as many as 9,000 written testimonies have now been submitted by fans at the Saint-Denis venue when football followers were subjected to indiscriminate tear-gassings from riot police and pickpocketing and assaults from local gangs.
Klopp has now explained how his family were mixed up in the mayhem on the evening of the fixture and said it was telling how the defeat itself was an otherwise irrelevant part of the night for those in attendance.
Klopp said: "There are different things to talk about. Some of them I think it makes no sense to talk about because there is an ongoing investigation. There is the other part of what I did know – even if I didn’t know a lot immediately after the game.
"But a situation outside? I heard first hand from my family because they were in the middle of everything. They texted me before the game: 'We are in, good luck' stuff like this but they were pretty much one-and-a-half hours away from being in the stadium.
"What happened to them happened to everyone, pretty much. Two or three people I spoke to were lucky, they got in and were waiting. Then there were all the issues through the game. People sitting on seats next to them (that weren’t theirs). They were looking: 'what are you doing here?'
"There were a lot of spots occupied definitely by people without tickets but they were not Liverpool supporters.
"This is pretty much the story everyone told, everyone had this experience. I think I knew 50 people inside the stadium; 47 people told me exactly the same story. That is what I heard. That is obviously not how it should be.
"In the end, it felt for them – and they are passionate Liverpudlians – that the smallest problem we had that night was that we lost the game. Imagine that around the Champions League final! Crazy."
The findings of a French parliamentary inquiry will be made public on July 13 following a statement from the interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, that as many as 40,000 "fake tickets" that were in circulation on the night caused the potentially fatal issues.
Mr Darmanin's claims, and those of French sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera, were widely disputed and subsequently disproven before he offered an apology on French TV late last month.
Meanwhile, UEFA have an investigation of their own that is being led by Dr Thiago Brandao Rodrigues and aided by Peter Weatherby QC, a human rights barrister and Ronan Evian, who is the director of Football Supporters Europe, among others.
"I didn’t hear about [the trouble] properly until the next morning," Klopp added. "My family didn’t tell me that night. They told me the next morning. Obviously this is a good example of how it should not be. We all know how beautiful Paris is and the big events they have got coming up in the next few years.
"But these kinds of things need to be sorted and clarified, definitely. First and foremost for the reason that it cannot happen again. I think we were really lucky that more (problems) did not happen. We have to make sure it does not happen again at all.
"I understand that, I understand it absolutely. For me, it’s not the last memory of the season to be honest. Mine is the bus tour, which was outstanding. But I was not outside the stadium, trying to get in. I cannot really see what was right was wrong.
"How I said: the smallest problem after a game like this is that we lost the game. It says it all. It’s why everyone, the authorities, have to make sure this does not happen again. It was clear where it was (held) was a problem.
"I think in Paris, the authorities would have known about the regional issues there. Anyway, UEFA decided pretty quickly that it will be in Paris. There were other cities, obviously, where it could have been held. I understand that they got the information pretty late.
"So how to organise it? You need somewhere it is easy to organise – and UEFA and Paris, this is not the first time they have worked together, all these kinds of things. I’m 100% sure that nobody made a mistake intentionally. It’s not that everyone thought: 'ah, pfft, who cares how supporters get in!' But the mistakes still happened and now we have to sort it."
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