Went to see Top Gun the other night.
Was told to be there three hours before the screening began because it was going to be busy, so I did as I was told.
Hung about outside with hundreds like me who had obeyed orders and got there early. It began to get busy so we moved out onto the street, only to be herded back onto a pavement that isn’t wide enough to take us all by baton-wielding cops. We didn’t move quickly enough for their liking and there were elderly people and kids also anxious to see the movie and we were trying to look after them and telling the cops to back off. So they pepper-sprayed us all.
There was panic. Pandemonium, folk getting trampled, battered and bruised. We’d only come to see a movie, for God’s sake.
Then when it all calmed down and we eventually got to our seats, traumatised, we were told it was all our fault. Got there too late and loads of you tried to get in with fake tickets. And if you’re thirsty, there’s plenty of water in the toilets.
Okay, that didn’t happen. But can you imagine the reaction if it did? If movie or theatre-goers were treated with the same blatant disregard for their health and well-being?
So how come then, that when football fans are treated like that, there are a few tut-tuts and shrugs but nothing EVER happens to make it better?
The situation that Liverpool fans endured on Saturday night at what should have been UEFA’s showpiece event of the year was nothing short of a scandal. This club knows all about tragedy and from all accounts - including many reputable media sources who were caught up in it - another one was avoided by nothing more than luck.
My Liverpool-daft brother-in-law was there. We were texting him to try to find out if he was okay and eventually got a message back that he’d made it into the stadium. But our concerns would have been mirrored across the country and beyond. What should have been a celebration turned into a fear-fest by an organisation that does not give a damn about the very people who sustain it.
The events in Paris are on UEFA’s head. There will be talk of investigations but what will come of them? Nothing. Nothing ever does because the bottom line is they don’t care.
The French Open tennis is on just a few miles away at Roland-Garros. Never in a million years would the tennis crowd be treated in such a fashion by the police and authorities. Why? Because football fans are viewed as a sub-culture; something to be tolerated but treated with contempt.
UEFA gives only a fraction of a stadium’s capacity to fans of the clubs participating in their finals. Sponsors and suits get the rest and it does nothing but create a black market designed only to put fortunes into the hands of the already rich at the expense of the ordinary fan, whose devotion to their team makes them take leave of their senses, financially and otherwise, at times.
They’ll pay ridiculous money to be there on the night that their team wins a major trophy and UEFA knows that, and they don’t care that they are being fleeced.
They leave it to local authorities to set up fanzones and the like, and to be fair, it seems Paris and Seville a week earlier got it right in those respects.
But the matchday experience was a horror show in both instances.
I was in Seville working at the Rangers game and it was only afterwards that the stories began to emerge.
It was blisteringly hot that day and night, so how anyone - police, stewards, whoever, would have the lack of common decency when fans were pleading with them to be allowed to take water and suncream into a stadium that simply wasn’t fit for purpose - is simply beyond comprehension.
To make people drink from the taps in the toilets. Do you think the Roland-Garros crowd would have been told to drink loo water if they were thirsty?
Maybe it’s all about keeping the small people in their place, but it’s time for change.
UEFA won’t change, so it’s up to the clubs and the fans to do something about it, no matter how hard it is.
Rangers and Eintracht Frankfurt condemned the situation in Seville that night. UEFA ‘apologised’. But a week later, got it horribly wrong again,
They will keep getting it wrong because they don’t have to get it right. Not when fans keep scrambling to get to the events and not when clubs meekly accept rotten ticket allocations without kicking up a stink.
Rangers played a final in a stadium that held 42,000. Roma and Feyenoord’s Conference League final was in a 21,000-capacity ground in Albania.
Both matches would have sold out three or four times over, so the very least UEFA can do is put their finals in stadiums that can take as many fans as possible. But they won’t. They want to keep the ‘small’ people desperate.
And until the ‘small’ people and the clubs they follow tell them to shove it, we’re not playing that game anymore, they’ll keep getting away with it.
Those watching Tom Cruise will be treated with decency - as they should - while those watching Toni Kroos get battered with batons and tear-gassed.
