It was one of the great tragedies in the history of sport. It happened in 1985, in the Champions Cup final. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Now, in the time of the Champions League with happy faces televised around the world, that seems like an absurdity from the remote past. Or a lie of crazy days. This May 29 marks the 33rd anniversary of the most dramatic day in Europe's top club competition, the same one that hosted the duel between Liverpool and Real Madrid last weekend. But it happened. In an ancient stadium, Heysel, in Brussels, the tragedy occurred: 39 deaths due to lack of organization, violence, hatred.
Yes, it happened in the context of the most important game of the year. Juventus were playing – the one that Michel Platini, also a former president of UEFA, was driving from the field of play at the time – and Liverpool were playing the Champions Cup final. Despite the dead in sight of all, beyond the inadmissible drama, the match was played.
It was 1-0 for those from Turin, who then won their first trophy in the competition. The journalist Santiago Segurola told it when it was twenty years old, in the newspaper El País: "That final will never be remembered because of what happened on the field, and it even adds more shadows to the tragedy that the game was played in front of the corpses deposited next to the pitch -Juve won thanks to a non-existent penalty on Boniek, but nobody talks about that victory in Turin-, but because of the carnage that was experienced before the match, in a vigil that the players remember with horror because the news They came to the locker room without any filter. They knew there were dead, they saw them when they entered the field, they had them by their side throughout the match and, even so, they played". Platini's converted penalty generated the most uncomfortable and embarrassing cry in football history. It was celebrated at a wake, in the midst of tragedy.
In 2015, three decades after the tragedy, the BBC interviewed Simone Stenti, one of the Juventus fans who survived that dramatic moment. His testimony is still moving: "We decided to go to the bottom to escape through one of the walls. I thought I was going to die there: people were squeezing my neck and for a few seconds I couldn't breathe. And when you can't breathe properly, You can't think properly. We were surrounded by children, old people, women. Suddenly we could see the entrance to one of the bathrooms. Somehow I managed to push my father to that place and then he was able to get me out. We knew that something huge had happened. past, but we never imagined the magnitude".
That episode was an end and a beginning. English football, owner of so many traditions, of magical stories, seemed prisoner of itself beyond the success that its clubs exhibited. The hooligans damaged it in their own territory and abroad with their drunken bar fights and in the streets near the stadiums. As some documentaries portray and even as Nick Hornby tells it in his book Fever in the stands (Fever Pitch, in its original language). It ended up being a milestone. Since Heysel, everything has changed.
UEFA severely sanctioned English clubs: they were left out of European competitions for five years. The best, the most successful, run to one side. It was the final and definitive consequence. There was an added detail in terms of sanctions: Liverpool was given a decade of continental restriction; then they cut the sentence to six years.
It was the epilogue of the Founders domain. Between 1976 and 1984, English clubs had won seven of the eight trophies in the most important competition. Four of the city reds from The Beatles; two for Brian Clough's unlikely Nottingham Forest and one for Aston Villa in their first revival.
What happened in Heysel redefined English football. Some cracks left after that context of an import scenario. Those who stood out in England -especially in the national team- began to leave for the continent, to the land of UEFA, the one that had sanctioned it. The stars left and local football lost its shine, while learning to get rid of the violent ones -the much feared hooligans- and rebuild their own space. The beginning of the end began for excess.
In addition, it was also a milestone in the context of FIFA. Safety was born then as a priority. Obligations arose that were not always complied with: areas without seats were eliminated from all stadiums; criteria were established to evaluate the level of security and comfort of the stadiums; measures were determined so that the fans of the different teams were separated by security cordons; body searches arose with intensity; the exhibition in the stadiums of aggravating symbols for the opponent was inhibited; Surveillance cameras were installed inside the stadiums.
In Europe, slowly but surely, they learned their lesson. In the South American sphere, tragedies and slapstick are still expected to teach. Or something like that.
Four years later, when there was no room for more pain, another tragedy occurred: on Saturday, April 15, 1989, at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, 96 people were crushed to death against the stadium's fences by an avalanche. Liverpool was playing again; this time against Forest, for the FA Cup. Since then, nothing has been the same. The Football Museum in Manchester offers a definitive look at the episode: it counts it as a before and after in English football. Nothing would be the same there. The wordy world of the Premier League - with its many strengths and many flaws - was underway...
11.040 SRY