There’s no escaping the fact this is a blog about European soccer (with an admittedly English bent) that is geographically situated in Canada. While many North American football enthusiasts spend a great deal of time thinking about what happens an ocean away, it’s through the sometimes-unreliable filter of English papers, blogs and the Premier League television feed. Even spending hours, days and weeks reading football’s best—Simon Kuper, David Goldblatt, Brian Glanville or a host of other evocative English football writers—we will still only see through a glass-darkly.
And there’s no glass perhaps so dark through which overseas fans view Hillsborough. On the surface, it’s one of several stadium disasters that have sometimes afflicted professional sport, albeit a particularly important one for the science of crowd dynamics and safety standards. It’s also a moment among several—including the recent tragic death of IndyCar racer Dan Wheldon—when fans and professionals are forced to confront their own mortality.
However a dense patina of symbolism surrounds Hillsborough, an event whose influence will be discussed years from now, even after the British government will have finally released hundreds of thousands of hitherto unavailable documents to the public after a parliamentary session yesterday. Some of that legacy indirectly involves the struggle for the soul of English football in a modern era characterized by overseas investment, branding and an increasing sense of rootlessness.
For Liverpool supporters, the stadium crush at the semifinal match against Sheffield Wednesday is now built into the collective understanding of what it means to be a fan of the club; indeed, the meaning of “Justice for the 96″ is as familiar and important to Kopites as “the Fields of Anfield Road.” While the self-ascribed “special status” of Liverpool supporters is often criticized in sections of the wider press, some of it has its roots—justifiably—in the appalling treatment of the victims by both police and the wider English press in the hours and days following the disaster.
For fans of the sport, particularly outside of Britain, it represents the horrific-yet-symbolic end of the dark ages in English football. English clubs had already been banned from Europe following the events at Heysel stadium in the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus in 1985; tactically, the game was lagging far behind the progenitors of modern tactics on the continent, particularly in Italy. Meanwhile, England lived in fear of aggressive hooliganism at matches, and ordinary football fans became increasingly ostracized—by the government, the media, and the police.
Hillsborough represented the beginning of the end of the isolation and alienation of football via the changes wrought by the Taylor Report, a series of recommendations following the disaster which in part sowed the seeds of the gentrification of the game—the modern, all-seater ground replacing all-standing terraces for example—in time for the creation of the intentionally TV-friendly Premier League, the Bosman ruling, lucrative overseas broadcast rights, better managers and players, and European domination. It underlined the importance of developing an atmosphere of fun and entertainment (which of course requires a guarantee of safety) at football matches, rather than one in which fans were treated like violent animals (the most galling revelation was the report that the police tested victims at Hillsborough for blood alcohol levels, including children). It may be an overreach to say the Premier League would not be what it is today without Hillsborough, but along with the 1990 World Cup, it had an indelible mark on the future of the domestic game.
Not everyone however sits comfortably with the state of modern football in England, and this is where meaning of Hillsborough today becomes particularly important. As MP Steve Rotheram said in his address to parliament yesterday, references to the “ninety-six roll off the tongue too easily,” and then proceeded to read out the names of every single person—mothers, brothers, neighbours—who died, crushed to death because of appallingly poor crowd control on their way to do what most of us now take for granted: watching a football match.
It makes for very difficult viewing, but what makes his speech so moving is the realization that Hillsborough wasn’t primarily about the state of football or Liverpool fans, but about the unnecessary deaths of ninety-six individual people. No one would argue that the state of the game hasn’t improved in England since the 1980s, so much so the world clamours to watch along with those fortunate enough to drive to grounds across the country every Saturday. But the sense of football fans as a faceless horde ripe for exploitation—whether by FIFA’s refusal to pay taxes to host nations as it bulldozes favelas, or working fans forced to pay outrageous ticket hikes above inflation, or to watch as their clubs are run into the financial ground without a say in its future—remains, albeit in a significantly less vicious form.
It took the death of nearly a hundred people a mere twenty-two years ago to drag football into the 20th century from the 19th, as Justice Taylor put it in 1990. It would serve those well in charge of the game, as well as fans, whether in England or without, to remember the wider lesson from that awful afternoon in Sheffield, that fans are not a masse bloc to be exploited, controlled, penned-in and kept in line, but ordinary, everyday people from all walks of life, entitled to be safe, to have their voices heard, and to seek justice for an overdue wrong.
