Liverpool fans will receive refunds for tickets to the UEFA Champions League Final

UEFA said on Tuesday it would return tickets to thousands of Liverpool fans who attended last season’s Champions League final outside Paris, in the latest effort by the organization to make up for the police and security failures that nearly saw its exhibition match deadly. Role.

UEFA said it would do so Offer refunds To the fans “hardest hit” by the scenes of dangerous overcrowding outside the Stade de France gates last May 28. Affected tickets include the entire ticket allocation offered to Liverpool for sale to their fans – a block of around 20,000 tickets – as well as any fans with tickets to specific gates where the worst of the hurricane occurred.

Last year’s final, the final match of the European football season, brought together two of the game’s most popular and supported teams, Liverpool and Real Madrid. But a planning failure led to dangerous scenes as large crowds of Liverpool fans were herded into cramped areas where, with kick-off approaching and fears growing in the crowd, some were sprayed with tear gas by French riot police.

A French senate investigation last year slammed authorities over the chaos as a “fiasco” and raised concerns about French police ahead of this year’s Rugby World Cup and the Paris Summer Olympics. investigation by UEFA, Released last monthwas even more blunt: his scathing review concluded that no fans were killed was simply “a matter of chance.” This report blamed UEFA.

UEFA officials and French sports officials, They previously apologized Liverpool and their fans were blamed for the overcrowding after initially blaming the problems on the team’s “late arrival” fans. (It was also initially stated that people who arrived with fraudulent tickets were to blame, although those alleged were later debunked by examining computer ticket records.) In a recent Champions League match against Real Madrid, the first meeting of the two teams on the field since last year’s final, Liverpool fans raised banners criticizing UEFA and falsely denouncing the French Minister of Sports and Interior.

UEFA’s statement announcing the ticket refunds, a tangible multimillion-dollar effort that may have been intended to defuse some of those hard feelings, was notable because it contained no new apology or any comment from the organization’s president, Aleksander Ceferin. Instead, a senior Ceferin MP thanked the Liverpool fans for their contribution and said the recovery scheme was an attempt to “recognize the negative experiences of those fans that day”.

UEFA He said Refunds will be provided to all fans who had tickets for six specific gates to the Stade de France, but also to all fans who ticket controls showed did not enter the stadium prior to kick-off at 9pm, and to anyone else who was unable to. – or chose not to – enter the stadium at all.

UEFA said the refunded tickets included the entire 19,618 Liverpool allotment, but hundreds or even thousands more tickets were likely held by fans affected by the problems at the match.