Harrowing stories of what unfolded in Paris continue to emerge and as French authorities look to play the blame game, and Real Madrid fans experienced the same dangerous issues.
Bottlenecks, kettling, tear gas, local gangs and complete mismanagement of a situation led to no concern for supporter safety prior to the Champions League final.
The horror stories from Liverpool fans continue to come out and the club are taking action in the face of a cover-up from French authorities, which chairman Tom Werner brandished as a “blame game strategy.”
The, unsurprising, rhetoric from French sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera and others has been to allege fake tickets and ‘ticketless British fans’ for the chaos that unfolded.
But it was not only Liverpool fans to experience the brutality, Real Madrid supporters were also subject to the horrors of that night and acknowledged only the patience of Reds saw tragedy avoided.
Manolo Lama, who commentated on the game for Spain’s Radio Cope Cope, via the Daily Mail, said: “The fortunate thing was that the English fans behaved because if they had not then there would have been a tragedy.”
And Madrid fan, Gabriel Saez, also speaking to Radio Cope, recounted the scenes he witnessed with his wife and five children.
“We are lucky to be talking about Madrid’s victory and not a tragedy. There were no signs to say where the entrances were,” he said.
“We followed other supporters to the only place you could advance to the stadium. It was a bottleneck and imagine the scene: I have children of eight, 12, 15, 20 and 24 years.
“The English fans have a bad reputation, but I never saw any problems. They were showing a lot of patience. There are a lot of gates to access this stadium.
“I was there to see a France-Ireland rugby match and there was no problem, but they only opened two or three gates with these bottlenecks.
“There were no police or stewards there at all [as local youths ran riot]. My daughter was crying, my wife was terrified.
“Another group of Spanish supporters turned up afterwards and they were bloodied. They had been through the same thing but clearly more violent.”
The scenes after the final whistle were just as horrific and scary, as television screenwriter Juan de Val recounted: “We had to walk about 1.5km to our bus. I’m not an easily scared person but I was very frightened.
“When we got on the bus, there were people getting on after us who had been robbed.”
It was to be a day of celebration for both sets of supporters and yet it has ended as a day they’d like to forget but never will, and the subsequent cover-up from French authorities is a further insult.
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