Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and it's just us and that's okay. And this is our ongoing Studies Abroad ped issue.
That's right, and we you know, this is about the Hillsborough disaster, which was the very unfortunate and super sad and somewhat infuriating, deadly crush that happened at an English football stadium in nineteen eighty nine. So we enlisted Kyle, our one writer from the UK, to put this together for us, and he did a great job and used all the appropriate letters and terminology and his spelling and stuff.
You know, yeah, I was gonna say no z's throughout. They were all s's.
Yeah. Yeah.
He did a wonderful job this summarizing like a really big giant story that had we done this episode like when we first started, it would have been totally different because around twenty fifteen, the public opinion, the entire basically worldview of what happened at the strategedy completely flip flopped and the truth finally came out. We'll get to all that, but I'd say we kind of give everybody some background
about what's going on here. The whole thing took place, like you said, in nineteen eighty nine at Hillsborough Stadium. That's in Sheffield, which is in South Yorkshire, which is a county in Yorkshire, And normally this is the home of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. That's where they play at Hillsboro, but this day it was actually hosting an FA Cup semifinal. That means it was all England teams and it was
between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. So far, so good. This is just a normal Cup semifinal game that's a big deal, way bigger than the average Sheffield Wednesday Football club game. But you know, so far it's pretty normal.
Yeah, for sure, they had Liverpool had more fans and I'm not sure how it is now, but nineteen eighty nine at least that was the case. I think it
probably still is. But they were allocated the smaller end of the stadium and the entrance and you know, as you'll a lot of times with disasters like these, you're going to see it like a series of steps that happened to kind of ensure unwittingly that something terrible goes down, and this was sort of the first one was they allocated the larger fan base the smaller end of the stadium, and the entrance to that was at the end of Lepping's Lane, which was a street that dead ended into
the stadium, and not only did it dead end, but it bottlenecks. It got more narrow as you got toward that dead end, and that the turnstiles there, which is where you get in at that part of the stadium. There were seven of them. They were old, you know, this is an older stadium, and they didn't you know, they just couldn't move people through as quickly as like you would be able to today exactly.
And you know, under a normal game for Sheffield Wednesday, this was not that big of a problem. This was a very big problem this day because there were ten one hundred fans who were just the ones who had standing room only tickets in what are called pens. Right, So they're ultimately like basically little terraces with a bunch of little tiny steps on them and some railings which are called crush barriers, and you just stand in them.
You just pack everybody in. But they're supposed to say like, okay, there're no more than this many people can go into this pen, no more than this many people can go into that pen.
Whatever.
So there's ten thousand people who are all going into these pens. They have to use these seven turnstyles so very quickly. Even outside of this stadium, a bit of a crush starts to happen, in part because the cops aren't doing anything about having people form a line or q. They're not directing anybody to do anything. It's just get in where you fit in, and whoever gets there first is the one who gets through that turnstile that moment.
Yeah, but you know, there's plenty of surveillance footage and stuff out and it was not you know, as we'll see the story that was kind of cooked up to evade I guess being responsible for this, which is what they were, was that, you know, it was an unruly crowd of drunks. Hooliganism was a thing much more back then. They've basically eradicated that now for the most part. And if you look at the footage, it's you know, it's
a bunch of kids, a lot of teenagers. It wasn't super expensive back then to get into soccer and football games like this. It was six pounds to get in for standing room only, and they were lively. They were have a good time, but it didn't look like anything threatening at that point at all. There were people just like, you know, kind of trying to get into the stadium to see a game. They were excited about.
Yeah and all. This really kind of starts about ten minutes before kickoff. That's when people are like, come on, let's go, we got to get in. And like by this time that crowd had backed like the lines or whatever had backed up into Leppings Lane pretty far. So people wanted to hurry up and get through right, But
like you said, everybody was generally good natured. Kickoff was set at three pm, and at ten till three pm there were still five thousand Liverpool fans who were outside on Lepping's Lane trying to get through these seven turnstyles. And so at this point the cops, at least one cop. The guy who was in charge of managing this side of the outside of the stadium, got in touch with the guy who was running all of the police for
this soccer match. His name is David Duckinfield, and the guy outside said, hey, we need to open a gate and forget the turnstiles and tickets. There's a bunch of people who are about to get crushed out here, and we need to relieve some of this pressure. Please open this gate. You did that once, Duck and Field ignored it, did it twice, Duck and Field ignored it. The third time. It was almost frantic, and Duck and Field finally said, okay,
go ahead and open gate. See they did that at two point fifty two pm and all of a sudden, just an enormous mass of people stream into essentially the foyer of the stadium. So now you go from a crowd crush outside of the stadium to the potential crowd crush just inside the stadium.
Yeah, and so, and we'll get to more about David Duckinfield, the match commander, and his qualifications and stuff, I guess in a minute. But one thing we did not mention is these pins. And this was partially to kind of keep hooliganism down. They were fenced within the seating area, so once you got to this large standing there were different numbered pins within that that were you know, fenced
off from each other. So there were literal pins and when people started flowing through when they opened gate, sea. They were all passing through towards this, you know, the central part of the field, down this long tunnel. I think Kyle said it was twenty three meters long to get to pins three and four, which were basically midfield, and there was plenty of room on the pins on
the outside. But because nobody was directing traffic, nobody was relaying information, no one knew this, and those central pins were already full at ten till when that big crowd of people started to make their way to that spot.
Right. So again, because I was standing room ontely, it didn't tell you what pen you had to go to. You could go to whatever pen. But since that tunnel was straight ahead, that's where people naturally went. And like you said, those pins were already full. So as this tunnel this crush of people, there's crowd of people after opening gate, sea floods in connects with the people who
are all already coming through those seven turnstyles. Almost all of them start to go through this tunnel, and that tunnel opens up on two pens that are already full of people, way over capacity already. As they found in retrospect, there was about a thousand more people that they allowed onto each pen than they should have based on the kind of crowd control safety stuff they had in place. So it was already dangerously full before those people from
Gate Sea even made their way down the tunnel. But when they did, they encountered this mass of other people. But there were people behind them who didn't know this, at the back of the tunnel, in the tunnel, and they all wanted in two so everybody was pressing forward and then all of a sudden a crowd crush happened in those two middle pens.
That's right.
So it's about five till kickoff. At this point when people like later described just sort of a change in how things were going, you know, like I said, it was it was people generally happy to go see this soccer game. And by two fifty five it becomes clear that like something's wrong. Four minutes later it was a lethal crush had developed and those two central pins and officers, some of them are telling people to move back like this is part of the problem is the officers themselves
were very disorganized and not sharing information. So some officers are telling people to move back. They're saying they can't move back because there's people behind them and those fences that were installed to I think that was in nineteen seventy seven to prevent the hooliganism. We're keeping people like once they got in from being like, oh wow, it's getting like super crowded, let's move to these outer pins
where there's plenty of room. People started climbing fences and stuff, and this is where it gets really really out of hand, like the panic starts to set in. People are trying to drag people over the fences to safety. Some of the gates of the pins were opened by the cops at that point, but it's developed into like a real dangerous.
Right, And so inside the pens there's those railings that they're kind of like intermittently staggered in the pens, right, So if you walk into one of these pens and you're facing the field, you'll eventually come to a railing, and that's a crowd barrier or a crush barrier, which means that if a crush develops, that barrier is supposed to stop it from going any further than the barrier. So the people behind the barrier, life's gonna suck for them,
but the people in front of that barrier will be safe. Right, it's like limiting crowd crushes. Well, the problem is one of them was very very old, at least one, and it gave So there's a whole crush of people who are pressed up against this and a whole bunch of people on the other side of it too, And now one of those barriers fall and that crush of people just basically spills into this other group of people in
the same pen and people it just fell over. It was like a wave of people that overcame the people who were standing on the other side of that barrier that broke.
Yeah, so all this time the match starts on time, word is not again. Communication was just kind of chaotic, and no one got word down to the pitch that hey, maybe we should delay this game and get this under control. And at three pm the game starts at three oh five, those barriers, at least the one in Pen three, had given away, and a human cascade starts. And this is when,
you know, the devastating stuff. We're not going to read one thousand accounts of people getting you know, squeezed to death, because it's pretty awful, but you know what happens in a situation like that is you can't breathe because you're so packed into one another that you can't expand your chest out to get a breath, and you generally die of asphyxiation or like your heart stops right.
Yeah, and this happened to a lot of people in this We talked a lot about this phenomenon in the Crowd episode and I think in the Black Friday episode two.
Yeah, the Crowd one was what inspired this episode.
Yeah, because we we just touched on it just a little bit, right.
I don't even know if I mean, I think if we mentioned it. I said, I brought it up because I had asked Kyle to write this.
Gotcha, gotcha? Okay, But when there was like when this crowd, this human cascade happened, people got pushed over, and you know, there's a natural human reaction to try to get upright again, which means that you were standing on people beneath you, and so people got trampled. In addition to the people who were pressed up against the other crush barriers or against the fence. There's some really disturbing photos that were taken very close up of the people pressed up against
the fence. Did you see those.
I saw them when I was in high school and sports illustrated, Like, I remember this vividly. I didn't go back and revisit a lot of that because it's super upsetting.
Yeah, it really is upsiding. And there's a guy who took a lot of His name was David Cannon, and he was at least partially responsible for getting the police
to finally stop the game. The reason why they wanted to stop the game so bad is because they think that that that crush or that movement that caused the human cascade was in response to one of Liverpool's players just missing a goal, and so they're like, we need to stop the game, right, So this guy, David Cannon, got them to stop the game, or at least he tried.
He's one of the main photographers who was there at the time, so his pictures are like you said, it's very disturbing to see this because you can hear people describe it, you can read descriptions of it, but when you see the people pressed up against the fence like they were, it really comes home how horrific this was. Like you can kind of finally start to imagine yourself in that position.
Yeah, it's yeah, it's pretty bad. That's why I didn't go back and look at three oh six. It was a superintendent who actually got the game stopped. He went down to the pitch and actually went to the referee. They had a couple of minutes before signaled to the police control box to stop, but it kept on for two more minutes. So that's when the superintendent finally like literally went on the field and told the referee, like,
you got to stop this game. This isn't because you know, everyone thought it was just like rowdy fans, and he was like, no, that this is not what's happening. The match commander Duckinfield requested more cops to come. It was called Operation Support, and no one was explaining why or what's going on though, So once the officers and you know, communications are not what they are now. Certainly it's not an excuse, but they were not getting briefed on exactly
what was going on. So a lot of the cops there assumed that the fans were just rowdy and we're trying to like storm the fence, to storm the field, and they formed a cordon on the pitch to kind of keep that from happening. And again some of them are opening gates, like they see what's going on and are some or trying to help the fans, but other cops are either ignoring them or like shoving people back in.
Right or standing there facing this crowd crush in a line according with other cops. So imagine that, like just how surreal that would look because they didn't understand what was going on. So eventually they managed to open some gates which allowed the crowd crush to ease up. And so the crowd crush was bad enough, like the after effects like immediate after effects, or it just continued to
go badly. The police response, the emergency response was just so uncoordinated that it surely I think they proved it cost the lives of scores of people. I think in the end, ninety five people died, seven hundred were injured. Two more people died years later. So really ninety seven people died from this crowd crush.
Yeah, thirty seven people were teenagers, twenty seven were parents. There was one ten year old that died. He was very ironically, I guess, and sadly the cousin of Steven Gerard, who was became a big star for England in their soccer team, but I think the oldest I think that was the youngest at ten and the oldest was a sixty seven year old whose brother was playing for Liverpool. And it's yeah again you know to read through like each account is a little too depressing for this show.
But you did mention the two that died years later. I think Tony Bland died four years after in nineteen ninety three. He had brain damage up into that point and then what they count as the ninety seventh victim didn't pass away until twenty twenty one, but they said it was due to you know, these life changing injuries that he suffered from this.
Yeah, I think also brain damage as well. Andrew Devine, So there were there was like an immediate response to this, right spite what we'll see Liverpool just taking all of the blame for this, Liverpool fans, there was like a public response. One of the things was Paul McCartney jumped in because this is a Liverpool team and he's from Liverpool. I don't know if you knew they're not Chuck, but he, I guess released a charity single cover of fairy Cross the Mercy.
Have you heard that song?
It's a good song.
I didn't think it was a great but I think it was a great act.
Did you listen to the I didn't listen to the eighty nine one that they released for as a charity single. Did you listen to the original, because that's very good?
Oh? No, I listened to the one that pertained to the show.
Okay, Well, at any rate, it's a good song originally, and it was, like you said, a very cool act. There were also tons like you can also see photos of just the the whole entire soccer pitch covered with flowers, just as in Memoriam. It was just there was a there was a good public response, but ultimately public opinion was much more venomous.
Yeah, I guess that's probably a good time for a break, and we'll come back and talk about that venom right up for this, all right, So, right after this, the police basically immediately started trying to engage in successfully as we'll see for a while, engaged in a cover up. They wanted to, you know, not be on the hook for this, and the hooliganism that I talked about had been blamed. I thought we had done an episode on hooliganism, but I don't think we ever did, did we?
No? Surely we talked about it in our soccer episode, but I don't think we ever did one just on that.
Yeah, it was on the list for a while, but maybe we should wait in case things change again. Okay, but that was the narrative that was fed the public basically that match commander, and I guess we should go ahead and talk about David Duckinfield a little bit. He's the one that first started saying was that gate was forced open by Liverpool fans, Like he denied even opening that gate. This guy was not qualified for this job.
I think previous commanders did things like go down before the game, like hours before, check things out, walk around, identify choke points or potential hazards, because this had happened a couple of times before, one time in this very stadium, I think in nineteen eighty one, and so it was top of mind or should have been, and he did
not do that. He never actually inspected the grounds beforehand, and he kind of went missing from about noon to two o'clock on the day, never accounted for his whereabouts.
Yeah, he had never commanded a match at the stadium, let alone a semi final match. Just even a regular match. He'd never commanded it, so he had no idea what he was doing. He was also a very arrogant person, so he felt like he could just do it naturally. He didn't need to familiarize himself. And he had served as a rank and file patrolman or PC like ten years before. That was the last time he'd worked a match,
and he was definitely not in charge of it. So he was very much out of his league and like it took him decades to finally acknowledge that. Instead, he helped lead this police cover up that shifted all the blame unfairly and untruthfully toward the fans for Liverpool and off of the cops who were really responsible for the tragedy.
Yeah, for sure. So we'll get to kind of what happened in a timeline since as this goes on in a minute, But initially the police watchdog recommended that there was like a disciplinary case would be brought against Duckinfield. That did not happen at the time, and he was medically retired two years later on full pension, basically to evade these discipline from this incident. The case again that the cops built was that people were drunk. They got
there late. It was the Liverpool fans, a lot of them didn't even have tickets and they were trying to just force their way in. And over the years they found out that they had gone back in. Even this is how despicable it gets. Not only did they cook up this narrative, but they went back in and cooked the books and altered witness statements and removed comments about that were unfavorable to the police and how things were handled, and they torched it basically.
Yeah, and the force was very regimented, I saw, right. So there wasn't there wasn't going to be any descent. There wasn't going to be any secret tip offs to the press about what really happened by any of the police constables, you know, under these guys charge, right, So the top saying this is what happened. That's what everybody on the police force was going to say, what happened. And so that's what the media heard. And the British tabloids typically have like a fairly bad reputation, and they
really showed up for it for this one. The whole idea that the soccer fans, especially the Liverpool fans in particular were responsible for this. Would they just beat that drum incessantly? They called the fans and by extension the victims beasts yobs, which means thugs, vile. And then The Sun printed a front page article called The Truth I think within a day or two after this that really drove this home, like just how despicable the tabloids could get about this stuff.
Yeah, they said things like there were fans that were urinating on cops, that they were looting the dead at the time, and this was not the case. And The Sun ended up apologizing in twenty twelve and has been boycotted in Liverpool ever since. I still don't think they'd sell the Sun there good, even after the apologies. But this was, you know, this was the nineteen eighties and things were different back then. The hooliganism was, you know,
much more prominent. So it was a narrative which was easy for people to believe in England, and when they were reading it, they you know, people were like, yeah, this is the typical sort of anti social underclass is
how Kyle put it. They're trying to get in without tickets, you know, drunk it through in the afternoon, it was a different kind of It was a different sport back then in a lot of ways, as far as you know, as we'll see the kind of money that poured into the sport in the nineteen nineties after this, certainly with the start of the Premier League in nineteen ninety two and ticket prices rising and stadiums modernizing and just big
money and big business. It just it was a lot more just kind of small time and old school and quaint back then, and so people were ready to accept this narrative, you know, kind of as it was being fed to them.
Yeah, Britain has a classist streak running through it and this certainly fit that idea, that supposition that lower classes were drunk and violent, and of course they were responsible for this, right, But so the public accepted this. The Thatcher government obviously was totally down with this idea, and that's just how it went. Like that was it, as far as everybody was concerned. Thanks to the police reports, thanks to the government stance, thanks to what the media
was saying. What happened was a bunch of drunk Liverpool fans who didn't have tickets storm the gate and ninety seven people ended up dying as a result. Shame on Liverpool and its fans. That was the public opinion on this for years.
That's right. So in nineteen ninety we get our first independent report. It was called the Tailor Report for Lord Justice Taylor, and they, I mean, this was kind of right after and they did come out blaming the police failure to control the crowd first off, and Duckinfield specifically
for failing to close this tunnel. Like if they e would have closed that tunnel and it would have fed people to the empty pins, and that could that probably would have avoided this whole thing, despite like having way too many people down there. If they would have been
fed to those empty your pens, this probably wouldn't have happened. Sure, and he made you know, safety recommendations in the final report, but very key, it didn't have anything in there about like like hey, these people were all just victims and they had no part in sort of making this happen. That didn't. That didn't come along until much later.
No, for sure, that closing that tunnel too, or his failure to close the tunnel two is even worse than it seems because that was actually such a widely used technique for police superintendents who were in charge of overseeing matches over the years that one of them had his name on. It was called the Freeman tactic. And it was as simple as closing that middle tunnel and opening
the entrances to the less the less full pens. And so that just shows you how little of a grasp Duckinfield had on the concept of safety at a football match that he was responsible for overseeing. He didn't even know about the Freeman if you ask me. And like rank and file cops who worked matches before knew about
the Freeman tactic. It was like that was a huge deal in addition to all the people dying as a result that the fact that like everyone knew that you should do that and Duck and Field didn't is a big deal.
Yeah, for sure. And a year later, after the Taylor Independent Report, the Tailor Report, these inquests are coming back with verdicts. Accidental death is basically what they all were, you know, decided upon, and it was very controversial. Obviously, the victims' families are and they're the ones you know who kept us alive all these years until they, you know, finally got some measure of accountability. I guess the coroner ruled out evidence relating to death anything after three pm.
He ruled out evidence because he said everybody was either dead or brain dead by three point fifteen, and there were there was like actual proof that would come out later that some people survived until four pm, and a lot of people would have survived for that forty five minutes had they gotten emergency services in there in an orderly manner.
Right Yeah, those are the people I was talking about earlier. So that coroner essentially was just basically going along with the sentiment, the public sentiment that these people surely it
wasn't the police who were responsible, right Yeah. In addition though to being disorganized, they were also like really cruel to the families, And this stuff came out in these reports, including the Hip report in the trials that like, if you were a victim family member, you were sent to a gym, a nearby gym that had been turned into a morgue, and the first thing that you encountered was standing out waiting outside in the cold before they led you in and handed you a stack of polaroids of
the victim's dead bodies.
Right yeah, I mean they had to look through those who identify their own. It was pretty brutal.
But it wasn't even like are you looking for a child? Are you looking for a man? And they were sorted. It was like, here's the stack of polaroids, look through hi until you find your loved one. The parents of the children who died, they weren't allowed to hold or kiss them because they were told that they were property
of the coroner. And the coroner himself seems to have been on the cover up to some degree, tangentially, because he ordered that all of the deceased, including the children, have their blood drawn to be tested for alcohol content to support this police narrative. Well, what turned out, what he did inadvertently was show that alcohol was not a factor in this really, Like there were very few drunk people, and the ones that were drunk weren't all that drunk.
Yeah, I mean, in a weird way, it's good that he did that, you know.
Yeah.
So, like you said, the families of the victims organized and tried to keep this thing alive and you know, keep the public from solidifying their about what had happened, and they managed to get a private prosecution I guess laid or charged against the police for this for the incident. Didn't know you could do that. Apparently you can still in the UK, America some other places. But a private group of people can get a court to prosecute people,
and that's what they did. And this found that duck and Field, they couldn't reach a verdict on him, whether he was criminally responsible or not. One of his deputies was acquitted and the judge in this case said, that's it. Duck and Field will never face another a retrial like this is it. He's not responsible, even though we failed to reach a verdict, which is a weird thing to do. But that happened in two thousand.
Yeah, charges against Sheffield the actual football club that wasn't even playing that day, but he played in that stadium Sheffield Wednesday, and the Sheffield City Council and the safety engineers the Eastwoods were ruled out. And this was I think years earlier, so they were already off the hook.
So that was all in two thousand. Twelve years later, in twenty twelve, there was another report that the Hip Report, the Hillsboro Independent Panel, and that brought about some new inquests more sort of digging into this thing about like what happened with the police, And this is the one that really started to kind of turn the tide as far as the public goes. And one of the reasons it happened was because MP Andy Burnham was at a twenty year memorial service and was just lambasted by the
crowd people chanting justice for the ninety six. Really had a hard time at that event. So he's the one that was like, let's open this back up four hundred and fifty thousand pages of information, and this is when they really kind of started to make things right.
Yeah, that panel apparently kept like releasing information piecemeal and the press is kept reporting on it, and very quickly the public was like, oh wait, we've been wrong. It wasn't these drunken Liverpool fans. They were mistreated. The families of the victims were mistreated, survivors were mistreated. It was actually these cops, and the cops had lied to essentially
cover up their responsibility. Like the public opinion just completely shifted, and so that hip report led to new inquests, and the inquests found that the ninety six victims and later on the ninety seventh victim were all unlawfully killed. So
it wasn't accidental anymore. Like the first inquest found they were unlawfully killed, which meant someone is criminally accountable for their deaths, right, And this inquest said go figure it out, like this is our we're saying, we're recommending that somebody is responsible for this.
Yeah. It also found that forty one I was looking for the number earlier, but forty one of the ninety six who died, they said, quote had potential to survive if the you know, rescue had been a little more organized, because I don't think we said the first ambulance arrived on the scene at three sixteen, and even when the ambulances had been called, they didn't know the severity of the situation because they I think one cop called for like a big, you know, mass of ambulances to come,
but it wasn't described what was happening, so they refused that initial. The medical services refused that initial like huge rush of ambulances and just sent like some They also didn't set up patriage on the field like you know, we'll get to that in a little more detail. But forty one of the ninety six would have survived, they determined, which is just a brutal number.
Yeah, in twenty nineteen, after all this stuff had come out, public opinion changed, Duckingfield was dragged back into court. Remember that one judge had been like, he can't face a retrial. Well, they were like, well, circumstances have changed enough now that he's definitely going to be tried again. And he was
found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter. And then they also heard evidence about the altering of the police reports to make it favorable for the cops and make it unfavorable for the Liverpool fans, and those guys got off too. So now we have a place where the inquest, the government inquest, is saying these people are unlawfully killed, so someone's criminally responsible, and the courts are saying the people who are responsible are not criminally responsible, So nobody is
liable anymore. Nobody's responsible officially.
Yeah. And then the final well, who knows it's a final report because they seem to still be happening. But last year, in twenty twenty five, an Independent Office for Police Conduct report came out and basically reiterated that nobody was going to be held like, actually held responsible. You know, they it wasn't as cold hearted as it sounds, they were basically saying like, hey, this is thirty six years later. All twelve of these officers are either have either passed
on or have long since retired. And I got the sense it was like, can we can we put this all behind us now and not throw these old cops in jail.
Essentially, But yeah, I think the families were like, well, they're still responsible even though they're old. And the reason that they got old because you took fourteen years to conduct this investigation.
Yeah for sure, let's take a break.
Chuck, and we'll come back and finish up.
Huh. Yeah, let's do it, okay, Chuck.
So not just the hip report, but a bunch of different reports basically showed quite clearly that the police response, the emergency response was just terrible. And you talked a lot about what the I guess the cluster with the ambulances, but the police as well were essentially disorganized about its disorganized as a group of police can be. And the reason why is because again David Duckinfield was just out of his depth through and through even though he was
commanding the match. And I said that he was a rather arrogant type and he was. But in twenty fifteen, for the first time in decades, twenty five plus years, as these reports started coming out and public opinion changed, when he was tried, eventually he admitted. After seven days of intense grilling on the stand, he finally basically broke down and admitted like, yes, he was responsible for the death of those ninety six people because the ninety seventh
hadn't died yet, and that he froze under pressure. This is a complete reversal of what he'd been saying the whole time, Chuck like he'd been saying it was the Liverpool fans. They were drunk. They were drunk. These guys have been saying it for decades. Now, all of a sudden, the guy in charge says, no, I failed and people died because I was not qualified to command that match.
Yeah. You know, you hear something like that as a family member of a victim, and it's I don't know how that feels, actually, I don't know if that would provide some solace to finally hear the truth, yeah, or if it just like re angers you all over again after all these years.
Probably both.
Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of mixed emotion about it, but at the very least that finally happened. I mean, there is something about somebody finally admitting something like and not just continuing to gaslight the world and the victims themselves, So I guess that is something. It really changed stadium safety and security after this, the Taylor Report. They basically said, hey, no more of these standing room only things. You have
to have seats for everybody that's in there. I think it was all the clubs in the top two divisions in nineteen ninety four had to move to that, and then they established the Ground Sports Ground Safety Authority after that, you know, to oversee like all of these football stadiums over there.
Right.
Yeah, this was a major turning point, not just in safety at football matches, but in the game of football itself because this happened to coincide with England making it into the semi finals in the World Cup in nineteen ninety and you know a lot of people who had been former football fans were now caught up in the spirit again. So that brought a lot of people back
to being fans of pro football. Those upgrades that the clubs and the stadiums were required to undertake meant that they needed to up ticket prices, higher ticket prices, like you said, kind of change the social strata of fans. It got more expensive, it got more business like soccer changed almost directly as a result of the Hillsborough tragedy.
Yeah, and that, you know, when the Premier League came on in ninety two, like that was that was a
real game changer. Like the amount of money that is spent in the Premier League on players, on the teams, on I think there's the and I'll probably get some of this wrong because I don't call the Premier League, but my good friends do all of them almost And they were talking about the you know, you get relegated if you don't I guess when, or I guess if you're in the bottom of whatever category and you don't make that you don't win that game to stay in
the Premier League, you get relegated down to the lower league. And so that game to see who gets relegated and who doesn't is called the most expensive game in sports or something like that, just because of like all the money that comes with or that you miss out on with being relegated or that comes with staying in the Premier League.
Yeah, these guys get paid like thousands and thousands of pounds a year to play, some of them way more than that.
That even the first joke of the episode.
Let's talk about Keir Starmer because he is under fire right now. That family or the organization of victims Families, they haven't gone away. They organized and they're still very vocal and one of the things that they have been doing is putting pressure on Kere Starmer and his labor government because he made a direct promise that he would see through the Hillsborough Law, which would it was pretty important legislation, or it would be if they get it passed through.
Yeah. I think the whole point, it seems to be of the Hillsborough Law would be to enforce and it's weird that you have the law to do this, but to enforce truth when cops are dealing with something like this and basically like almost like a whistleblower thing like hey, you can come out and tell the truth, Like you
don't like you're obliged to tell the truth. You don't have to go along with this narrative that gets passed down and that loyalty that you were kind of talking about earlier on I don't I'm that didn't like really dig into the law. I don't know if they're like protections or anything involved, but that law was is hasn't been passed yet, which is really frustrating.
Right, Yeah, not just cops too, but like any public official has to tell the truth and when it pertains to their work, which actually it is sad that you would need to make a law, but that would be revolutionary to have a law like that in any country, you know.
Yeah. And I think the hang up maybe or one of the hang ups is I five, And we did a pretty good episode on that at one point that I think Kyle helped us with that one too. But unless I'm reading this wrong, it seems like I five is hanging it up because they're like, hey, listen, like we deal in lies and subterfuge, like that's our bag, so we can't be included in this.
That is our bag. Baby, That's right.
I missed it. I missed the baby.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else, just to an awful tragedy, like I said. I remember this was right after spring break my senior year. I came home and I had been a regular Sports Illustrated subscriber since I was like nine years old and this was I think the cover issue even and that's where I saw those brutal pictures. If you're into a it's not like super hard to watch other than you know, it's about the tragedy, but they
don't show like truly truly awful things. There's that twelve minute documentary from The Guardian that you sent that really encapsulates it, although there are some body bags and stuff like that, so I guess there should be a trigger warning there, Yeah, for sure, But thankfully there weren't. Like, you know, I didn't see any actual video footage of the fences and the people, like, I don't know if that exists.
Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't know either. The photographs definitely do. I'd be surprised if there wasn't any footage, So, you.
Know, yeah, I wonder if that photographer won an award for that work he did.
You should have, especially if he was one of the people helping, because you know, so many fans helped, you know, try to render aid to the people on the field. One thing we probably should mention that that we didn't is that in twenty twelve, the United Kingdom government, through Prime Minister David Cameron at the time, apologized to the victim's families for the double injustice of the loss of life and the blame that was put on Liverpool fans.
So at least they had that kernel of something. Yeah, Solace, maybe Salace, thank you a quantum of it.
If you want to know more, you're just throwing around British pop culture references. Who knew that James Bond and Austin Powers were going to make an appearance.
I'm going to start on my own sitcom called Suddenly Angle File, but it's gonna be spelled like that. I just Mangled Anglo file.
Yeah, or black Adder, that's another good title.
Sure, since Chuck made a joke about Blackadder has foretold in two thousand and eight, it's time for listener mail.
I'm going to call this. I screwed up on that Van Go episode about the movie. Hey, guys, just finished the Visa Bango episode. Want to let you know the movie with Willem Dafoe is called at Eternity's Gate. This is something I remember now but I forgot at the time. You mustn't have seen it. But we're aware of it. More importantly, you must see Loving Vincent, and I think that's what I said.
It was called.
That's the movie that's animated using sixty five thousand paintings done in the style of Ago by one hundred Polish painters.
Wow.
It's visually amazing and incredibly well done. And the soundtrack includes the song from Don McClean. I think we talked about it in the episode of Vincent Storry Storry Night beautifully compliments the movie highly recommended. My wife and are huge fans of the show. Have been listening to every episode since almost the beginning. Keep up the amazing work and don't let those naysayers who complain about your sidebars.
That's one of the things we enjoy most. And that is from Brian and Alexis in Bethlehem, PA.
Nice Thanks Brian and Alexis. We appreciate that, Chuck. Since you stepped up and took a correction, I feel like I should admit to one. Okay, in are Lamon's short stuff, you mean Lamon, that's part of it. The bigger part is that I said Greece is an island. I even went back and double checked, and everybody's right. It is not an island at all.
I didn't catch you saying that.
So it's like Germany being landlocked. Now my geography skills are starting to match up with my math skills.
I wish I would have caught that, because I remember very distinctly that you could take a train there.
Well, in the episode, you said, yeah, yeah, it sure is an island. I swear to God it's an island.
Josh, that's right.
I doubled down verbatim.
All right, Well, thanks to Brian and Alexis. And if you want to be like Brian and Alexis, you can get in touch with this too via email at Stuff.
Podcast That I Heard, Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H