On April 15th, 1989, Trevor and Jenni Hicks and their two teen-age daughters travelled from Liverpool, England, to Hillsborough stadium, in Sheffield, to watch their favorite soccer team play in a semifinal cup match. It was a sunny Saturday in the usually dreary north of England. About an hour before kickoff, the family split up. Jenni had a ticket for a seat in one of the stadium’s terraces, while her husband and daughters would be standing in one of Hillsborough’s “pens”—sections enclosed by high fences meant to contain the visiting team’s supporters. The match promised a thrilling afternoon, a chance for Liverpool to display its dominance, fielding legends such as Peter Beardsley and John Barnes. Trevor told his girls, Sarah and Vicki, to go on ahead while he waited in a concession line to buy coffee. Then something terrible happened.
As he later told the police, Trevor was making his way to the pen when he noticed “an old man with a grey suit on, and his tongue was hanging out.” He looked toward the field, and saw people being pushed to the area hemmed in by the fences. The bottleneck created by fans trying to get into the stadium had gushed through the turnstiles and into the pens. As Trevor rushed toward the front of the crowd to find his daughters, he saw Vicki, who was fifteen, being lifted over the fence and onto the pitch. By the time he got to her, it was too late. “I saw both my daughters lying side by side,” he later said.
Sarah and Vicki were among the ninety-six people killed in the worst sporting disaster in British history. Seven hundred additional fans were injured. Compounding the tragedy, the victims’ relatives then had to endure years of smears, coverups, and outright lies by police officials, politicians, and media outlets, who blamed the disaster on “tanked-up yobs” (in the words of Sir Bernard Ingham, the press secretary for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), and who claimed that the crush occurred after drunk, ticketless fans had forced down a gate.
That ugly story was finally put to rest on Tuesday, when a British jury found that the supporters who died at Hillsborough were “unlawfully killed,” rejecting the claim that the fans were culpable in the deaths. The jury also found that David Duckenfield, who was the police chief superintendent in Sheffield at the time of the disaster, had breached his duty. Four years ago, Duckenfield testified before an independent panel that he had given an order to open one of the stadium’s entrance gates, a move that created overwhelming congestion in two of the fenced-in pens and led to the stampede. Duckenfield also admitted to lying about the order after the deaths, and blaming supporters for forcing down that gate.
Reaching this day of justice took decades. It didn’t help that, for years, officials worried more about restraining a minority of lawless soccer fans than keeping the rest of the fans safe. In 1985, four years before Hillsborough, rioting Liverpool supporters at a match in Brussels had triggered a stampede that caused the collapse of a stadium wall, leading to the death of thirty-nine people, most of them Italian fans of the soccer club Juventus. Following that collapse, English teams were temporarily banned from European competitions, prompting Margaret Thatcher to declare, “We have to get the game cleaned up from this hooliganism at home and then perhaps we shall be able to go overseas again.”
The Hillsborough disaster, however, was caused not by violence but by the very system set up to curb it: cage-like stands with metal bars, perimeter fences, an iron-fisted police force, and stadiums that many said resembled maximum-security prisons. “The premise was this: that football stadia built in most cases around a hundred years ago . . . could accommodate between fifteen and sixty-three thousand people without those people coming to any harm,” Nick Hornby wrote in his 1992 soccer memoir, “Fever Pitch.” “Containment rather than safety became a priority.”
This isn’t to say that soccer hooliganism was not a real concern. During the seventies and eighties, rampaging fans routinely wreaked havoc in and out of stadiums, with gangs like the Millwall Bushwackers gaining particular infamy. Hillsborough marked “a point of no return,” according to Jason Cowley, the author of the book “The Last Game: Love, Death and Football,” about the aftermath of the tragedy. “The culture of the game had to change definitely if football was ever to be perceived as anything more than the preserve of the white, working class male, a theatre of hate and of violence, often racist and misogynistic excesses, if it was to survive at all,” Cowley said in an interview a few years ago.
Luckily for those of us who love the “beautiful game,” the culture did change. The most immediate and lasting changes were prompted by the publication, a few months after Hillsborough, of a damning report by Lord Taylor of Gosforth, later England’s Lord Chief Justice, criticizing the soccer industry’s poor treatment of supporters. The report led to a complete overhaul of stadium-safety regulations, and to the requirement that every spectator have an assigned seat. Public funds poured in to help teams with the transition. “For a sport that jealously guards its independence, it is worth noting that it was an influx of public money and a government review that forced the game to upgrade its antiquated infrastructure,” Owen Gibson pointed out in the Guardian, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster.
But the new seating requirement also contributed to a change in demographics. A mostly working-class fan base gave way to a middle-class and upper-middle-class clientele, the only people still able to afford tickets: adjusting for inflation, ticket prices now cost at least three times what they did in 1989, and, increasingly, clubs offer perks like champagne-on-tap V.I.P. boxes to their most deep-pocketed fans. Money coming in from TV rights has also skyrocketed, from a revenue stream of about twenty million dollars a year in 1988 to more than five billion dollars a year in 2014. Next year, the English Premier League is expected to overtake the N.F.L. as the highest-earning sports league in the world.
The lucrative economics of the game, along with the elimination of restrictions on the number of foreign players who can play on an English team, have lured the world’s best players to England in recent years—from Eric Cantona and Thierry Henry to Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Suárez. Team owners have also increasingly come from abroad. Almost one in three of the leading ninety English clubs now has international ownership, vanity projects for billionaire tycoons.
Many supporters rue the changing landscape of the game. Among them is Kenny Dalglish, the famous manager, who led Liverpool at the time of the Hillsborough disaster. “One legacy of Hillsborough is that the game has become less accessible to the working classes. The prices are too heavy,” Dalglish wrote in his 1996 autobiography. “With smaller capacities, no one standing and a wealthier audience, grounds have become quieter.” And yet, for all the heartfelt nostalgia, it is undeniably safer to be a soccer fan today than it was twenty-seven years ago. Going to see a match in the eighties was often a frightening experience; it no longer is. Soccer culture has forever changed because of Hillsborough, and is the better for it.
“You’re trying to get your head around it,” Trevor Hicks, the father of Sarah and Vicki, told CNN this week. “You go to a football match on a lovely sunny morning and you come home without your daughters, who are in a body bag back in Sheffield.” Finally and belatedly, the families of the “Hillsborough Ninety-Six” have been awarded the justice they deserve.
