Liverpool fans attending this year’s Champions League final faced a crush outside the stadium that held stark echoes of the worst day in the club’s history. David Conn has spent months investigating what happened
On the morning of 28 May, thousands of Liverpool supporters arrived at fan zones in Paris for that night’s culmination of Europe’s football season: their team’s Champions League final against Real Madrid. The atmosphere was good natured, the anticipation was electric. It ended in chaos and came closer to catastrophe than many realised at the time.
Thousands of Liverpool supporters, like Kevin Cowley, were crammed together on a dangerous route to the stadium. Later, as the crush intensified and the match was delayed, they would be blamed for the event nearly turning deadly. For Cowley, a survivor of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, it transported him back to that day, he tells Michael Safi.