The Hillsborough Disaster

When a crush of football fans killed 97 people in England in 1989, police and officials engaged in a massive cover-up to blame it on drunken fans. Today we tell that story. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:34Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:44Josh Clark?

  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 edition.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  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 a English football stadium in 1989. 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?

• 2:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I was gonna say no Z's throughout. They were all S's.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he did a wonderful job with 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 2015, the, the public opinion, the entire basically worldview of what happened at this tragedy, completely flip flopped and the truth finally came out. Well, we'll get to all that, but let's, 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 1989 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.

• 3:16Josh Clark?

  That's where they play at Hillsborough. 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. It's a big deal, way bigger than the average Sheffield Wednesday Football Club game. But, you know, so far it's pretty normal.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. They had, Liverpool had more fans and I'm not sure how it is now, but in 1989, at least that was the case. And 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 like a series of steps that happen 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 Leping's Lane, which was a street that dead ended into the stadium. And not only did it dead end, but it bottlenecked.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It got more narrow as you got toward that dead end. So, and that the turnstiles there, which is where you get in, 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.

• 4:46Josh Clark?

  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 10,100 fans who were just the ones who had standing room only tickets.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:02Josh Clark?

  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 are 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 10,000 people who are all going into these pens. They have to use these seven turnstiles. And so very quickly, even outside of the 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 queue. They're not directing anybody to do anything.

• 5:46Josh Clark?

  It's just get in where you fit in and whoever gets there first is the one who gets through that turnstile that moment.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, you know, there's plenty of surveillance footage and stuff out and it was not, you know, as we'll see, the, the story that was kind of cooked up to evade. I guess, being responsible for this, which is what they were,

• 6:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  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 having a good time, but it didn't look like anything threatening at that point at all. They were people just like, you know, kind of trying to get into the stadium to see a game they were excited about.

• 6:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and all this really kind of starts about 10 minutes before kickoff. That's when people are like, come on, let's go, we gotta get in. And like, by this time, that crowd had back, like, the lines or whatever had backed up into Leping's Lane pretty far. People wanted to hurry up and get through, right? But like you said, everybody was generally good natured. Kickoff was set at 3:00 PM, and at 10 till 3:00 PM, there were still 5,000 Liverpool fans who were outside on Leping's Lane, trying to get through these seven turnstiles. 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

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  of the police for this soccer match. His name was David Duckenfield. 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. And he did that once, Duckenfield ignored it, did it twice, Duckenfield ignored it. The third time, it was almost frantic. And Duckenfield finally said, okay, go ahead and open gate C. They did that at 2:52 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 a potential crowd crush just inside the stadium.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so, and we'll get to more about David Duckenfield, 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 area, there were different numbered pins within that that were fenced off from each other. So, they were literal pins. And when people started flowing through, when they opened Gate C, they were all passing through toward this, you know, the central part of the field, down this long tunnel.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  I think Kyle said it was 23 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 10 till, when that big crowd of people started to make their way to that spot.

• 9:14Josh Clark?

  Right. So, again, because it was standing room only, 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, this crowd of people, after opening Gate C floods in, connects with the people who are already coming through those seven turnstiles, almost all of them start to go through this tunnel. And that tunnel opens up on two pins that are already full of people, way over capacity already. As they found in retrospect, there was about 1,000 more people that they allowed onto each pin than they should have, based on the kind of crowd control, safety stuff they had in place.

• 9:57Josh Clark?

  So, it was already dangerously full before those people from Gate C 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 too. So, everybody was pressing forward, and then all of a sudden, a crowd crush happened in those two middle pins.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  That's right. So, it's about 5 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.

• 10:35Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  And by 2:55, it becomes clear that like something's wrong. Four minutes later, it was a lethal crush had developed in 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 are 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 1977 to prevent the hooliganism. Were 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.

• 11:15Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  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 it's developed into like a real dangerous mess.

• 11:34Josh Clark?

  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 crush barrier. Which means that if a crush develops, it that barrier is supposed to stop it from going any further than the barrier. So the people behind the barrier, life's going to 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, 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.

• 12:14Josh Clark?

  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 that barrier that broke.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  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 and get this under control. And at 3:00 PM, the game starts. At 3:05, those barriers, at least the one in pin three had given away. And a human cascade starts and this is when, you know, the.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Devastating stuff. We're not going to read a thousand accounts of people getting, you know, squeezed to death because it's pretty awful. But, uh, 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.

• 13:25Josh Clark?

  Right. Um, yeah. And this happened to a lot of people in this. We talked a lot about this phenomenon in the crowd episode. Um, and I think in the Black Friday episode too.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the crowd one was what inspired this episode.

• 13:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Cause we talked just, we just touched on it just a little bit, right?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Um, 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?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  I saw them when I was in high school in Sports Illustrated. Like I remember this vividly. I didn't go back and revisit a lot of that because it's super upsetting.

• 14:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it really is upsetting. Um, and there's a guy who took a lot of these. His name was David Cannon and he was, um, 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, that crush or that movement that caused the human cascade was in response to one of Liverpool's players, um, just missing a, a, a goal. Um, and so they're like, we need to stop the game. Right? Uh, so this guy, David Cannon, um, got them to stop the game, or at least he, he tried. He's one of the, the main photographers who was there at the time. So his pictures are, like you said, they're very, it's very disturbing to see this because you can hear people describe it. You can read descriptions

• 15:10Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's uh, yeah, it's pretty bad. That's why I didn't go back and look. At 3:06, it was the 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 gotta stop this game. This isn't, uh, like, cause you know, everyone thought it was just like rowdy fans. And he was like, no, this is not what's happening. The match commander, Duck and Field, uh, requested more cops to come. It was called Operation Support. And, uh, no one was explaining why or what's going on though.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  So once the officers and you know, communications are, 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, the fans were just rowdy and were 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, there's some of them are opening gates, like they see what's going on and are some are trying to help the fans, but other cops are either ignoring them or like shoving people back in.

• 16:38Josh Clark?

  Right, or standing there facing this crowd crush in a line, a cordon with other cops. So imagine that, like just how surreal that would look. Cause they didn't understand what was going on. So eventually they, they managed to open some gates, which allowed the, um, the crowd crush to ease up. And so the crowd crush was bad enough. The, like the after effects, like immediate after effects where it just continued to, to go badly. The police response, the, um, the emergency response was just so uncoordinated that it surely, I think they proved it cost the lives of scores of people.

• 17:20Josh Clark?

  I think in the end, um, 95 people died, 700 were injured. Two more people died years later. So really 97 people died from this crowd crush.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, 37 people were teenagers, uh, 27 were parents. There was one 10 year old that, uh, died. He was very ironically, I guess, and sadly, the cousin of Steven Gerrard, who was, became a big star for England and their soccer team. But I think the oldest, I think that was the youngest at 10 and the oldest was a 67 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 1993. He had brain damage up until that point.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  And then what they count as the 97th victim didn't pass away until 2021. But they said it was due to, you know, these life-changing injuries that he suffered from this.

• 18:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think also brain damage as well. Andrew Devine. So there, there were, there was like an immediate response to this, right? Despite what we'll see Liverpool just taking all of the blame for this Liverpool fans.

• 18:41Josh Clark?

  There was like a, a, 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 that or not Chuck. But he, he, I guess, released a charity single, a cover of Ferry Cross the Mercy. Have you heard that song? It's a good song.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  I didn't think it was that great, but I think it was a great act.

• 19:04Josh Clark?

  Did you listen to the, I didn't listen to the 89 one that they released for, for, as a charity single. Did you listen to the original? Cause that's very good.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I listened to the, the one that pertained to the show.

• 19:15Josh Clark?

  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.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess that's probably a good time for a break and we'll come back and talk about that venom right after this.

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• 23:12Speaker 02

  All right. So right after this, the police basically immediately started trying to engage, and 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?

• 23:35Josh Clark?

  No, surely we talked about it in our soccer episode, but I don't think we ever did one just on that.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was on the list for a while, but maybe we should wait in case things change again. 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 Duckenfield a little bit. He's the one that first started saying it 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 had 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, or one time in this very stadium.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  I think in 1981. And so it was, it was top of mind, or should have been. And he did not do that. He never like actually inspected the grounds beforehand and he kind of went missing from about noon to two o'clock on the day and, and never accounted for his whereabouts.

• 24:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he had never commanded a match at the stadium, let alone a semifinal 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, he could just do it naturally. He didn't need to familiarize himself. And he had served as a rank and file patrolman or a PC. Like 10 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 it like, it took him decades to finally acknowledge that.

• 25:23Josh Clark?

  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 are really responsible for the tragedy.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So we'll get to kind of what happened in a timeline sense as this goes on in a minute, but initially the police watchdog recommended that there was like a disciplinary case would be brought against Duckingfield. That did not happen at the time and he was medically retired. Two years later on full pension, basically to evade these like discipline from this incident.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  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, 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 like torched it basically.

• 26:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And the force was very.

• 26:43Josh Clark?

  Regimented, I saw, right? So there wasn't, there wasn't going to be any dissent. 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, the British tabloids typically have like a fairly bad reputation and they really showed up for it, for this one. The, the, the whole idea that the, the soccer fans, especially the Liverpool fans in particular, were responsible for this, they just beat that drum incessantly.

• 27:27Josh Clark?

  They called the, the fans, and by extension, the victims, beasts, yobs, which means thugs, vile. And then The Sun printed a, 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, the tabloids could get about this stuff.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, 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 2012 and has been boycotted in Liverpool ever since. I still don't think they'd sell The Sun there.

• 28:08Josh Clark?

  Good.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Even after the apologies. But this was, you know, this was the 1980s 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, to believe in England. And when they were reading it, they, you know, people were like, yeah, this is the, the typical sort of antisocial underclasses, how Kyle put it. They're trying to get in without tickets, you know, drunk at three in the afternoon. It was, 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 1990s after this, certainly

• 28:53Speaker 02

  with the start of the Premier League in 1992 and ticket prices rising and stadiums modernizing and just big money and big business. It just 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.

• 29:13Josh Clark?

  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's stance, thanks to what the media was saying. What happened was a bunch of drunk Liverpool fans who didn't have tickets stormed the gate, and 97 people ended up dying as a result.

• 29:55Josh Clark?

  Shame on Liverpool and its fans. That was the public opinion on this for years.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  That's right. So in 1990, we get our first independent report. It was called the Taylor 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 Duckenfield specifically for failing to close this tunnel. Like, if he would have closed that tunnel, and it would have fed people to the empty pens, and that could have, 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 emptier pens, this probably wouldn't have happened.

• 30:40Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  And he made, you know, S.A.P. 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, in sort of making this happen. It didn't, that didn't come along until much later.

• 30:59Josh Clark?

  No, for sure. That closing that tunnel too, or his failure to close the tunnel too, was 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. 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 Duckingfield had on the concept of safety at a, at a football match that he was responsible for overseeing. He, he didn't even know about the Freeman tactic, if you ask me. And like rank and file cops

• 31:41Josh Clark?

  who worked matches before knew about the Freeman tactic. It was like, that was a huge deal. In, in addition to all the people dying as a result, that, the fact that like, everyone knew that you should do that and Duckingfield didn't is a big deal.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And a year later, after the Taylor Independent Report, the Taylor 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 this alive all these years until they, you know, finally got some measure of accountability, I guess. The coroner ruled out evidence relating to deaths, anything after 3pm, he ruled out evidence because he said, everybody was either dead or brain dead by 3:15. And there were, there was like

• 32:36Speaker 02

  actual proof that would come out later that some people survived until 4pm and a lot of people would have survived for that 45 minutes had they gotten emergency services in there in an orderly manner.

• 32:49Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah, that those are the people I was talking about earlier. So that coroner essentially was just basically going along with the the sentiment, the public sentiment that they these people surely it wasn't the police who were responsible, right?

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:02Josh Clark?

  In addition, though, to being disorganized, they were also like really cruel to the families. And this 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 led you in and handed you a stack of Polaroids of the victims' dead bodies, right?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they had to look through those to identify their own. It was it was pretty brutal.

• 33:39Josh Clark?

  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 them until you find your 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.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, in a weird way, it's good that he did that, you know?

• 34:28Josh Clark?

  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 opinion 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 Duckingfield, 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.

• 35:12Josh Clark?

  Duckingfield 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 2000.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  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, 10 years earlier. So they were already off the hook.

• 35:41Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  So that was all in 2000. 12 years later, in 2012, there was another report, the HIP report, the Hillsborough 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 20-year memorial service and was just lambasted by the crowd. People chanting "Justice for the 96" really had a hard time at that event. So he's the one that was like, let's open this back up.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  450,000 pages of information. And this is when they, they really kind of started to make things right.

• 36:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that panel apparently kept like, releasing information piecemeal. And the press just 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, the public opinion just completely shifted. And so that, that HIP report led to new inquests. And the, the inquests found that the 96 victims and later on, the 97th victim, were all unlawfully killed. So it wasn't accidental anymore, like the first inquest found.

• 37:15Josh Clark?

  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, this is our, we're saying, we're recommending that somebody is responsible for this.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it also found that 41, I was looking for the number earlier, but 41 of the 96 who died, they said, quote, "had potential to survive if the rescue had been a little more organized." Because I don't think we said the first ambulance arrived on the scene at 3:16. 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 mass of ambulances to come. And, 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 a triage on the field. Like, you know, we'll get to that in a little more detail.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  But 41 of the 96 would have survived, they determined, which is just a brutal number.

• 38:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah. In 2019, after all this stuff had come out, public opinion changed. Duck and Field 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."

• 39:04Josh Clark?

  And the courts are saying, "The people who are responsible are not criminally responsible." So nobody is liable anymore. Nobody's responsible officially.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then the final, well, who knows? It's the final report because they seem to still be happening. But last year, in 2025, 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 36 years later. All 12 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?

• 39:56Josh Clark?

  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 is because you took 14 years to conduct this investigation.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 40:07Josh Clark?

  Let's take a break, Chuck, and we'll come back and finish up, huh?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 40:23Josh Clark?

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• 40:59Josh Clark?

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• 41:15Josh Clark?

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• 41:25Speaker 02

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• 41:35Josh Clark?

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• 41:49Speaker 02

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• 41:54Josh Clark?

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• 42:06Speaker 02

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• 43:00Josh Clark?

  Okay, Chuck, so not just the HIPAA report, but a bunch of different reports basically showed quite clearly that the police response and 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 as disorganized as a group of police can be. And the reason why is because, again, David Duckenfield 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 2015, for the first time in decades, 20, 25-plus years,

• 43:42Josh Clark?

  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, it basically broke down and admitted, like, yes, he was responsible for the death of those 96 people, because the 97th 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 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 to command that match.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, you hear something like that as a family member of a victim and it's, I don't, I don't know how that feels, actually. I don't know if that would provide some solace to finally hear the truth.

• 44:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Or if it just like re-angers you all over again after all these years.

• 44:37Josh Clark?

  Probably both.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of mixed emotion about it. But it, 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. Uh, and the victims themselves. So I guess that is something. It really changed stadium safety and security after this. Um, 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. Uh, I think it was, um, all the clubs in the top two divisions in 1994 had to move to that. And then they established the ground, uh, sports ground safety authority. Uh, after that to, you know, to oversee like all of these football stadiums over there.

• 45:24Josh Clark?

  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 semifinals in the World Cup in 1990. 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 to being fans of pro football. Um, those upgrades that the, um, the clubs and the stadiums were required to undertake meant that they needed to up ticket prices. The higher ticket prices, like you said, kind of changed the social strata of fans. It just, it got more expensive. It got more businesslike. Soccer changed almost directly as a result of the Hillsborough tragedy.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that, you know, when the Premier League came on in 92, 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 a, the, and I'll probably get some of this wrong because I don't follow 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

• 46:50Speaker 02

  expensive game in sports or something like that, just because of like all the money that comes with, that you miss out on with being relegated or that comes with staying in the Premier League.

• 47:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, these guys get paid like thousands and thousands of pounds a year to play, some of them way more than that even.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  The first joke of the episode.

• 47:11Josh Clark?

  Let's talk about Keir Starmer because he is under fire right now. Those, that family or that 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 Keir 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.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the whole point, it seems to be of the Hillsborough law would be to enforce, and it's weird they 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.

• 48:01Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  You don't have to go along with, with this narrative that gets passed down and that, that loyalty that you were kind of talking about earlier on. I don't, I didn't like really dig into the law. I don't know if there are like protections or anything involved, but that law was, is, hasn't been passed yet, which is really frustrating.

• 48:19Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah, not just cops too, but like any public official has to tell the truth 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?

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think the hang up maybe, or one of the hangups is MI5, and we did a pretty good episode on that at one point. I think Kyle helped us with that one too. But unless I'm reading this wrong, it seems like MI5 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.

• 48:57Josh Clark?

  That is our bag, baby.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. I missed it. I missed the baby.

• 49:01Josh Clark?

  Um, you got anything else?

• 49:04Speaker 02

  I got nothing else. Uh, just an awful tragedy. Like I said, I remember this was right after spring break my senior year. I came home and I was, 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, um, 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 12 minute documentary from The Guardian that you sent.

• 49:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  That really encapsulates it. Although there, there are some body bags and stuff like that. So I guess there should be a trigger warning there.

• 49:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  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, I don't know if that exists.

• 49:55Josh Clark?

  Uh, yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't know either. The photographs definitely do. I'd be surprised if there wasn't any footage though, you know?

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wonder if, uh, that photographer won an award for that work. I bet he did.

• 50:08Josh Clark?

  He should have. Especially if he was one of the people helping, because, you know, so many fans helped, um, you know, try to render aid to the people on the field.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:19Josh Clark?

  Um, one thing we probably should mention that, um, that we didn't is that in 2012, the United Kingdom government, through Prime Minister David Cameron at the time, apologized to the victims' 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, um, something.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, solace, maybe. Who knows?

• 50:43Josh Clark?

  Solace, thank you. A quantum of it. If you want to know more-

• 50:46Speaker 02

  You're just throwing around. British pop culture references. Who knew that James Bond and Austin Powers were gonna make an appearance?

• 50:52Josh Clark?

  I'm gonna star in my own sitcom called Suddenly Anglophile. But it's gonna be spelled like I just mangled Anglophile.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, or Blackadder. That's another good title.

• 51:02Josh Clark?

  Sure. Since Chuck made a joke about Blackadder, as foretold in 2008, it's time for listener mail.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  I'm gonna call this, I screwed up on that Van Gogh episode about the movie. Hey, guys, just finished the Vincent Van Gogh 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 the time.

• 51:27Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  You mustn't have seen it, but were aware of it. More importantly, you must see Loving Vincent. And I think that's what I said it was called.

• 51:34Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  That's the movie that's animated using 65,000 paintings, done in the style of Van Gogh by 100 Polish painters.

• 51:41Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  It's visually amazing and incredibly well done. And the soundtrack includes the song from Don McLean. I think we talked about it in the episode, Vincent, Starry, Starry Night. Beautifully complements the movie. Highly recommended. My wife and I 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.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  That's one of the things we enjoy most. And that is from Brian and Alexis in Bethlehem, PA.

• 52:11Josh Clark?

  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.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 52:20Josh Clark?

  In our Lamont's short stuff.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  You mean Lamont?

• 52:26Josh Clark?

  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.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  I didn't catch you saying that.

• 52:37Josh Clark?

  So it's like Germany being landlocked now. My geography skills are starting to match up with my math skills.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  I wish I would have caught that, because I remember very distinctly that you could take a train there.

• 52:49Josh Clark?

  Well, in the episode, you said, yeah, yeah, it sure is an island. I swear to God, it's an island, Josh.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  That's right. I doubled down.

• 52:56Josh Clark?

  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 us too via email at [email protected].

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 53:27Josh Clark?

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• 54:12Josh Clark?

  more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of Vivgard. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of Vivgard on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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