Why did it take 27 years for ‘the truth’ to come out about the Hillsborough soccer stampede?
One newspaper’s complicity in the official deceit
After 27 years, an inquest has found police responsible for the deaths of 96 soccer fans at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England. The long-awaited verdict exonerates fans in the 1989 tragedy commonly known as the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, which cast a pall over British soccer for years.
Why were fans ever blamed in the first place, you might ask? It started with notoriously sensational Sun, one of Britain’s daily tabloids. Following the disaster, The Sun published a now-infamous article called “The Truth,” claiming that the efforts of police to save dying fans were thwarted by crazed, drunken hooligans. Failing to retract their statements for 23 years, the newspaper tacitly perpetuated the myth surrounding the events of the day.
The story read, “Drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims of the Hillsborough soccer disaster, it was revealed last night. Police officers, firemen and ambulance crew were punched, kicked and urinated upon by a hooligan element in the crowd. Some thugs rifled the pockets of injured fans as they were stretched out unconscious on the pitch. Sheffield MP Irvine Patnick revealed that in one shameful episode a gang of Liverpool fans noticed that the blouse of a girl trampled to death had risen above her breasts. As a policeman struggled in vain to revive her, the mob jeered: ‘Throw her up here and we will **** her.’”
The story was met by outrage among many who knew — or believed — it wasn’t true. Newspaper sellers throughout Merseyside (Liverpool’s county) refused to stock the paper. But it wasn’t until 2012 that Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of the Sun, apologized publicly for his decision to print lies about Liverpudlians that day. Arguably, by then, the event had settled into into popular consciousness.
There may have also been a more general cultural willingness to believe a story about sociopathic soccer fans. American journalist Bill Buford’s 1990 classic Among the Thugs: The Experience and the Seduction of Crowd Violence described with ethnographic precision the culture of British soccer thuggery. To write it, Buford befriended an electrician named Mick who headed a “firm” of hooligans. They had names like Bone Head, One-Eye Billy and Speedie and spent their weekends savagely fighting other firms and wreaking havoc at soccer matches and on public transit. In the course of the narrative, Buford himself comes to understand the draw of the hooligan scene: “I had not expected the violence to be so pleasurable,” he wrote.
“Violence is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenaline-induced euphoria that might be all the more powerful because it is generated by the body itself, with, I was convinced, many of the same addictive qualities that characterize synthetically-produced drugs.” — Bill Buford, Among the Thugs
To many American readers, Buford was diagnosing a phenomenon. But to Brits, it was old news. They were largely familiar with the thugs in the book. There were also soccer-related tragedies in the recent past. A stadium fire in Bradford City, England, had claimed 56 victims in 1985. The same year, 39 people died just before the European Cup Final between Liverpool and the Italian team Juventus at Heysel Stadium in Brussels. It had been Liverpool fans who’d breached a fence at Heysel; 14 were convicted of manslaughter and served prison time. It didn’t help their image.
The families of the Hillsborough victims, who ranged in age from 10 to 67, have fought for years for their truth to emerge. Today, a jury found that the victims were “unlawfully killed” as the result of grave police error. According to The New York Times, the verdict offers an unequivocal counter to the “narrative pushed for many years…that portrayed the fans as drunk and out of control.” Many hope it will bring some closure.
