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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.
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 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.
Yeah, I was going to say, no Zs throughout.
They were all Ss.
Yeah.
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 public opinion, the entire, basically worldview of what happened at this tragedy 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 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.
That's where they play at Hillsboro.
But this day it was actually hosting a 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.
Yeah, for sure.
Liverpool had more fans, and I'm not sure how it is now, but in 1989 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 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 space.
The larger fan base, the smaller end of the stadium, and the entrance to that was at the end of Leppings Lane, which was a street that dead-ended into the stadium.
And not only did it dead-end, but it bottlenecked.
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.
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 10100 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, 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.
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 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.
Yeah, and all of this really kind of starts about 10 minutes before kickoff.
That's when people are like, come on, let's go.
We've got to get in.
And by this time, the lines or whatever had backed up into Lepping's 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 3 pm and at 10 till 3 pm there were still 5000 Liverpool fans who were outside on Leppings 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—
I got in touch with the guy who was running all of the police for this soccer match.
His name is 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.
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 252 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.
Yeah and so And we'll get to more about David Ducanfield, 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... 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, you know, 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.
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.
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 pens 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 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 on to 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 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 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 the soccer game.
Right.
And by 255, 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.
Right.
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 pens were opened by the cops at that point.
But it's it's developed into like a real dangerous mess.
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, 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.
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 3 p.m., the game starts.
At 3.05, those barriers, at least the one in PIN 3 had given away, and a human cascade starts.
And this is when you know the 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 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, too.
Yeah, the crowd one was what inspired this episode.
Yeah, because we talked just 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 in 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 upsetting.
And there's a guy who took a lot of these.
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, 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 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 got to stop this game.
This isn't uh like, because you know, everyone thought it was just like rowdy fans and he was like no, this is not what's happening.
Um the match commander duckenfield uh 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 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, some of them are opening gates, like they see what's going on, and some are 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, a cordon, 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.
The after effects, like immediate after effects, it just continued to go badly.
The police response...
The 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, 95 people died.
700 were injured.
Two more people died years later.
So really, 97 people died from this crowd crush.
Yeah, 37 people were teenagers, 27 were parents.
There was one 10-year-old that died.
He was, very ironically, I guess, and sadly, the cousin of Stephen Gerrard, who 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 into that point.
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.
Yeah, I think also brain damage as well, Andrew Devine.
So 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, right?
Um, there was like a, a, a public response.
One of the things was um.
Paul McCartney jumped in cause.
This is a Liverpool team and he's from Liverpool.
I don't know if you knew they're not Chuck, but he, um he he, I guess released a charity single, a cover of fairy cross the mercy.
Have you heard that song?
It's a good song.
Uh, I didn't think it was that great, but, um, I think it was a great act.
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.
Oh no.
I listened to the one that pertained to the show.
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 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 after this.
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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?
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 fed the public, basically, that match commander.
And I guess we should go ahead and talk about David Ducanfield 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, one time in this very stadium, I think in 1981.
And so 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 never accounted for his whereabouts.
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 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 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 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 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 Duckenfield.
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.
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 that were unfavorable to the police and how things were handled and they like torched it basically.
Yeah, and the force was very... regimented I saw, right?
So 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 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.
They just beat that drum incessantly.
They called the fans, and by extension, the victims, beasts, yabs, 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 2012 and has been boycotted in Liverpool ever since.
I still don't think they'd sell The Sun there, even after the apologies.
This was the 1980s and things were different back then.
The hooliganism was much more prominent.
So it was a narrative which was easy for people to believe uh, in england, and when they were reading it they, you know people were like yeah, this is the typical sort of um anti-social underclass is how kyle put it.
Uh, they're trying to get in without tickets.
Uh, you know, drunk at three in the afternoon um, it was.
It was a different kind of um.
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 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 money, old school and quaint back then.
And so people were ready to accept this, 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 nothing.
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.
Shame on Liverpool and its fans.
That was the public opinion on this for years.
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 duck and field specifically for failing to close this tunnel.
Like if they were to close 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.
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 in sort of making this happen.
It didn't that didn't come along till much later.
No, for sure.
That closing that tunnel to, his failure to close the tunnel to 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.
It was called the Freeman tactic.
And it was as simple as closing that middle tunnel and opening the entrances to the less full pens.
And so that just shows you how little of a grasp Duck and Field had on the concept of safety at a football match that he was responsible for overseeing.
He didn't even know about the Freeman tactic, 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 Taylor report, these inquests are coming back with verdicts.
Accidental death is basically what they all were 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 finally got some measure of accountability, I guess.
The coroner ruled out evidence relating to deaths.
Anything after 3 pm.
He ruled out evidence because he said everybody was either dead or brain dead by 315.
And there was like actual proof that would come out later that some people survived until 4 pm and a lot of people would have survived later for that 45 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, this stuff came out in these reports, including the hip report, in the trials that 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 victims' dead bodies, right.
Yeah.
I mean, they had to look through those to 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 them 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 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 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 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.
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.
So that was all in 2000.
Twelve 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.
450,000 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 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 public opinion just completely shifted.
And so that HIP report led to new inquests.
And 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.
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 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 316.
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.
But 41 of the 96 would have survived, they determined, which is just a brutal number.
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.
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 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 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?
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.
Yeah, for sure.
Let's take a break, Chuck, and we'll come back and finish up, huh?
Yeah, let's do it.
American soccer is exploding.
The knockout rounds are here.
The U.S. won their group, and now every match is win or go home.
Score!
USA!
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And I'm Tom Bogert.
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It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals.
Whether you're a lifelong fan or this is your first World Cup, we've got you covered.
Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogert and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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June is Black Music Month and on the Drink Champs podcast we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Swae Lee.
Do you realize how legendary you are?
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No matter the era, Drink Champs brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations.
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OK, Chuck.
So not just the HIP 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 Ducanfield 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 as these reports started coming out and public opinion changed, when he was tried, eventually he admitted that, 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 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 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 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 1994 had to move to that.
And then they established the ground sports ground safety authority after that, to 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 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 being fans of pro football.
Those upgrades that the...
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 changed the social strata of fans.
It just 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 92, like that was, that was a real game changer.
Like the amount of money that is 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 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 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, 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 even.
The first joke of the episode.
Let's talk about Keir Starmer because he is under fire right now.
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.
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.
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 didn't like really dig into the law.
I don't know if there are like protections or anything involved.
But that law 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 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 may be, or one of the hang-ups, 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, 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 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 that 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 12 minute documentary from The Guardian that you sent.
Yeah, 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.
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.
I bet he did.
He 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.
Yeah.
One thing we probably should mention 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 something.
Yeah.
Solace, maybe.
Who knows?
Solace.
Thank you.
A quantum of it.
Wow.
You're just throwing around notes.
British pop culture references.
Who knew that James Bond and Austin Powers were going to make an appearance?
I'm going to star in my own sitcom called Suddenly Anglophile.
But it's going to be spelled like I just mangled anglophile.
Yeah.
Or Blackadder.
That's another good title.
Sure.
Since Chuck made a joke about Black Adder, as foretold in 2008, it's time for Listener Mail.
I'm going to call this.
I screwed up on that Van Gogh episode about the movie.
Hey, guys, just finished the Vince 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 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 65000 paintings done in the style of Van Gogh by 100 Polish painters.
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 compliments 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.
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.
Oh, okay.
In our Le Mans short stuff.
You mean Le Mans?
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 us too via email at stuffpodcasts at iheartradiocom.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
American soccer is exploding.
The knockout rounds are here.
The U.S. won their group, and now every match is win or go home.
I'm Tab Ramos.
And I'm Tom Bogert.
On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, we'll talk about the real storylines.
Discuss the tactics that actually decide matches.
And give you the truth about the U.S. national team from inside the program.
Whether you're a lifelong fan or this is your first World Cup.
We've got you covered.
Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogert and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Joy is essential and it's also elusive.
But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.
Joy 101.
It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb.
If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on-air chats.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Joy 101 and listen now.
Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS.
My first guest is Paris Hilton, Shakira, Luke, and Yerin.
We have surprises.
Many surprises.
Welcome to the Sweet 305 podcast, where the group chat comes to life.
You're the only person I know that loves a yellow Starburst.
It's lemonade.
This is Sweet 305.
Here, oversharing is encouraged.
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