The Hillsborough Disaster

Guaranteed Human. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of iHeart Radio. 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 Hillsboro 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 a Kyle or one writer from the UK to put this together for us and he did a great job and he used all the appropriate letters and terminology and his spelling and stuff, you know? Yeah, I was going to say no z's throughout.

They were all s's. Yeah, he did a wonderful job with this. Um, 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 the strategy completely flip flopped and the truth finally came out.

“Um, we'll get to all that, but let's, let's say we kind of give”

everybody some background about what's going on here. The whole thing took place, like you said, in 1989, it Hillsboro 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. That Hillsboro. But this day it was actually hosting a FA Cup semi final. That means it was all England teams.

And it was between Liverpool and notting them forest. So far, so good. This is just a normal Cup semi final 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. Um, they had Liverpool had more fans. And I'm not sure how it is now, but in 1989, at least that was a case.

“Yeah, 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 as like a series of steps that happened 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 Lepping's Lane, which was the street that dead ended into the stadium. And not only did it dead end, but it bottle neck. It got more narrow as you got toward that dead end.

So, and that the turn styles there, which is where you get in, that part of the stadium, they were seven of them. They were bold. 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 10,100 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. Let me 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 turn styles. 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 getting where you fit in and whoever gets their first

as the one who gets through that turn style 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. Yeah. Was that, you know, it was an unruly crowd of drugs. 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.

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're excited about. Yeah. And all this really kind of starts about 10 minutes before kickoff.

“That's what people are like, come on, let's go.”

We got to get in and like, by this time that crowd had, like the lines or whatever had backed up into leppings, laying pretty far. People wanted to hurry up and get through, right? But like you said, everybody was generally good nature.

Kickoff was set at 3 p.m. And at 10 till 3 p.m. There were still 5,000 Liverpool fans who were outside on leppings laying trying to get through these seven turn styles.

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 of the police for this soccer match.

His name was David Duck and Field. And the guy outside said, hey, we need to open a gate. Forget the turn styles and tickets. There's a bunch of people who were about to get crushed out here. And we need to relieve some of this pressure.

Please open this gate. And he did that once. Duck and Field ignored it. Did it twice. Duck and Field ignored it.

The third time it was almost frantic.

And Duck and Field finally said, okay, go ahead and open gate and open gate. They did that at 250 2 p.m. 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 the potential crowd crush just inside the stadium. Yeah. And so, and we'll get to more about David Duck and Field. The match commander has qualifications and stuff.

Because these pins, and this was partially to kind of keep who look in as them 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 they were all passing through toward the central part of the field down this long tunnel.

“I think Calsett was 23 meters long to get to pins 3 and 4,”

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 remotely, you didn't tell you what pin you had to go to. You could go to whatever pin.

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, there's crowded people after opening gate sea floods in,

connects with the people who are already coming through the seven turn styles. 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 a thousand more people

“that they allowed on to each pin than they should have,”

based on the kind of crowd control safety stuff they had in place. So as already dangerously full, before those people from gate sea even made their way down the tunnel. But when they did, they encountered this massive 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 two. So everybody was pressing forward, and then all of a sudden a crowd crush happened

in those two middle pins. That's right. So it's about five till kick off at this point. When people like later described just sort of a change in how things were going.

Like I said, it was people generally happy to go see the soccer game. And by 255 it becomes clear that 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. 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 pool genism, 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.

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 developed into like a real dangerous mess.

that they're kind of like intermittently staggered in the pins, right? So if you walk into one of these pins in your facing the field, you'll eventually come to a railing. And that's a crowd barrier, or a crush barrier.

Which means that if a crush develops, that barrier's 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 that 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 in 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 worded 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 305, those barriers, at least one pen 3 had given away. And a human cascade starts.

And this is when the devastating stuff we're not going to read 1,000 accounts of people getting 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 asphyxiation or like your heart stops. Yeah, and this happened to a lot of people. And 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 just touched on it just a little bit, right? I don't even know, I mean, I think if we mentioned it, I said I brought it up because I had asked Kyle to write this. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, okay.

But when this crowd, this human cascade happened, people got pushed over, and there's a natural human reaction to try to get upright again, which means that you are standing on people beneath you. And so people got trampled in addition to the people

who were pressed up against the other crushed 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 read this. It 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 as name as David Cannon. And he was, I 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, that crusher, 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, they're very,

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, yeah, it's pretty bad.

“That's why didn't go back and look at 306.”

It was a 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, because you know, everyone thought it was just like rowdy fans. And he was like, no, this is not what's happening. The match commander, Duckinfield, 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, 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 curtain 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 trying to help the fans, but other cops are either ignoring them

Right, or standing there facing this crowd crush in a line,

a curtain 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.

Like the after effects, like immediate after effects, or it just continued to go badly. The police response, the emergency response was just so uncordinated

“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.

Those one 10 year old that died.

He was very ironically, I guess, in sadly, the cousin of Stephen Gerard, 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 who's 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. You did mention the two that died years later. I think Tony Blan died four years after in 1993. He had brain damage up into that point.

And then what the account is the 97th victim, it 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, under divine.”

So 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. There was like a public response. One of the things was Paul McCartney jumped in

because this was a Liverpool team. And he's from Liverpool. I don't know if you knew they're not Chuck. But he, I guess, released a charity single, cover of Fairy Cross the Mercy.

Have you heard that song? It's a good song. I didn't think it was a great, but I think it was a great act. Did you listen to the, I didn't listen to the 89 one that they released for as a charity single? Did you listen to the original? Because that's very good.

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

“Okay. Well, at any rate, it's a good song originally.”

And it was like you said a very cool act. They were also tons. 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 it's probably a good time for break. And we'll come back and talk about that venom right after this. [MUSIC] I'm Mungus, you're together, and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive.

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[MUSIC] All right, so right after this,

the police basically immediately started trying to engage in successfully

as we'll see for a while engaged in a coverup. They wanted to 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 was fed the public basically, that match commander. And I guess we should go ahead and talk about David Duck and field 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. I think in 1981.

And so it was top of mind or should have been. And he did not do that.

He never 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 semi-final match. Just even a regular match, he 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 ten 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 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 are really responsible for the tragedy. Yeah, for sure.

So we'll get to kind of what happened in a timeline since as this goes on in a minute. But initially the police watched dog recommended that there was like a disciplinary case would be brought against Duck and Field.

That did not happen at the time. And he was medically retired two years later on full pension

basically to evade these discipline from this incident.

The case, again, that the cops built, was that people were drunk. They got their 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 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.

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.

And 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 victim's beasts,

jobs, which means thugs, vile. And then the son, 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 the 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 son, it ended up apologizing in 2012 and has been boycott in Liverpool ever since. I still don't think they've sold the son there. Even after the apologies.

But this was, you know, this was the 1980s and things were different back then. The who look at us and 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 typical sort of, anti-social underclasses how Kyle put it. They're trying to get in without tickets.

You know, drunk it 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 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, it was a lot more just kind of small time

in 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 class of streak running through it. And this certainly fit that idea that supposition

that lower classes were drunk and violent.

“And of course, they, they were responsible for this, right?”

But so the public accepted this. The, the thatsher 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 storm the gate

and 97 people ended up dying as a result. Shame on Liverpool and its fans. That was the, 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 feel specifically for

failing to close this tunnel. Like if they even to close that tunnel and it would have fed people to the empty pins. 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 empty your pins, it probably wouldn't have happened. Sure. 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 sort of making this happen. That didn't, that didn't come along till much later. 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 superintendent, who were in charge of overseeing matches over the years.

That one of them had his name on. It was called the Fremontactic. And it was as simple as closing that middle tunnel and opening the entrances to the less full pins. 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 Fremontactic if you ask me.

knew about the Fremontactic. It was like, that was a huge deal. In addition to all the people dying as a result,

“the fact that like, everyone knew that you should do that”

and that duck and field didn't as 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,

you know, decided upon. And it was very controversial, obviously the victim's families are, and they're the ones, you know, who kept this alive all these years until they finally got some measure of accountability, I guess.

The corner ruled out evidence relating to deaths. Anything after a 3 p.m. He ruled out evidence because he said, everybody was either dead or brain dead by 315. And there were, there was like actual proof that would come out later

that some people survived until 4 p.m. and a lot of people would have survived for that 45 minutes had they got an emergency services in there in an orderly manner. Right.

Yeah, those are the people I was talking about earlier. So that corner essentially was just basically going along with the sentiment, the public sentiment,

“that these people surely 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 stuff came out and these reports, including the hip report in the trials,

that like, if you were a victim family member, you were sent to a gym and 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 polar rides of the victim's dead bodies, right? Yeah. I mean, they had to look through those two 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 polar rides. And so you find your loved one. The parents of the children who died, they weren't allowed to hold their 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 were 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 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 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. Rather, 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 wins day. 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. Right.

So that was all in 2000. 12 years later, in 2012, there was another report that 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. Apparently kept like releasing information piecemeal.

And the press is kept reporting on it. And very quickly, the public was like,

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 the hip report led to new inquests.

And the inquests found that the 96 victims and later on the 97 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, this is our, we're saying,

we're recommending that somebody is responsible for this. Yeah. I 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, you know, rescue had been a little more organized. Because that, 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, you know, 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 40, one of the 96 would have survived. They determined, which is just a brutal number. Yeah. In 2019, after all the stuff had come out, public opinion changed, that can feel 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 to. So now we have a place where the inquest, the government inquest is saying, these people are unlawfully killed to 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 a 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 re-edited that nobody was going to be held 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?

“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 to Chuck and we'll come back and finish up, huh? Yeah, let's do it.

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Okay, Chuck, not just the hip report, but a bunch of different reports.

It's basically showed quite clearly that the police response and the emergency response

was just terrible. And you talked a lot about what, I guess, the cluster with the ambulances. But the police as well were essentially disorganized. About it's disorganized as a group of police can be. And the reason why is because, again, David Duck and Field 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 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 Lake. 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 the match. Yeah, 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.

Or if it just 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 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 in 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 oversee 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 semi-finals in the World Cup in 1990. And 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 profile.

Those upgrades that the clubs and the stadiums were required to undertake meant that they needed to uptick up prices. Higher ticket prices, like you said, kind of changed the social strata of fans. It just got more expensive.

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 spent in the Premier League on players on the teams.

“I think there's a, you know, 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. You don't, I guess, when, or 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 and 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.

And the first joke in the episode.

Let's talk about Keir Starmer because he is under fire right now.

Those, that family are they 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 that seems to be of the Hillsborough law would be to enforce.”

And it's weird they have to a lot 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 your obliged to tell the truth. Right.

You don't have to go along with with this narrative that gets passed down and 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 they're like protections or anything involved. But that law was, has it been passed yet? Which is really frustrating.

Yeah, not just cops too, but like any public official has to tell the truth. And 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 hangups is M.I.5. 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 M.I.5 is hanging it up because they're like, hey, listen. Like, we deal in lies and and subterfuge like that's our bag.

So we can't be included in this. That is our bag, baby. Yeah, that's right. I miss the baby. Did 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 was a 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 that really encapsulates it. Although 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, the fences and the people like, I don't, I don't know if that exists. Yeah, I didn'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 in a word for that work. But he did.

“You 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, that we didn't, is that in 2012, the United Kingdom Government through Prime Minister David Cameron at the time, apologize to the victim's 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. You know, solace. Thank you.

A quantum of it. If you allow more. You're just throwing around. British pop culture references, who knew that James Bond and Austin Powers were going to make an appearance. I'm going to start my own sitcom called Suddenly Angle of File.

But it's going to be spelled like, I just mangled Angle of File. Yeah. Or Black Adder.

Sure.

“Since Chuck made a joke about Black Adder as foretold in 2008,”

it's time for listen or mail.

I'm going to call this. I screwed up on that Van Gogh episode about the movie. Hey guys, just finished the events of Van Gogh episode. Want to let you know. The movie with Willem Dafoe is called At Eternity Skate.

This is something I remember now. But I forgot at the time. Okay. You must 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.”

Okay. That's the movie that's animated. You know, using 65,000 paintings. Done in the style of Angle by 100 Polish painters. Wow.

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, story story night. Beautifully compliments the movie. Highly recommended.

My wife and our 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. Chucks and she stepped up and took a correction.

I feel like I should admit to one 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 geographies 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 double down. Verbate them. All right. Well, thanks to Brian and Alexis.

“And if you want to be like Brian and Alexis,”

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