Liverpool endured chaos and fear in Paris in 2022. Many fans are not ready to return

Phil Blundell and some fellow Liverpool-supporting friends were at a cafe by the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris on the day of the 2022 Champions League final.

When they set off for the Stade de France, there was no sense of drama. The sun was shining and it was more than three hours before kick-off — plenty of time, even allowing for the train strike which had stopped anyone travelling to La Plaine, one of the two metro stops serving the southern end of the stadium where Liverpool supporters had been instructed to approach from.

The carriages on the RER line rattling towards the suburb of Saint-Denis were extremely busy and the crowds at the metro stop were huge. This was at around 5.30pm, two and a half hours ahead of kick-off between Liverpool and Real Madrid. Blundell was concerned. “The signage from the station was vague and people were guessing which way to go,” he remembers.

There was no attempt to direct anyone back towards the route from La Plaine, easing the load. Instead, everyone seemed to be heading towards the same access point, one that was already bursting at several times its capacity. To make matters worse, local police tried to secure the scene by reversing vans into an underpass below a motorway where the space was already uncomfortably tight.

Blundell could see a checkpoint at the bottom of a ramp in the distance. “It was probably able to do about 30 people a minute,” he recalls. “There were easily 10,000 or more in the queue. It doesn’t take great maths to work out there was a problem.”

A crush was beginning. On the concourse above, fans who had made it through were having panic attacks. Temporarily, organisers gave up on the checkpoint, but that decision knocked problems closer to the stadium. Gangs of pickpockets had been operating in the underpass. Unchecked and now outside the gates, they were confronted by French police, who acted indiscriminately. Amid pitched battles, families with children were truncheoned and tear gassed, with others being attacked by locals; later, some suffered life-changing injuries.

“I found the Gendarmes to be unnecessarily confrontational, lacking in people skills, short of any ability to do anything that wasn’t just haphazard at best and dangerous at worst,” says Blundell, who was able to make it to his seat safely.

The football, when it finally started after a delay which UEFA unsuccessfully tried to pin on supporters due to their “late arrival”, came as some relief. Yet there was a “peculiar” atmosphere throughout a match Liverpool would lose 1-0. “Not like a European final,” Blundell says. “The whole thing just didn’t feel real.”

Tonight, Liverpool return to Paris for the first time since that dark day in 2022. It is the same competition and the same local police force — which was found to have “failed in its duty to protect people” by an independent report last year — but the circumstances are very different.

Liverpool are not playing in Saint-Denis, but at Paris Saint-Germain’s Parc des Princes stadium, in the west of the city. Around 60,000 Liverpool fans were estimated to have travelled to the French capital for the final three years ago; for this last-16 tie, the club have been allocated just 2,000 seats.

The occasion, and the atmosphere around it, will be very different, which is one of the reasons why Blundell can rationalise returning to Paris. “Saint-Denis and Paris are mentally detached for me,” he says. “But I can understand why it isn’t for others.”

GO DEEPER

‘He hit me with a hammer’: Fans recall the chaos of the Champions League final

For Danny Smith, the underpass in Saint-Denis stirred horrendous memories. He was 14 years old in 1989 when he experienced a crush in the Leppings Lane end at Hillsborough, where 97 Liverpool supporters were unlawfully killed due to the organisational failings of the authorities.

Thirty-three years after surviving the worst stadium disaster in British history, he was trying to leave Stade de France with his teenage son when he was ambushed by a gang, who smashed his knee with a hammer and rummaged through his pockets before stealing his possessions in front of police while they stood watching. “This is Saint-Denis,” one of them commented.

With no ambulances available, Smith was told he would have to make his own way to hospital. His priority was getting his son back to Merseyside safely so rather than seek urgent medical treatment for his shattered leg, he embarked on the journey via a train to Nantes, around 250 miles (400km) away.

At Liverpool’s Royal Hospital, X-rays revealed he had suffered three fractures to the upper part of his tibia. He was transferred to Aintree University Hospital for surgery the following day where surgeons had to rebuild his knee, comparing it to a “box of lego because bits were everywhere”.

He would spend the next couple of months in a hospital bed. At one point, it seemed as though he would become an amputee because his leg was damaged so badly; while that was avoided, his injuries have left him unable to return to work at a company that produces car seats. He is yet to receive compensation and a settlement with UEFA involving thousands of fans suffering from physical and mental trauma is ongoing.

Police spray tear gas at Liverpool fans outside Stade de France (Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)

Smith is grateful for the help he received from the club he supports. Liverpool paid for his treatment at a rehabilitation company part-owned by the club’s first-team physiotherapist Chris Morgan. But the idea of returning to Paris for tonight’s game is unthinkable.

“I’ve not been to a European away game since and I certainly wouldn’t ever go back to Paris,” Smith insists. “In fact, my son and I agreed that we would never go back to France. Daniel had the chance to go to Euro Disney but he didn’t even want to go there.

“We’ve still got our season tickets for Anfield. I’ve missed a couple of night matches with the cold weather. I just feel so worn out some days. We’ve been to a few away games in the Premier League this season but it takes a lot out of me.”

“I’m about 40 per cent of the person I was,” he adds. “There’s the ongoing issue with mobility but it’s also about the trauma. I’d say dealing with the mental side of things has been even worse than the physical side of the assault. I thought I was going to lose my son that night. It brought back so much from being in the Leppings Lane.

“I know some lads who are going over to Paris this time but none of them are taking their kids.”

Smith attends meetings held at Anfield once a month with the Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance (HSA), who arranged for him to have individual psychotherapy.

He says there are Liverpool fans who are still coming forward, affected by what happened in Paris nearly three years ago. “Survivors’ guilt is something a lot of people suffered with after Hillsborough, and Paris brought a lot of that back to the surface. I found the therapy really useful.”

Peter Scarfe, the chair of the HSA, says the organisation is aware of five suicides since Paris. In 2023, the family of Paul Marshall told the Liverpool Echo that the Hillsborough survivor took his life after behavioural changes following the final.

“We saw a huge spike in people reaching out to us in 2022,” Scarfe says. “A lot of Hillsborough survivors were triggered by what they witnessed. Not all of them went to Stade de France, for some just watching on TV was harrowing enough. It brought back a lot of difficult memories. We have a WhatsApp support group and we provide individual therapy for those who need it.

“Getting drawn against PSG and the prospect of fans going back to Paris led to more people coming forward to contact us. Many have vowed never to go to Paris again. I’m only aware of one person in our group who has decided to go.”

Parc des Princes, where Liverpool play PSG (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images)

The ongoing work of the HSA has been boosted by financial support from both the LFC Foundation and the Football Association.

On Monday, Scarfe was involved in a meeting with representatives from the French police, who spoke with fan groups through an interpreter.

“We received the reassurances we were looking for over crowd control and what plans are in place for the 2,000 fans going over there,” Scarfe says. “They acknowledged that the behaviour of Liverpool fans in recent years has been exemplary and that they regard this game as low-risk.

“They also explained that the two stadiums are very different and that it would be much safer this time in terms of the route for fans to take. They were appalled by how it was policed last time. There will be vans blocking side roads but not narrowing the actual route to the ground like we saw at the 2022 final.”

Having dispatched operational staff to Paris a few weeks ago as part of standard preparation for a European tie, Liverpool are confident of a safe passage for supporters due to the game taking place in a different part of the city, where transport links are expected to be better.

Manchester City’s recent Champions League tie at Parc des Princes passed off without problems, although travelling fans have been warned not to use line 10 of the Paris metro system, which is used by the PSG ultras supporters, and take line 9 instead.

He, and many others, are hoping lessons have been learnt by their counterparts, several hundred kilometres to the north.

(Top image: Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic, images: Getty Images)