UEFA to refund £3m pay-out for 19,618 Liverpool fans
UEFA are refunding ticket cost to all Liverpool fans who attended the Champions League final in Paris last year in an unprecedented move that is likely to cost millions and which is a further acknowledgement of how far UEFA got the organisation of the show-piece event wrong.
An independent report commissioned by UEFA concluded that only the calmness of Liverpool fans prevented a ‘mass fatality catastrophe,’ after UEFA were found to have sidelined safety and security that French police behaved incompetently by firing tear gas into the crowd and that French Interior Minister, Gerard Darmanin, inflated the numbers of ticketless fans ‘as an excuse to mask other failures’.
UEFA have already apologised and promised to implement recommendations in the report, but this is the most substantive act of contrition, and will cost Europe’s governing body millions of pounds.
Many Liverpool fans are already suing UEFA in group actions and hundreds of fans with genuine tickets were refused admission either because of the chaos or because they were accused of having fake tickets because stewards were untrained and the scanning devices were faulty.
Top price tickets were €690 or £610 and cheapest were €70 or £62, meaning UEFA’s bill for the 19,618 tickets issued to Liverpool fans is likely to cost around £3million. —Sportsmail
