The Heysel Disaster took place 40 years ago, with 39 fans losing their lives
The memorial at the stadium is insignificant and an insult to their memories
LISTEN NOW: It's All Kicking Off! Is Ruben Amorim too honest?
By IAN HERBERT
Published: 17:30 EDT, 28 May 2025 | Updated: 17:30 EDT, 28 May 2025
The security guard at the entrance to what was once the Heysel Stadium refuses to let me through to the spot which commemorates the death of 39 football fans.
It’s after finding an open gate elsewhere I reach the memorial stone which is a disgrace and an insult to their memory.
Blink and you’d miss the small, insignificant granite plaque affixed to one of the stadium’s vast, red-brick exterior walls, where the names of those who were crushed to death here in the Heysel Disaster, 40 years ago on Thursday, are being weathered away.
Roberto Lorentini, a young doctor, died trying to save a child’s life. Andrea Casula, aged 11, died a few yards from the place where his father Giovanni’s body was found. Northern Irishman Patrick Radcliffe, an archivist working for the European Economic Community in Brussels, died having simply wanted to experience a big event in the city.
These and others were supposed to have been remembered in posterity at the place where they lost their lives. There was a ceremony to inaugurate the plaque and an adjacent commemorative ‘light sculpture’ 20 years ago.
Turns out no one in Heysel could be bothered to notice that the paint used to list the victims is peeling off.
The Heysel memorial (pictured) is an insult, with the names of the victims peeling off
Clashes between supporters ahead of the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus led to 39 fans losing their lives at the Heysel Disaster in 1985
The victims deserve better after the horrifying scenes of 40 years ago
This would not have surprised Roberto Lorentini’s father, Otello. He, more than anyone, knew all about the rank incompetence and disgraceful buck-passing of the Belgian authorities and UEFA after the disaster of May 29, 1985. He worked tirelessly, amid his own grief, to hold them to account for what befell fans in Heysel’s infamous Z Section, where he arrived with his son that night.
The banners those Italian fans draped over the stadium crush barriers before all hell let loose bore messages such as Mamma sono qui! (‘Mum, I’m here!’). They imagined their mothers being proud they had completed the 10-hour road trip north for the European Cup final between Juventus and Liverpool.
Instead, their families back in Piedmont stood transfixed before TV sets, looking for a sign in the transmission that their loved ones were not caught up in the crush which claimed the lives of 32 Italians, four Belgians, two French and Northern Irishman Radcliffe.
The German broadcaster ZDF terminated their transmission out of respect before the decision was taken — astonishing and abysmal in hindsight — that the final would still be played that very night: a 9.40pm kick-off, with the deaths so quickly put out of mind that the noise of the crowd could be heard from the little Brussels hospital where many of the bereaved had congregated.
The tragedy was a very awkward truth for Liverpool FC for years and an indelible stain on the club’s reputation. The fine new Heysel memorial at Anfield, which Liverpool announced last week, is welcome, though for many years the club struggled to take responsibility. Sir John Smith, then chairman, wrongly claimed two National Front members had been responsible, later telling a Merseyside Police investigator he was misquoted.
A list of organisations who made payments to a fund for the grieving families, listed in Italian journalist Francesco Caremani’s devastating book Heysel. The Truth, included the Merseyside local authority, Merseyside Police and the Walton police station in Liverpool. Not the football club.
But in the eyes of Otello Lorentini and many others, the Belgian authorities were the despicable ones in the aftermath, treating grieving families in a way for which no word can do justice.
They were the ones responsible for the bodies of fans allegedly being mixed up at a makeshift mortuary.
The Belgian authorities were heavily criticised in the aftermath of the Heysel Disaster
One year after the tragedy, the English press were refused access to the stadium to witness a meeting between a Juventus fan who was rescued by an English supporter
Belgian bureaucrats claimed the Italians were to blame for rushing their mortuary teams. The families of some of the injured were charged hospital fees and transport fees to reach the dead, later reimbursed.
There was a flagrant wish in Belgium to airbrush the disaster from history. Caremani relates the story of how Juventus fan Carla Gonnelli, rescued by an English supporter after her father had died in front of her, went to Brussels to meet the man who had saved her life, on the first anniversary of the tragedy.
The Belgian authorities refused to allow the English press into the stadium to capture the meeting. ‘They tried to leave it all behind,’ Lorentini, who passed away in 2014, said of UEFA and the Belgian authorities, a year after the disaster. ‘But we will not accept that this tragedy is ascribed to Liverpool fans only. Our rage stems from the fact there is a general lack of steps taken against the violence.’
UEFA and their egregious then president Jacques Georges denied any responsibility, despite pocketing 83 per cent of total match revenues and making the catastrophic decision to stage the final in a crumbling, 55-year-old stadium which was condemned in the early 1980s for failing to meet modern safety standards.
Safety was placed in the hands of the grossly incompetent Belgian authorities. Local police had supposedly flown to England to ‘study hooliganism’ in advance, yet even Liverpool fans were surprised by the availability of strong Belgian beer from 5pm that evening. It significantly impacted what was to follow.
A group of 100 Liverpool fans were free to charge through the Z Section because the line of police officers positioned there was so thin. The batteries failed on their walkie-talkies. There was no communication with the stadium control centre. More than 20 officers had left the terrace to investigate the theft of a cash till from a hot-dog vendor.
The official inquiry by a leading Belgian judge found the local police chief was ‘always where he shouldn’t have been’.
When UEFA general secretary Hans Bangerter was fined and given a three-month suspended prison sentence, the governing body appealed the verdict in a fight to avoid liability, and lost. The Belgian football authorities challenged their own convictions in an attempt to avoid paying compensation. They also lost.
It was Otello Lorentini and the organisation he founded, The Association for the Families of Heysel Victims, who brought these individuals to justice.
The despicable treatment of the Italian families has, to this day, never been fully appreciated.
‘The Belgians did not have a clue and their policing of the event was pathetic,’ former La Gazzetta dello Sport journalist Giancarlo Galavotti tells me.
‘When the Liverpool mob surged the policemen ran down to pitch level, fearing for their own safety. I was in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico for the Roma-Liverpool final the year before and something similar was about to happen just before kick-off. But the Italian Carabinieri military police in riot gear quickly ran up the dividing line forming a barrier and started to baton charge and push back the Liverpool mob, preventing their attack.’
Liverpool have a fitting memorial for Heysel at Anfield, and announced plans for a new one
40 years on, the current memorial at Heysel to mark the tragedy is simply not good enough
The blank looks my questions about the disaster elicited in the Heysel district last Friday evening demonstrated that the events of May 1985 do not form part of any collective memory in this place.
‘Look around. You see this is a small, peaceful place. The game should never have been played here,’ says 60-year-old Vincent Einhart, outside a shop called Market across the road from what became the King Baudouin Stadium, when the original Heysel was bulldozed and rebuilt.
There is a bleak irony in finding an officious security officer barring my entry to a place where the pitiful lack of protection led to those 39 deaths, 40 years ago.
I insist he must let me through. ‘What if I had a tribute to lay at the plaque?’ I ask him. ‘Do you not know the significance? That it’s been 40 years next week?’
He makes a phone call, fiddles around in his little cabin and then re-emerges.
‘No,’ he says. ‘This will require a written request. Not permitted. You cannot pass through.’
LiverpoolJuventus