Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 106: Heysel Stadium Disaster

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

this podcast is now about sports Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All right, it's a podcast podcast. We're doing a podcast guys. I it's incredible that we're back here again doing this technology Advances hello and welcome to well as your problem forecast about engineering disasters with slides. I am Alice Kordwell Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now my pronouns are she and her I go okay. Okay. I'm Justin Rosnack. I'm the person who's talking now my pronouns are he and him yay Liam Hi, I'm Liam Anderson and for those of you who left comments in the past two episodes saying how happy you were that I wasn't there You're not so I invite you to throw yourself into the sea Yes

And we're we're doing the introduction in a slightly unusual order because I wrote these slides Yeah, I Said now, I know I thought I would help out with the workflow by doing by doing an episode And so what you see here is a football stadium Before a football match has started and this is the hyzer stadium In Belgium, this is sort of gonna be a companion piece to our Hillsborough episode from ages and ages ago So go back and listen to that Also, I'm going to be drawing a lot of this from a long GQ article called remembering hyzer by Robert Chalmers

That's that's worth reading. So we'll put that in the description as well um We're going to talk about some football some soccer um And some some social conditions in in the 1980s in Europe But in the meantime we have to do the goddamn news No delay there on account of it was uh, it was it was you doing no you swearing that you can't find the right drop Yeah, that's right. Um

Well, I mean our first piece of news is uh, nothing is good. Nothing good is allowed to happen. Yes Uh, they recalled, um, san francisco's, uh progressive da What's his name chase a budan? I think I get mad at me if i'm pronouncing his name wrong Um, he's he's not even that fucking radical man. His mom is way cooler than him um That's a Some of you'll get that. Um, he's so his deal was like

moderate reform progressivism not prosecuting some like shoplifting and drug offenses Uh, and in exchange for this the san francisco police department decided to do a sort of undeclared strike bad kind of strike um And that combined with san francisco being Sort of in the jaws of this crisis of poverty and homelessness shithole of a place and a logical shithole of a place governed by uh fascists who You know as as that one tweet that I saw said fascists who think they're progressive because they go to sex parties. Yes

um uh Because they saw a homeless person once decided that they could use california's very very stupid recall provisions To recall him from office and it wasn't even close. He lost by like 25 points. I'm I am I've been confused about this isn't like the the california recall like process just designed in such a way that it almost always works Yeah, pretty much like, you know, you just say okay. Do you want to recall this guy? Yes or no And your your options are status quo or what's in this mystery box? And most people go for the mystery box just regardless

We we cannot emphasize enough do not go into the mystery box. Don't don't go for the mystery box It's usually just like a like a sort of philosophical approach. Yeah, we're anti all recall elections We think california should still be under the thumb of gray davis. Um, I mean Robert gary conduit and his missing interd. Wow. Okay. Yeah No, so this is this is of course immediately being spun by every state and national level Outlet to that this is a huge defeat for the left. This is the voters Sending a message that uh, you you shouldn't defund the police which isn't something that he wants to do

Which isn't something that anyone has done No, no The the you know, you know, you can't do woke culture or progressivism Uh, instead you have to support the cops and you have to give them a shit ton more money I gotta say I mean, you know, I if if people don't want, uh, progressive da is the first time heard of it here in philly Where, you know, krasner cruise through the re-election no problem. Um, you know, I like 70 30 Exactly. Yeah, it was there was no contest there I I mean, and I I don't know that we're more notably progressive than san francisco other than that. We don't have california ideology here

We are more antagonistic. That's true. I mean the thing is right every uh, every win for the left is very specific and uh, Based on those set of circumstances and every loss of the left is general and universal. This is true Yeah, and I'm kind of like how much of this really is Like anyone making a conscious conscious decision here versus just how the election is structured I mean here when we went to go re-elect krasner They actually gave you here's the alternative option and he's stunk and everyone knows he's stunk And and so, you know, they they're like even people who didn't like krasner that much are like, well Better than that other guy

But the really funny thing is that now The sfvd and the san francisco board of supervisors in london breed have have fucked themselves by trying to fuck chase and be Down over because they've put themselves in this position where now it's sort of like Accepted truth that san francisco has a sort of like fallen city Um, and it's it's like goth them there and the you know, the forces of order are useless Which is kind of an unfortunate thing to be believed if you are the incumbent City supervisor. I'm very confused as to like what What they expect to happen with this?

Um, if they get a new da are they gonna like because like, okay It's my understanding that crime is actually down in san francisco. Oh, yeah, that's a objective standpoint What's up is homelessness Yes, and that's really what they're pissed off about. Yeah. Yeah, what they're gonna do Is they're gonna they're gonna bring back a san francisco icon One inspector harry callahan And he's gonna take care of the homelessness problem his way Rather than the way that the fat cats and the suits and city hall want to take care of it

Yeah, because if they like want to take care of homelessness using the the carceral system like the entire service industry is going to stop functioning like You think people don't want to work now Uh, wait until you get rid of all the people who uh Actually work in all those javs and throw them in prison. I mean, I don't know. Are they gonna do like work release for starbucks? I don't get it. I I wish you hadn't had your hand on the laze when you said that I'm like, yeah Appreciate that. That's fine. Yeah, but I guess the lesson to draw from this is that like you you may as well

Be a sort of a raging communist who wants to abolish the police because I expect to say Yeah, I mean that is the way you'll be presented if you're not like if In our in our long and very one-sided bleeding kansas to Even the party of moderate reform within the law is uh, you know radical and extreme I this is just uh, this is just a massive media failing. I think you know, it's oh, yeah, you know, there's there's uh every single like Crime is just You know the way the way that people report on crime now

You would think it's like the bad old days of like the 70s In these major cities and the gangs have free reign on the street, you know, and it's just that's not the case No, it's mass hysteria. It's on purpose well, it's like I You know, we had that uh recent big shooting on south street, right? um This was pointed out by uh, my friend from college, uh, obry nagle who does a Uh media accountability project and really good work at reframe philly. You should go

Subscribe to her newsletter. Yes. Uh, and one of the things she pointed out was you know In the immediate aftermath of the shooting the coverage was all like You know, wow, how did larry krasner personally arm these? Shooters as opposed to this is where the shooting occurred. This is how you need to avoid it So and and so forth like actual useful information for people who live there Harrisburg, yeah, and it makes people very very very afraid right because people who uh Objectively safer than they have been in years Yeah more terrified and it's not like

No one's saying that things in san francisco are always nice, right? It's just that you have to be able to distinguish between You are seeing something that is unpleasant Something that makes you feel bad. Yeah, like I don't know someone fucking shoplifting baby formula because they have to feed their baby Or someone, you know, taking a shit in the street because that's the only place where they can fucking shit without paying for something uh And something that like endangers you um, and I I just I don't know it's it's just it's so obviously and so

Coordinatedly this this rat fucking You know, I Fucking is a good word for it. It's absolutely true because the same shit's happening in philly. Mm-hmm. Well I don't know what to say like you how are you supposed to as a progressive elected official Fucking ride the wreckage of the united states down As all of this other shit falls apart around you. You're supposed to like maintain Uh, you know a nice safe environment for people and their kids. They don't ever have to feel, you know, see anything Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I will say progressive

uh, da is kind of a Oxymoron progressive cop is sort of an oxymoron. Yeah, sure But yeah, it's also like a lot of the a lot of the problems that you know The perceived problems or problems that have been caused by enforcement. I mean, you know, take a look at okay if i'm in philly Hypothetically, I might take the L somewhere and see that there's heroin everywhere just every single place Uh, just all over the place now like that's not like an exaggeration. That's just how it is. He's not lying Yeah, and and and people are you know, and it's like why is this it's because the police Cleared out the big heroin in camp in Kensington because the real estate guys wanted to move in there

And then we'll do a god damn safe safe injection site. Yeah, everyone who's out and using is using on the L at this point you know and and so Narrowing is like, oh my god, they got to do something about that and what are you gonna do? Okay build the fucking safe injection site like we told you tell I think I think perversely this is one sort of endorsement of an electoral strategy, which is uh, people have been saying for a while smarter people than me that uh, a da is probably One of the positions that can make the most difference as you say, uh to like everyday enforcement and to like, uh, you know criminal justice policy

And the fact that it was this important to to get Joe Sabudan out of office that it was like Necessary to marshal all of the fucking forces of darkness against him. Yes, uh, I think kind of indicates that it's just you know a question of What that means if You know the the effort to elect progressive da's leads to them being unseated anyway, you know Nothing ever goes right folks speaking of In British news, yes, no, thanks HS2 got cut back again Yeah, uh, uh, let me let me uh, as a return to favor. I will be gareth. So we're gonna do is take jesus jacobre's mark

And we're gonna That's right fire other we're gonna fill The Something something his own anemic feces a hurly stick um Yeah, so this is this is one particular spur of HS2. It's called the gold born spur it goes through um warrington and wigan, I believe It would have connected the cruise and manchester line to the west coast main line

um And that's gone now. Um, yes, that's that's gone in part because As you may be aware our prime minister at time of recording boris johnson was subject to a to a no confidence vote by his own party And the mp who administers that that voting process sagray and brady. That's his constituency He was against it his constituents were against it And so it has been cut As part of a sort of transparent bribe to keep boris going

Um, and it's it's wild how I invite the residents of that place to commit sepico You have a lot of uh, these um, you know the way this project's been cut and cut again You know one of the one of the arguments against it from the beginnings Oh, this is just a train for rich people to get from like london to birmingham or london to manchester, right? And sure no you have a You had a wide variety of services that were enabled by the original design You take a lot of trains off the west coast main line So you could free up traffic for local services. You had all that sort of stuff Every time decarbonization to every time they cut something it becomes less and less useful

And more like what people thought it was going to be That's sure. That's a very good At some point it's going to be like, okay Why do we even bother buying the uh, uk load engage high speed trains when we're not actually going to be able to through run up to like Glasgow or edinburgh or something, you know Well, that's that's the thing Because this this not only this creates a bottleneck on the west coast main line, which is going to fuck Everything local right, uh, you name it

But it also specifically fucks me the one unforgivable crime because this was the one constituent part of hs2 Would have cut journey times from glasgo to london and it's gone. So whatever hs2 becomes I will not see any benefit from it Uh, I just have to support if the love of the game at this point I think I I saw a post that, uh, you might still get one just get your ski mask Get your ski mask. I think I saw a post that you might still get one train per hour up there May Wow

Fantastic headways, baby Yeah Yeah, even the northeast region is better than that $950 u.s. Dollars please else His tickets are gonna be expensive Yes, yeah, it's gonna be fucking like first-class prices for for second-class fantastic All this stuff is gonna have to be built at some point. Anyway, that's the other thing like Yeah, once they get this thing operating like everyone's gonna be like, why don't we have that and then they're gonna have to build it They could have had it earlier, you know because you don't deserve it

So this is I don't this is really really stupid short-sighted decision. Thank you Boris for being more on idiot dumb asshole shit Yeah, yeah, I mean this has been in the works for a while apparently Grant Shaps the the transport secretary could given We're not a real country. I don't I don't know why we're named like this had given Graham Brady like verbal assurances that it would be quietly cut Uh, at some point during like February, I think but now it just has been At some point we'll have to do a whole HS2 episode because this is yes This has been a debacle. Um, I mean less of a debacle in california high speed rail, but still a debacle Yeah, another episode. Um, didn't we do california high speed rail? No, we did cal train modernization

Oh my bad. Yeah. Well I guess the only the only thing we can draw from both of these is that nothing good is possible Everything is terrible. The forces of darkness and evil will always win. Yep. Uh, and uh, with that in mind It's goddamn news. Yep All right, so now we have to we have to move on from all of that sort of depressing stuff to something much much cheerier Football hooliganism. Oh, yeah Yeah Some examples of which seen here

um So I actually looked into the history of sports rioting and the first sports riot I could find was during the Byzantine empire The needle riot Yeah, so you'll listen to the lion's liby donkeys episode. Oh for more. It's a good one. Yeah So, so for as long as as sports have existed people have wanted to fight each other about it I think we we can all agree with that. Um But what we're specifically talking about here is a phenomenon of 1970s europe Um and in order to understand that I think you have to understand how shit Europe was in the 1970s

um for a sort of like It often governed by nominal socialists policy um, it was also like extremely poor extremely unequal corrupt shit like on every level

And also you had like the first generation of young people seen here who didn't personally remember Either the war or it's immediate aftermath and who thought that the sort of post war settlement was shit um And I mean we're going to be talking about football fans in England and Italy to at this time uniquely dismal countries um And it's it's sort of worth talking about what the vibes were at this point, right? um And the vibes of football at this point are

cheap nice working class very nice uh Very very male dominated uh good very was allowed very very white uh

Not I can't do I can't do the racism joke there. I'm not gonna do that Yeah, let's not do that. Um Not not very corporate is the other thing like We're in the era of uh sponsors being sort of like local medium-sized business, right? um And in particular John's tobacco barn. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, um megatronics and also Some kind of meat store Yeah, big dave's pies, um doesn't call it not called that butcher. It's just called a meat store

It's like to go to the meat store quality at every cut. Yes But also uh teams and players moved around less managers moved around less and teams in particular still had very strong local identities um Like now you get this phenomenon where you can kind of like shop around for a team to support you can be like I'm I'm really into like man united or uh, Liverpool or Everton or whatever without having set foot in any of those places and you see

Yeah Well, I mean it's the same reason I have like a an oakland athletics hat in my closet as you know, you just tragic because I enjoy I enjoy suffering. Um, and also because I always will be Yeah And also because like these these things are multinational businesses now that have increasingly, uh, you know are increasingly detached from You know areas from geography and from populations Uh, not the case at the time. Um In like there was not a question of shopping around for a football team to support in the 70s

anywhere in europe you issued one at birth uh And you know, I just all I can say is thank god those days are over. Otherwise, I would be recording this wearing a crystal palace shirt Um, maybe that's still like the some it's the case with some like franchises though Like I I don't think you're gonna get like too many, uh, too many like, uh Like a kansas city A guy in kansas city. It was a fan of mill wall. Um I mean, have you seen have you seen those? Um,

French nfl fan accounts Oh, it's the funniest fucking thing in the world because it would just be like a guy in I don't know. No, you or whatever Who's like, you know allele's eggl or whatever Let's go legs That's right. Um Yeah, I mean it obviously it's still the case like I mean fuck's like I live in glasgo, right? Like there's a uniquely sectarian dimension to to which football team you support here

Same to an edinburgh with like hearts and and hibs, but like um Yeah, I think I would say that the the era of the corporate middle-class season ticket fan was not yet upon us um And there are like there's there's a quote from the at the time this happened chairman of the English football association that the way that you get modern football is hyzel plus hillsborough plus satellite tv Those are the three components that make modern football what it is

um, and that's how it became gentrified in the way that it did um I was sort of interested in why this this this kind of behavior never Never really happened in like american sports at all like you don't have yeah You don't have a baseball hooligan or like a Or like a basketball hooligan or uh, no, we we we take out hooliganism and put in mass shootings in elementary schools Uh, a ha a hockey hooligan is just the players

Uh, yeah college football maybe to a point those fan bases can get pretty weird, but like I think it's maybe because And all these teams have existed for roughly the same amount of time, but in Alice do do soccer teams ever move Uh, very very seldom. Um, I think that's maybe part of it is that the united states is so big You know, it's rare that you'll you'll have a rivalry with the town over Or you know, I mean, there's there's somewhat of like a red sox yankees rivalry, but those

Don't usually culminate in fights. I would like them to I would love to just beat the shit out of some 14 year old yankees family the jeter jersey on Yeah, yeah like stadiums might move but generally like between towns I don't think that's common at all So you have that like base of support Also, I think the other thing we have to talk about is like alienation and and boredom and disaffection Yeah, right like obviously americans were feeling those two, but there is a particular kind of grimness

To 1970s europe Yes Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the feeling of having like no future Uh of uh of everything being pointless. I'm sure you know, our listeners couldn't relate to that in any way It's not listen to the sex pistols. Yeah, listen to the clash. Yeah, listen to the clash So with that in mind, we have to talk about uh fashion because a lot of these guys were as a lot of alienated white working-class men were Drawn to fascism and were drawn to things like skinhead fashions

um, and so your 70s football hooligan is Doc martin's shaved head, right, right? Um, and this is this is a problem because They're very easy to identify if your football hooligan looks like a skinhead because he is a skinhead The police are apt to detect him and you know, uh arrest him for his various crimes or like eject him from from the ground or whatever Yes But at this point english slides are playing in uh in europe um When they're doing european fixtures and the story the story is that

Liverpool fans discover a very poorly guarded luxury menswear store in the course of one of these things Just just some some fucking boutique that is not really prepared For a bunch of english guys to come in break all the windows and rob the place um and so

It's debatable whether this is where this started but imperialism by way of my Armani exchange t-shirt. Yeah, like as the 70s roll into the 80s, you get the development of what's called the casual And this is somebody who wears like a lot of This time expensive european fashion designers your your adidas your Circhio tecchini your stone island as you see here with the little fucking badge Which itself became Like sort of mimetic for everything from football hooligans to to far right violence to you know, you name it um

I mean even today, right? Like stone island is still a luxury brand It's kind of worked quite hard to try and shed that image, but there are definitely clubs that you could not get into wearing Uh, you know a thousand pound stone island jacket because of that fucking badge on the arm And I mean also Uh, so so the point of this the point of this casual subculture is partly that People enjoy dressing up, but it's also a deterred suspicion, right? um

The police think that if you're wearing expensive clothes, you're less likely to get in a fist fight with somebody Not really accounting for the fact that you don't care about your expensive jacket getting scuffed if you stole it in malan like The year before or whatever um And it's interesting because you can talk about football hooliganism on the continent as a cover for Acquisitive crime as a cover for robbing stores because a lot of that happened It was very poorly reported on at the time that if you if you know

If your team is playing away and you follow them that it's entirely plausible that you spend that day drinking you Rob some luxury. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well you you rob a store you get some jackets to take home with you Then you go to the football All right, I I was reading these notes earlier and I had a thought which was like what what if there were like golf hooligans They go go rob the joseph a banks or the man's warehouse I don't know. Yeah, just a bunch of like polo Ralph Lauren guys. Exactly. They go they go rob the They go rob the Ralph Lauren display at the macy's at the mall And this bed is not too far off from what happened like all of the you look at all of these fashion brands

And like they've been so so tainted by association in a lot of ways But you look at the corporate history and it's like oh, it was founded by this italian communist in 1950 And he wanted to use like expensive nylon and and whatever and then these guys show up and they just take it So that's redistribution right there. That's true. That is true and it's it's praxis and we're obligated to support it so So so so your casual your um your guy wearing a lot of like european menswear is your sort of archetypical football hooligan of the 1980s as things get into is the casual like in opposition to like the guy who actually looks like a skinhead Yeah, well not like it's the same guy. He's just like

Uh, he's just kind of used it as camouflage or his his style has changed over time I'm just like casual is like in opposition to like hardcore or something like that or I think I think it might be just from casual wear Wow, I can also do it Yeah, because all of these are like sport brands like your uh, your adidas or whatever Um, we have casuals versus our real gamers Yeah Yeah, so, uh, this means that we have to talk about my overclock to my router to be closer to god

We have to talk about the ways in which casuals were organized, which means we have to talk about, um Firms, which means we have to talk about next slide, please to work this in Trains, of course So as anyone who's ever taken a train in the uk will know Being on a train with football fans is hell. Yes. Uh, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah That I will never forgive shelsey fans for existing perfectly reasonable, um You you know

football fans on trains Always drunk always loud Uh, sprawled across six seats between four people Uh, you know bottles rolling down the aisle Etc etc the thing you got to remember about getting drunk on the train Is guess who's not driving That's me We can't do shit to me about getting drunk on a train. I have been drinking since 9 a.m

I have had 14 beers. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna piss into the six-year-old tat There's a party atmosphere. I think it's like it's apt to be called. Um, so this this is source of a problem and british rail Uh, who at this time? Control all of the trains as it should be they develop a solution That only a centralized nationalized train company could love which is the football special Scepter does this to alice Yeah, we do have we at the sports express. Yeah, we have the sports express. Yeah on a brad street line

It skips a bunch of stations in south philly. Also the pennsylvania used to do this There were football specials for the army navy game. Yeah, they had a special temporary station They built for them. It's also a lot of specials that went to horse racing tracks. That's right. Alice. How dare you? All right, just fucking dragged my ass on this one. So there was a special train that went direct from west point to South philly and it was um, but the only time you'd see a gg1 hauling a new york central passenger cars and then hopefully dumping it into the Delaware Um So so your football special in the UK

originates in the 20s with steam engines, right? You just put a fucking special headplate on the front of the steam engine and you move a lot of people Uh, you know to to go see a football match and it's sort of conceived of as a more gentile sort of like a leisure class outing thing at that point um But we're not talking about this. We're talking about the 1970s and 80s and because of a combination of

classism fear of violence and leftovers Your football special that ferries fans to such exotic places as Bristol or Leicester um, that's made up of leftover rolling stock uh with often no working toilets

Uh, and sometimes sometimes no seats as weight Bars over the windows occasionally. Oh, yeah, that's weight I was imagining this might be like slam door cars You got to prevent people from like sticking their arm out the window and getting it knocked off by an oncoming train You know, that's weight But all of this is a great way to make people live down to their reputation Uh, if you treat football fans as dangerous, you know, well They're gonna show you dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, exactly

But there are the advantages of this for the authorities are You could have you kind of like corral the fans you keep fans away from nice normal people Um, you can police those trains very heavily. You can just put a cop in every carriage Um, and most importantly, you know exactly when and where your fans will be arriving So when they get out of the station at wherever is holding the away game You can just corral them as you like in your own time. You know what this reminds me of Aaron express Oh god, yeah. Yeah, this is just Aaron express on a larger scale

Yep, uh For the for the folks on uh, who may not know what Aaron expresses lucky you. Yeah, I lucky you every Every year in march. They are there's an extended st. Patrick's Day tradition, which is on the weekends There's a whole bunch of crappy school buses They go around Philly the various irish pubs and you can get hop on and hop off Everyone's drunk. Everyone's 19 um When I turned 21, I was like, I'm too old to go to Aaron Aaron express

Yeah, I think the same vibe, um Also, if you remember from our Hillsborough episode like the sudden appearance of a lot of fans in a way that the police aren't Aren't expecting is a serious serious problem because no one knows how to do crowd control yet, right? So it's it's part of the sort of the the matchday plan for all of these things that you know You know x100 fans will be at the station at this time Next slide please so this is a tactic right and Obviously for every tactic there's a counter tactic and if you're interested in going to the football because you want to do violence

if you're interested in Facing fans of other clubs Then you don't want to be surveyed by the police. You don't want the police to know when you're getting there um And so what you do is you take an intercity train or you take a normal service train And you get there a bit early or you go past and you double back or something like that um And that that becomes such a successful way of avoiding the police that it becomes part of the identity of

various uh hooligan groups who come to be called firms Um, so you see here you've got the the Leeds United service crew for for service trains You have the West Ham intercity firm. I like this Leeds United, but it's pretty funny There's there's some aesthetic here, right? There's some there's some graphic design going on here um and I mean The way that a hooligan firm acts often is quite paramilitary to

um For instance, like a lot of them have sort of military affectations millwall's firms called f-troop Because what they what what they actually want to do is like increasingly divorced from football and these days They just want to do increasingly divorced. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, whether that's fighting other other football hooligans whether that's uh Yeah crimes of what we would I suppose now call racial or religious hatred because again, there's a lot of overlap with neo-nazi groups still right um

Whether it's theft uh, you name it um so very often The way that a football hooligan firm acts is Not wearing any sort of identifying colors Arriving separately and then meeting on the terraces getting together having a fight during the match and then After it trying to like isolate and ambush opposing supporters or anyone they don't like the look of which is also when

Like the most people tend to get killed in relation to football hooliganism is Like someone being chased down on their own afterwards From being in the wrong place at the wrong time Do they go after other firms or they just go after like regular people and see the like randos. Yeah It's mostly the former so a lot of these are like by prior arrangement sort of fights Okay, they just agree to fight in the middle. Yeah, absolutely. Um, hey, you want to have a fight? Yeah Sure. Yeah, that sounds good. All right. I'll have your talk. I'll have your people fight my people And what's really funny is when when football when football grounds and football stadia started being more policed

um Firms started to arrange to fight each other away from them and the first big prosecution in the 2000s was Just all of these guys fucking texting each other and of course the police got the text of Are you going to come and have an organized fight with us at this location at this time? Just roll them up ahead of time Why is that a crime as long as you're not getting any These are consenting adults Exactly, they want to beat the shit out of each other and let them. Yeah. Hey, you want to come fight? I got a lead pipe

Yeah, okay, I'll bring my dad. We'll swear off. Yeah, what's the problem? 3am text you up I got a lead pipe Not that kind of lead pipe. Yeah So so not So so not not every English football club has a hooligan firm some have several Uh, they're always quite mutable. They're always quite deniable Uh, notably Liverpool the cut of the the the side that we're going to be talking about

Doesn't have an organized hooligan firm at any point Um, but it's so that you're aware that that these guys exist and are able to sort of like Uh, you know take on the whatever sort of role is expected of them, right? Or is rather not expected of them Also, one of the things that they did involved, uh, putting leaving calling cards on people who they had a Like beaten or stabbed or whatever This is something that the intercity firm at west hand pioneered Just a little card stuck to you that just says, uh, you know, you've just met the intercity firm or after a while They started doing you you've just met the intercity firm again, which is kind of funny

I like this taste but I like that Both these have the british rail logo on Yeah, i was thinking that too Um, so that that's your english side of football violence. Now we're going to talk about italy So, oh boy, let's go Yeah, go off. Yeah, uh, no, I'm it's I I can't Do the whole recounting of the italian vacation partial disaster um

His brother bought some hats. This is true He doesn't want people to know about the hats Oh So so italian, uh, then again, no one knows who my brother is so maybe that doesn't matter. It's true brothers. I've met your brother So you can tell by the hair five and a half miles away you could probably see it from space at this point My brother looks like jeremy clarkson, but with like a More hair Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of hair. He needs to start doing one of those

He need you know What like a like a fro like he's jerry allen. No, he did have a fro for a while. My parents hated it Oh, he tried like a brill cramming it like flat like a 1940s fighter pilot dude. That's a lot of hair I just could've ran anyway. So italian italian football fans Italians I know I know we're talking about, uh, altruism. We're talking about tifosi. Um, tifosi just means like Yeah, try to blow out that tifosi. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. Yeah means like superfan. There's this fun focus Where's the superfans?

This folk etymology that tifosi means like maddened like by typhus and i'm really mad that it isn't true Welcome to the super fans. Uh, let's talk about our favorite club today. Juventus So so so you may be aware that um, Seattle Ronaldo didn't want you your stupid miserable fox Do you think in a in a a match of football? Juventus could beat the bears Uh, you got the bears. So dear god, you're Juventus Justin no

Justin feels by 90 buddy. So so you may be aware that italy had kind of a different post war settlement than the mainland did Yes, the years of lead go and listen to our episode about the eustica massacre with Noah put some insight about that But the point is that the 60s the 70s the 80s in italy Oh Bless you our time of political violence sort of deep state violence very deniable violence. And so A lot of a lot of italian ultras Uh started in the 60s or 70s as or mimicking paramilitary groups Um, you know, you have your your commandos or your garrias

Um, or the guys that we're going to be talking about shortly romas fedain Um, it sounds like they're afraid of islamic terrorist group Oh, I mean they took the name off of them. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. Yeah They're just like, yeah, we're doing islamic jihad, but for as roma. Um, that's pretty funny Yeah, absolutely. Nothing about as roma is funny Italians don't even deserve to have a soccer league so, um Ultras ultras are a lot similar to uh to english football hooligans in some ways, but there are differences

um, in particular where football hooligans are kind of like Less about the football and less to do with the ground and getting further away from it Uh, your your ultras have more emphasis on physical control of their stadiums on You know where ticket to you know, where tickets are distributed to where the choreography happens Pyrotechnics as you see here Chant I read this one interview with a roma ultra where they ask him What would happen if someone started a chant that hadn't been like pre approved by the lads and he's like Oh, yeah, that'd be that'd be a very serious matter for us

It's like, uh, this is this is like a mummer brigade Yeah, I mean, um, yes, this is sort of like Very very tight control of of ceasing and access particularly in In the top flight of italian football Um, also by reputation more likely to stab you than just beat you Um, in particular rome has a sort of a reputation as like stab city for football violence Um, and the british thought oh, we'll have that. Yeah, absolutely So if if you are just like a normal fan and you want to go to a match do you have to like buy tickets through?

You might not you might not have to and if you do you might not do it knowingly Like if you're buying them from a ticket town someone who resells tickets, okay, right? That may well be controlled by ultras, but you don't necessarily like have to pay too much attention to that. Okay. Um so ultras Some of them have had some far left associations Uh, there are a handful of sides like if you want to talk about lakarunia in spain or livorno in italy But by and large these are again phenomena of the far right

Um, and you get some weird politics out of this too um Some very strange sort of european vibes where you have two groups of avowed fascists calling each other jews Right. Thanks guys. You're fucking dicks Like lazio whose ultras love doing nazi salutes like more than anyone shouldn't even be a team yeah, um They some of their ultras did a photoshop of an frank in a roma shirt for instance And roma ultras are not any less fascist

And so this went back and forth of them calling each other like secret jews for years Why does this country it continue to exist? Because it wasn't bomb tana from north africa nothing wrong Ethiopia will have its revenge aren't they like trying to start like a left ultra firm in seattle for their team I But then they're like mls is like trying to shut that down. That's the other thing. Yeah, you know, they don't want us to have fun Yeah

Also lots lots of uh, lots of sort of more political a lot of a lot of banners a lot of banners about Yeah Yeah, lots of neo nazi banners, which would be not felt like that's not kelton This time kind of unheard of in english football Um, it's not that english football is less racist. It's just that just hadn't gotten around to being literate yet Yeah, pretty much the way the means of expression differ um I feel like if in the united states like or like here in philly if they tried to start an ultra firm for like the uh union

It would be far right, which would be ironic because it's the union. It's just chester county. Yeah I mean one thing I will say is that this is sort of the um, this is the cultural success, right? Like yeah As much as people say football hooliganism and you think English person if you ask pretty much any european what they call this type of guy in their language, it's an ultra um All of the sort of like relationships between them between between different nations between different clubs Are between this type of guy like in some ways english football hooliganism is a bit aberrant in this way um

But so with that background we can get into we can get into our story 48 minutes in yes Thank you. I was thought this was going to be a quick one night at the order of food. I'll try I will I'll speed this up a little bit Hi, it's justin uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to People are annoyed by these so let me get to the point We have this thing called patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for Um, it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes

So you can learn about exciting topics like guns pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them The money we raise through patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month Join at patreon.com forward slash wtyp pod Do it if you want or don't it's your decision and we respect that Back to the show

Um, so within this sort of febrile atmosphere, we have the european cup final of 1984 in rome it is liverpool versus as roma um and liverpool who are the underdogs Win in a hostile atmosphere, right, which is tense Uh, they win were not expecting them to which is even more tense And they win on penalties, which is way more tense. Oh, yeah

And it's it's really hell. Yeah, like penalties are a good way to end the game. You fucking pose. Okay. Okay. Listen Sometimes penalties are good And that's when they have to shoot out till somebody dies. That's that's when they favor you Came came down close to a very literal shoot out in this It's also really funny because liverpool not expecting to win all of their squad have been drinking for a week at this point In the tunnel in the tunnel on the way to come out. They're listening to chris rays. I don't know what love is in a on a boombox As roma As roma have been training in the fucking dolomites halfway up a mountain

Like super super serious about this whole thing and they lose um This is this is such a blow that their captain shoots himself Dead on the on the 10-year anniversary of this um But on the streets afterwards, it's like the fucking warriors um liverpool away supporters have this fucking

Anabasis back to the train station being hunted through the streets with knives and bars Um a couple of them get stabbed. I don't think anyone dies um But this does get english football firms wanting revenge and so everyone sort of knows that there will be Consequential violence for this the next time an english and an italian side play each other The maximum amount of time that is Is gonna be like whenever another italian team plays

You know gets to the european cup final which as it turns out next slide, please Is the next year Oh my god, yeah liverpool defend their title against uh the turin side uventus who again uvfans fucking hate roma fans domestically, but it just doesn't matter right because there's this fucking second shadow match within the match that is italian ultras versus english casuals

meanwhile the liverpool team has discovered this sort of balmer peak where they They they have incredible soccer skill after a certain number of drinks Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um And I mean this is the thing this is going to be the the most Hotly disputed parts of this so yell at me in the comments, right? um

But it remains from from from that day to this Very hotly disputed to what extent? non-liverpool football hooligans were in attendance on the liverpool side at highs or at the 85 uh european cup final um i've i've heard i've seen interviews with Uh firms from other clubs who were explicitly invited

I think also Some probably came on their own because they knew they would be fighting and that appealed to them Right. It makes sense. They'd show up It you know and it proves a point also. It's sort of revenge, but also some of this Yeah, but also some of this is just organic from liverpool supporters uh, and I think some of this narrative of outside agitators of like national front guys of of um, you know other firms is sort of uh

Excalipatry and it's like self-excalipatry on liverpool's part To be like, yeah, no, it actually wasn't us. It was you know, it was it was these other guys Um, so, you know relitigate that in the comments um, don't relitigate shit in the garment shut up But so so in 84 the problem was that they held the cup final at one of the two sides home cities instead of at a neutral location and that led to the violence in Rome so Okay, you got to have a neutral location. Uh, what's more neutral than belgium?

Switzerland Yeah, this reminds me of a quote from a great history book 1066 and all that World the the great war was a war between germany and america and was thus fought in belgium I In there there are serious questions about why uh, why ua for holds this in in belgium Like there are bigger more professional stadiums that that could have you know, that could have accommodated this game um Why they picked hyzel stadium?

Uh, is is a question that people are still asking today given that it's ua for it's probably to do with bribes Um, it's soccer so it's bribes. Yeah, there was probably some profiteering on the side But you know by this point who can say uh next slide, please And we see we see our our our honkbor stadion here. This thing looks like shit Yeah, it's belgium. Yeah This this is hyzel. Um, it was built in the 1920s Um, which means at this point it is 55 years old It looks like it's been modernized to be worse

Yeah, yeah It's I I think it used to have a front building that they would yeah, uh, they demolished but um Yeah, at this point, it's literally falling apart like in a masonry sense um like in a Like we're talking like 80s fenway Yeah, absolutely ua for doesn't You a for does a pre-match safety inspection

Um, and that we don't know what that what that consisted of we do that at the last 30 minutes start to finish Um, so a guy looked at this taking some bribes Yes, look at your cigarette a guy looked at this and then looked at some envelopes and then looked at this again And decided it was fine. I was about to say I you know, I I have done structural inspections You know wide-ranging inspections of building. I would say in 30 minutes. I could do Like one small pizza slice of this building here Not neither Juventus nor Liverpool wants to play here. Um, this is this is a classic of our genre

This is one of those disasters where there's this long long lead in where everybody looks at it and goes Oh, that's gonna be bad. We should we shouldn't do that. Yeah Um, I I want to talk about how bad the masonry is when fans get there without tickets Uh, which is still a thing you can do. That's a decent chance you'll get in Um, uh, some of them are literally able to get in by kicking holes in the wall All right, that's pretty cool When you do get in You're stat

It's all standing and you're standing on a concrete terrace Which has the rebar exposed and big chunks of concrete just lying loose on the floor Um, we're shone from anti-photic get in there, bud I used to have a bad habit of just picking loose bricks out of buildings anytime. I was walking. Yeah, actually Yeah, and you could have come away with a cement mixer full of loose cement Yeah, I have the stadium like in my pocket like also Uh, beneath beneath a little hut at the back of the north terrace There were dozens of meter long lengths of rigid plastic pipe just easily accessible

Just for anyone who is poking around um And most importantly different sections are separated by thin chain link fences Which will become important as I show you next slide, please The most horrifying diagram I've seen on this podcast in a minute Oh, I don't like that So would you believe that both teams were opposed to the seating arrangement? That would make sense

So this idea of separating fans by which club they support is something that like Italian football very keen on English football very keen on Totally unknown in belgium in belgium. You just go to the football. You have a nice time Right, you don't even worry about it. You have a waffle or whatever um And so the belgium authorities don't really get the idea of separating fans The original idea is you put the Liverpool fans at one end You put the Juventus fans at the other end

You fill in the space with neutrals um And then you know that way no one can fight each other Um, but correct me. I'm wrong end of episode. Have a good one everybody So these guys at the end this is all standing area and then like in the middle. These are seats, right? I think this might actually be all standing. Oh, I think it might be all terraced. Wow um but the problem is

because Liverpool are playing slightly further away There's not as many Liverpool fans as there are Juventus fans And they don't want to just have an empty section So section zed here Is neutral just anyone can turn up and get a ticket um

And there are a decent number of italian expats Uh and people of italian descent who live in belgium who get to see a really really good italian football side play a really good english side for not very much money uh and for like Very little traveling time So a bunch of them do a bunch of italian Juventus supporters in belgium to show up and end up in section zed Next to were they like told they're like hey, you're gonna be next to the Liverpool supporters

Fuck no, of course not. Oh my god. No one was told anything. Oh my god. So about that fence next slide, please um So So the Liverpool fans have been drinking heavily. Look at these hats. Oh, yeah, that's not chain link chain links made of metal That looks like it's something like some kind of like stamped plastic I've heard I've heard it described as tennis netting um

So the Liverpool fans have been drinking all day by and large and then they go to the match and About an hour before the match starts the fighting does um Foolish to talk about provocation or who started it but Very quickly you see like stones loose bits of concrete Uh bottles coins empty cans thrown over this fence between section x and section zed um And this is we're looking here at section zed the mixed section and you can see the sort of like mix of

Mix of supporters you can see a Liverpool flag You can see some of Juventus hats There's one guy if you if you see the red can go about halfway up on the far right wearing a roma hat um, so you you have a real mix in there um and You may also notice If you count them up five belgian cops in riot gear plus the guy in the hat

um For a long time these were the only cops on this fence on this boundary um There had been another eight stationed up there, but they were outside the ground investigating a theft of 600 francs or about 22 euros from a cash box at a hot dog stand I'm not sure why this needed eight cops in riot gear Uh to solve this sort of crime of the century, but that's what they went They knew it was coming and they didn't want to be there

Yeah, and so as you approach kickoff Fans from the Liverpool section section x Uh mount this assault on section zed they Overwhelmed the cops they tear down this fence. We're talking about maybe 200 people um, which is A lot within the context of how many people would you like to fight at once? uh Next slide please

And this starts, uh Another crowd control event Yes If you are not interested in fighting a shitload of drunk englishmen You have to leave the situation. You have to do the share zone thing. You have to hit the bricks, right? Um, you might not even get a choice. You might just be getting forced back by the crowd anyway um But in that case you're getting forced back towards the walls of the stadium

There's uh, there's two walls. There's the outer wall and then there's the wall that if you go back to the diagram um You it's the the wall between Section zed and the long sort of like Um, yeah that one. Um Yes, so those two walls which are like, uh, tall concrete walls um The

shitty crumbling Concrete walls which are now having an entire section of fans pushing against them. So Some people die of crush injuries at this point And then the fucking wall collapses. Yes um and Again, like crowd movements, right? This isn't anyone's fault aside from the

english people, but um like What happens is that the wall collapses on top of people and then the crowd goes over the wall Uh, so there are people who are like trapped under the wall who have people climb over them Jesus if you if you look at the um the concrete wall here, you can see the the stanchions on it Yeah, you see those are Yeah, your buttresses here are clearly not designed to uh, uh withstand a force from this side um Well overall, I imagine a stadium of this sort of this age was not built with the idea of hooliganism in mind

No, honestly like having to give you the finest the finest sports of the 1920s, which are hitting each other with clubs or whatever Yeah, um, although, you know, if it didn't give way you might have had more crash deaths than uh concrete wall falling on people deaths Yeah Yeah, but the the stanchions on this are supposedly built like on the wrong side um And I mean this is this is where most of your deaths happen People die from being pushed against the wall people die from being crushed by the wall

Uh, and the fighting is still happening. So you're not fucking doing first aid, right? The police is the police radios don't work So they can't they can't go reinforcements there is one doctor and Something like 150 red cross volunteers who are also immediately overwhelmed um and so

39 people die Something like 400 injured um The youngest is like 11 years old There's this, uh, I found this line from an Italian Italian fact. He's a doctor actually Uh, he says, um, I saw my son lying on the terrace and I put my ear to his chest and listened I thought I could hear a pulse, but I realized it was my own heart um

He was dead and a television crew was filming me and later I saw footage of myself finding my dead son because all of this went out live um, right and you know Accidentally traumatizing an entire generation of people watching and not to mention the commentators. Um The uventus fans who are at the other end of the stadium can see what's happening They riot themselves break out of their stand try and run down the pitch um Probably for better rather than for worse. The police are able to like stop them. I probably would have made it a lot worse

Right Yes, um, but swicky would make it a lot worse Next slide, please. What they do after this is they play the fucking football match Why don't do that Of course because the belgian because the belgian cops are afraid that if they don't the violence would be worse Okay, I'm not sure. I genuinely don't know. I don't I yeah I think the I think the fear is that if you just tell everybody to go home, then you have like a running battle in the streets rather than

uh just contained within the stadium, but um all the players know what's happened and uh Uventus in particular explicitly request not to play the match, but ufa ignore them um Incidentally one of the one of the Liverpool players here. He dislocates his shoulder like a couple of minutes in They have to get him to the hospital in secret

Uh lock his hospital room with an armed guard and cover up his uniform when he's leaving the hospital um because That that you know, it's it's like fucking nearest hospital. That's where Uh a shit ton of uh victims of the the the collapse and the crush injuries are Ufa win the match in a sort of obviously fixed way. It doesn't matter um The Liverpool players get on their bus with the police escort it drives them Directly from their hotel to the plane like onto the tarmac so they don't have to go through the terminal

It's very much like yeah, you know leave town sort of thing get out of here Yeah, just get out Just get out of here Yeah, uh I have this quote from from an Italian fan says the match passes by as though we were in a trance or as if we had been drugged um All of the players like who are still alive, sorry as I know, uh all still traumatized by it Um, the the the captain of Liverpool this time. He says, um, uh, like

He testified to the to the inquest about Hillsborough. Never any inquest for this. Um, like he's never Like been asked to speak about it to anyone um he just sort of like Deal with it. Um, and so and so we're left with the aftermath next slide, please um And I guess we'll talk about the the football aftermath first and then the sort of aftermath in terms of hooliganism um

so every um Every investigation blames this entirely and solely on the Liverpool fans. Um, which is fair enough, right within reason uh If had had they not like gone over that barrier and attacked Uh, the other fans none of this would have happened. Yes, it would have been unsafe and shitty, but like you probably would have gotten away with it. Um And so, uh 34 Liverpool fans get arrested uh, extradited for manslaughter 14 of them get convicted

Uh in all I think only seven of them go to prison and it's for like three years um The head of the belgian football association gets a suspended sentence For fucking out the ticketing. So do a couple of belgian cops Which I will say is more institutional consequences than happened for hillsborough. Um like, uh South yorkshire police and the fa fought that for decades rather than like

Letting david darkenfield or whoever get like One year suspended sentence. Yeah, which yeah Instead of even doing that there was this sort of like refusal to accept any kind of consequences The belgians don't do that. They they like, you know, sort of quarantine that but um, there's this huge huge cultural shock in terms of um, uh, european football What people think it is like, um, the the french sporting newspaper they keep their headliners. Uh, if this is football then let it die um And there's this there's this incredible sort of uh guardian editorial in england that says quarantine our sad sick game

Uh, we are the root of the contagion the home of the virus and we must act accordingly. Um, so That's all right. Yeah, so everyone everyone expects liverpool to get banned from competing in europe Uh, and I think no one would have been surprised by that but Enter into the breach one margaret thatcher uh Who attempts to finesse this a little bit? And i'm a finesse Yeah, and and her way of finessing it is uh to ask the fa

Why don't you just uh, you know voluntarily pull every england every every english club out of europe for a couple of years And hope that that's enough to make it go away Sure, uh, so the fa try this on on on uefa the the european football association union And they go, huh all english sides out of europe. That's an interesting idea. Why don't we just do that? Um, yeah, brits out Yes, truly brits out every every english club is banned from playing in europe indefinitely And it indefinitely turns out to be five years six for liverpool, but

In in sporting terms this has this is incredibly serious effect. Um In particular, liverpool who've just uh, you know Had won the european cup the previous year would otherwise have won it this year probably uh Have this it's sort of incredible team are on incredible form that has then squandered uh entirely domestically over the next six years um If you want to like you can get really into the statistical consequences of this

um But the main thing is that like if you are a young footballer and you want to play in europe You do not play in england. You go and play anywhere else um And so it's this this this draw of talent away from uh away from top flight english football Uh in a way that wouldn't change until the advent of the premier league I'm gonna say this this this image here you can sort of see some of the horses that were involved in this incident, right? Oh, yeah these like you can see these you've got these

um You got bars for people sort of lean on right in these standing areas on these uh stadiums This may be unfamiliar to some of our american viewers Uh, you know the soccer stadiums. There's a lot of standing you have bars. You can well not now, but yes Well, I'll tell you what there's um I mean you got safe standing now, which is like a whole different thing And the the dc united stadium has safe standing actually. That's the only time i've seen it Um, I was not there for dc united. I was there for the uh, washington defenders xfl

Yes, so was liam But you can see these uh, you know these this is concrete And it's got some kind of steel bar across it's concrete again. I assume this is reinforced concrete. You can see Down here it's been knocked over it's been knocked over over here Been knocked over over here. You can see the rebar poking out the back like there was some Hey people got aggressive like my god. Oh, absolutely. You know, and it's hard to like knock over reinforced concrete Even if it's 55 years old Um, you know say people are getting really

Really crushed in there. You know, this is not uh, this you know these the crowd control like produces or Crouting or crushing incidents. They there's a lot of forces involved and that's why they're so dangerous and you hear You hear these it doesn't necessarily look that dangerous from the outside and then you uh Yeah, and then you start pulling bodies out of it. Yeah, and then you got like you got like 50 psi worth of people pressing on your body and turning you into like uh, Sort of chucky marinara. Yeah, exactly. Yeah

That's no thank you. Mm-hmm. Yeah Oh next slide please So We're gonna talk about the sort of the aftermath for football hooliganism um this this really sort of inflicted a psychic wound on on both sides And in Liverpool in particular it created this this incredible sense of shame and guilt

The fact is this could have been any English side like Liverpool was certainly not uniquely violent um, it was sort of a combination of The violence that was inherent to all English football at that point And the choice of venue and the ticketing conspiring Uh, and it was just sort of like dumb luck that it was them but um In particular like Liverpool supporters at that time thought of themselves as uh less violent as

You know sort of not engaged in football hooliganism to the extent that other clubs were um And that was something that like really had sort of like grave repercussions in terms of Liverpool's self image and it's something that would like Ultimately, it's a it's a cloud that would would hang until hillsborough at least um but so in any case

Liverpool along with every other English side is banned in order to ostensibly address football hooliganism in the English game um Did that work? Of course it didn't um The Thatcher government's best idea to counter football hooliganism of the time Was something called goalies against hoolies What where Jesus christ this woman was dumb Where and and this is a quote the more articulate goalkeepers. Oh come on

Would condemn violence because they were the ones like first in line for it because it was easiest to throw shit at them from the stands Um sounds really dumb for everyone involved. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, you know, thankfully this never saw the light of day uh, but Football hooliganism in england only really started to decline after hillsborough and for like a very complex set of reasons But the reason why hillsborough happened in part is because hyzel made people terrified of the idea of Uh, football fans are not being in contained pens If you don't keep them within these sort of very secure areas, they're just going to rampage out and attack each other

Uh, and and the same thing is going to happen again. And so that's how you get to the pens at hillsborough um but one thing I will say is uh compared to this right the response that Juventus had was

very very strange because For a long time Juventus officially didn't mention this at all. Uh, there was like no official commemoration of this whatsoever um There was this sort of sense of shame and i'm not quite sure I understand Why or how that happened? um But and so While english football did ultimately have this kind of reckoning with hooliganism to an extent

um Italian football never really did um as late as 2009 fabio capello was talking about seriae being 100 percent controlled by the ultras And and so you end up with this sort of like One-sided attempt at reconciliation for a long time where the next time liverpool play Juventus, which is in 2005 Uh, you can see here. It's quite this uh quite a sort of powerful gesture where a liverpool fans spell out amicizia, which uh friendship and Some Juventus fans applaud and some of them turn their backs on them Uh, some of them have signs calling english fans animals

Uh, saying that hillsborough is god's punishment That seems a bit extreme. There's there's there's one that says um, uh, it's easy to speak and difficult to pardon um, which fucking fair enough, I guess Like I'm not gonna tell you that you you are obligated to to forgive a football club But one thing I will say is that Juventus has never shaken off their ultras completely. Um, and You know to this day in italian, uh top flight matches, you will still see, you know, stabbings in in connection with them Uh, and you'll still see violence that I won't say it never happens in england, but uh, it is often more sort of like concealed so

maybe I would suggest A very cynical corporate apology delivered 20 years late Is better than nothing um And it's also it's also an indictment on the culture of football at the time and I I have this quote here from uh from nick hornby's

fever pitch The kid stuff that proved murderous in brussels belonged firmly and clearly on a continuum of apparently harmless, but obviously Threatening acts violent chance wanker signs the whole petty hard act works In which a very large majority of in which a very large minority of fans have been indulging for nearly 20 years In short heizel was part of an organic part of a culture that many of us myself included had contributed towards This so I will say You know there there is a huge institutional failing here outside of hooliganism, which is just that

They wanted to sell more tickets. So they decided let's throw the uh, let's have this general section next to the uh Next to the hooligan section Yeah, and this is people were like Marching zombie like to this match Knowing it was a terrible idea the whole time, but like institutional momentum Just brought to the point. We're like, all right. Let's do this stupid thing And then the stupid thing resulted in the obvious outcome. I I don't know that you can I mean

obvious I I I guess you know football hooligan color Culture is bad, but like but not being able to handle it in a Proactive fashion when you knew how to handle it before just refusing to do it It's just incredible that they that they made that decision Especially having having a year after the ac4 final Knowing that like some form of violence was gonna happen Probably want to avoid having these people next to each other. Uh, let's not do that Yeah, um, so I put this one firmly on the belgians

Um, yeah, it's it's on the belgians. It's on ua for it's on Liverpool question mark brackets national front brackets ultras brackets. Yeah, no, I don't know. Yeah All I can say is it has this sort of like it's max of inevitability like you say. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, right All right, not inevitability. I would argue the opposite of inevitability. You could avoid it. Yeah, this was very evitable Um, you could have evaded this No problem. Maybe not, but right, but you chose not to right both the teams were against the idea, you know, they should have just said, all right listen We're not gonna play this match

If you have the seating arrangement We are but you get one fan each Yeah, we have to sacrifice one fan each We put one in the oppo opposing section They get beaten to death So now if you go to Juventus, uh, Juventus stadium also anfield you you can see a Very small plaque or like a garden of memory and you know

I don't know if it feels inadequate, but what would feel adequate? Right, exactly And that's that that's that's what I had on, uh, the the high school stadium disaster What did we learn Don't go to belgium. Don't go to belgium. Don't never listen to uafer. They're all, uh, corrupt and very stupid if if if you see something that's going to result in Massive violence and you have the opportunity to prevent it. You should probably do that Also, I don't mean like this is a bad idea. This is a bad idea. This is a bad idea. We're gonna do it anyway

Yeah, for sure Well, we have a segment on this podcast called safety third safety third Uh, this is uh sent in by view of only only uh earlier today. Yes. So hello. Hello. Oh, would you like to read it? Yeah, it's my job Sorry, I don't mean to take your job away from you. I just because I did the notes. I was like, uh, fuck's like No, you're putting me out of a job. Liam. I alice. Whoever you are My food is here, so I'll be right back. Go ahead without me

All right. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam I don't know who my co-hosts are Hello, alice raz Liam or substitute for Liam and potential. Yeah, that's me again. Yes, apparently I've gotten used to deputizing for him. Yeah This safety third comes from way back in my family archives From my great great grandfather who was a lighthouse keeper in late 19th century ireland And so the documentary the uh the lighthouse of adam Is that what's called? I hope that joke lands the fucking one with um, uh robert patternson. I

Don't know that one. Uh, it doesn't matter. It might be funny for the viewers My uh, my great-great grandfather robert patternson. Ah, yes Ah, he was uh, he was a vampire of some core. So yeah, yeah Just like morbius That's right except he's dead not the living vampire. Yeah, the dead vampire. The dead vampire. Yes No longer morbid Morbius right out of living It's so funny that

People managed to convince them to re-release that movie and have it flop a second time pretty funny That's very funny. It's a very funny thing. Uh, I still don't know what morbius is I don't he's like a vampire guy. Is he like a comic book guy? I think he's a comic book guy, but he's he's he's like, uh, Is he even a guy? Yeah, he's a guy. Morbius. Dr. Michael Morbius He has like a blood condition that like makes him like a vampire But he's the living vampire because he's not undead. He's just a guy

His catchphrase of course is it's morbid time. That's right. That's right Stand back everybody. I'm about to morb. He's uh, all right um My family right up to the 1950s when I moved to england were always rather nautical with basically every generation from about 1830 to 1950 having at least Two light keepers in it being assigned to different lights across the coast of ireland This story This story comes from a lighthouse called the calf rock down in county cork

I'm glad to have found the diary that my great-great-grandfather wrote during this incident For several years before and after as well as other family stories and newspaper clippings The Main character of our story let's call him tom for no particular reason I've been assigned still picturing robert patterns and yeah had been assigned to the calf rock Alongside six other assistant keepers in 1880 And he was assigned as the senior light keeper I thought you just had like two guys in a lighthouse having like eight of them

Uh Seven of them rather that's I Dudes, yeah, it's a different movie if you have seven guys Well, I mean you gotta wonder. Okay. What how is this light powered? It's 1880 is it's not electric Right. It's probably not electric. Um, I'm not I'm not a lighthouse expert. So maybe it was a load of Shit load of consignments of whale oil or something. I don't know. You got whale oil Maybe you got like, uh, maybe it's a could be could be natural gas

um, it could be Might just be a big fire. Who knows I I have I don't know how lighthouses worked. Uh, I'm not a lighthouse guy someone someone who's a lighthouse guy Uh sound off in the comments. Yeah so Had been assigned to the calf rock alongside six other assistant keepers in 1880 and he was assigned as the senior light keeper You know, also probably the um The big fresnel lens

That magnifies the light. That's probably like steam powered or something Wow, that probably has like, uh, that's probably a whole whole thing to maintain. Um Yeah, I wonder how these lighthouses work. Um research project Um, so one of them could be a whole episode in itself the lighthouse the lighthouse. Yeah One of them was to always stay ashore known as the shore keeper Yeah, he works remotely. He like dials into the zancaster. It's fine Duty on the light at night included sitting at the top of the lighthouse or at the bottom in shifts Making sure that the light didn't go out

Generally sitting around not doing very much to make sure that the ship sailing by didn't get wrecked on the shore Um Safety back then was rather rudimentary especially since they were the safety people for the ships And during a period of particularly bad weather the incident which is the subject of today's story occurred Hmm As is most of the weather in munster Particularly outlying islands like the calf rock Atlantic storms were and still are frequent

Yeah, looks up. Yeah, and there had been terrible weather for more than a week leading up to one fateful night When tom our protagonist found himself on duty Duty has a capital D. So it's important Yeah, it's serious It was a particularly stormy night And during a few minutes when he went downstairs The entire top half of the lighthouse was almost completely blown off Jesus Here christ the picture

I don't know what he said after this But we can pretty sure that it was some kind of irish swearing And uh, fortunately no one else was in the top half of the lighthouse at the time that just blew off They managed that brick too. Does it just seriously just take the top half off of that? It does appear to be a brick lighthouse. Yeah, this is like the lens and everything in it Yeah, this is like a heavy-duty heavy-duty installation that got knocked over. Yeah Um They then managed to sneak into their living quarters on the rock shown at two on the picture

I did not get the picture. I have simply improvised Uh, without getting blown into the Atlantic And uh turned into salty marinara for some sharks Um the day afterwards the residents of the nearest island called uh, thursey Would have been for a surprise as as would the family of the keepers Who lived in the light keepers cottages near the shore when they saw that the top had blown off and for three days Yeah, you don't want to see that you don't want to see that and for three days My great-great grandfather tom as well as his crew of five other assistant keepers

Was officially regarded as lost and presumed dead That's that's rude. Yeah you don't You don't want to like go and check maybe. Hmm It was only once someone saw them dashing across the rock Which for scale is only about 30 to 60 meter wide or 100 to 200 feet for the american freedom havers That's right. We got the freedom here. Um, that a urgent rescue operation was mounted So

I was about to say I mean I don't know. I mean as long as no one was in the top of this thing you figure you're probably Pretty fine down here Yeah, your living quarters is like built into the rock Which has probably been there for like I don't know 100,000 200,000 years. You have to wonder how much anybody on shore like these guys that they see that and they're like, yep, they're dead Yep

Probably no longer. I'm fine. Yeah. Yeah, don't have to investigate that at all The royal navy gunmoats hms. Amelia and hms seahorse came over from the nearby castle town bear haven in bantry bay, which is at that time a royal navy base And both made attempts in the four days following the disaster to rescue them and both failed Effectively leaving them to die Couldn't get closer off the weather was too bad apparently. Yeah

Rescue failed. You're on your own. Bye. Yeah good luck It was shoot you a fucking like signal flare that just says, uh, we tried It was only after 12 days the navy having left them to survive on the rock amid Increasingly bad storms that a group of seven locals led by the shore keeper and a guy named captain michael oshae uh Went out to go grab him right the shore keeper and these six other guys were fishermen They rode out in the maelstrom until they eventually reached the rock

It took several hours of awkward moving around the rock To eventually get all six guys in the boat And they rode them safely back to shore Royal navy btfo Yeah, uh get good. Yeah, you just need some irish guys in a robo Yeah, you know things have gotten serious when it's like seven lads have gone out in a boat and they're just gonna sort it Uh, the story was that just national but international news making it into the new york times and even far broad as the news in new zealand As did the failed rescue attempts by the royal navy

Hmm I hope the story of anglo irish animosity brought you some Anti-anglish sentiment and some adoration for the boys of those seven guys were going out there to rescue my great great grandpa When the navy couldn't dudes Rock And this is the dudes rock right here. This is this is the name of the dudes rock Put a plaque on there. Yeah, this is the rock of dudes

Yes, this is the rock upon which I will build my dude They call me peter dude Yeah, you have to deny your dude three times before the crying of the cock This is uh, simon who should be called dude simon who shall be called dude. Yeah Fucking safety third. Yes Shake hands for danger. Our next episode will be on the boston molasses disaster. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Uh, trashy chair, kill james wand, 10 000 losses franklin

Lancelot by dog keys. Lancelot by dog keys I was on alan fischer's show Uh, today, so maybe you should you should watch that one. Uh, we just uh ranted about stuff For a while because he's got a hundred thousand subscribers now Uh, which we don't uh, so subscribe to the fucking thing. I want the plaque. I want the plaque black He had a plaque before us I know you have to like pay for extra plaques So like one of you gets the pre plaque and then like the other two of us will have to pay for our plaques

But I do want to play. I don't care. Right. Yeah well The podcast that was podcast Outstanding Yep