Paris Match (one of the biggest selling news magazines, if not the biggest) in France covers one of the same stories that are in The Athletic today :
https://theathletic.com/3356972/2022/06/16/liverpool-tear-gas-children/‘I really thought I was going to die’: The children tear-gassed and terrorised in Paris
Daniel Taylor
Jun 16, 2022
“I thought it was some kind of bomb. I was scared as I couldn’t breathe properly. I was scared because I had never seen any problems like this. I asked my dad, ‘Who was doing this?’ and he said it was the police. I was scared because I had always thought the police were good people to help us.”
Carlos Clemente is nine years old and a Liverpool fan.
A few weeks ago, his father, Carl, let him know the good news. They had tickets for the Champions League final in Paris. It was Liverpool versus Real Madrid in the biggest showpiece occasion in European club football. You can imagine his reaction: thrilled, excited, fully expecting it to be one of the best days of his life.
What happened outside the Stade de France instead turned it into an ordeal he will always remember for the wrong reasons. It was a scene of panic, brutality and sheer chaos. It has been exposed as a scandal that goes to the top of UEFA and the French police. And there are people who witnessed this mayhem, close up, and feel lucky it did not end in tragedy.
Carlos was one of the children who were tear-gassed, terrorised and traumatised and who have trusted The Athletic to tell their stories about the events that put thousands upon thousands of people in danger.
His first game at Anfield was as a six-year-old. His favourite player is Mohamed Salah. Carlos had told his friends at school he was going to the final. Everything was in place for a magical experience.
Yet there are photographs that show him after the match — and it is unmistakable terror on his face. His eyes are streaming. He is holding his dad close.
“I didn’t know what it (the tear gas) was until my dad told me a few days later,” he says. “I had to put my Liverpool scarf over my mouth. A Liverpool fan – a nice lady – gave me a face mask and some water. My eyes were stinging and I was crying a lot. It lasted for around a minute, but happened on two occasions.
“One time, the bomb landed in front of my dad and he fell over. I was scared. I just wanted to be with my mum. She phoned my dad and I was crying for her, telling her I was scared. I jumped into my dad’s arms. I wanted him to cuddle me.”
There are other children around the same age who went through the same ordeal. Some have told us they are wary, frightened even, about going back to football.
They talk about it being the scariest experience of their lives. Some are still suffering from the impact of the tear gas and, almost certainly, the psychological effects, too.
“Watching those harrowing and distressing scenes of young children being pepper-sprayed or feeling the effects of tear gas is truly heartbreaking,” says Joe Blott, chairman of the Spirit of Shankly supporters’ group. “Young kids on their parents’ shoulders, singing songs about their idols, pinching themselves that their parents had got them a ticket. A dream come true. A dream that turned into a nightmare.”
Maxwell Pearce is 11 years old and a Liverpool fan.
“I was really, really excited because it was the biggest game of the year,” he says. “I’ve always supported Liverpool. And, wow, we had tickets for the final.”
He was with his father, Jade, in Paris and perhaps you have seen the photograph that went viral of them outside the stadium. Again, it is difficult to see so much trauma in a young boy’s eyes. Maxwell is wearing a Liverpool top, holding his scarf over his mouth. He is, in his father’s words “petrified… in bits, he thought he was being poisoned, he thought he was going to die”.
It was not long after that picture was taken that they decided it was too risky, too dangerous, and gave up trying to get into the stadium. It didn’t matter that they had tickets. “I just want to go,” a sobbing Maxwell told his father. “I want to get out of here. Let’s go. Please, let’s go.”
It is a relief, therefore, to find Maxwell smiling again when he arrives home from school in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, and changes into the new Liverpool kit that Jason McAteer has sent him as a gift.
McAteer, a former Liverpool player, was also caught up in the trouble that involved gangs from Saint-Denis, one of the more notorious parts of Paris, picking off innocent fans outside the stadium. His wife, Lucy, was mugged for her watch and their son, Harry, was also attacked. McAteer saw the pictures of Maxwell and wanted to do something for him.
But it is always going to be hard for a boy of his age to understand the sequence of events that has led to the French authorities admitting there were “multiple failures” in the management of the crowd.
“We were sprayed with tear gas, and I still don’t understand why,” says Maxwell. “Everyone was shouting at me to get on the ground and cover my face with my scarf. I had no idea what was happening. Everyone’s eyes were really stinging. Everyone was coughing.
“You struggle to breathe. You can taste it on your lips. I tried to wash my eyes from my bottle of water, but I didn’t have enough water. I was panicking because I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I was being poisoned. I really thought I was going to die.”
Almost three weeks on, he is still suffering nasal problems. He has been to a doctor and the diagnosis was that the tear gas had left his nostrils red and inflamed. But Maxwell and his father know it could have been worse.
They saw the gangs who were ambushing fans and stealing their valuables. The gangs were feral and indiscriminate and described as “malevolent individuals” in the initial 30-page report by the French government. Nobody was safe.
“The Liverpool fans were really kind,” says Maxwell. “They formed a circle around me, making sure I wasn’t getting hurt. All the fans were helping, being really nice to me. That’s why I love going to Liverpool, because everyone is so nice. I don’t know if I’d go to France again, but I will definitely go back to Liverpool.”
Everything, though, is still very confusing. Maxwell has been brought up to believe the police are there to protect him. So why, he wants to know, did they want to hurt innocent people? “I’d been so excited to see the game. I was looking forward to it for ages but everything was so scary I just wanted to go back to the hotel. I said to my dad, ‘I’m really scared, I want to go’. Then the police came up to the gate again, with their canisters, and that’s when we ran.”
“It is healing quite quickly,” says Noel Welsh, removing his glasses to show the damage to his right eye. “It was more the shock, to be honest, because it was the last thing I expected. Physically, I’m all right. But I think it will always be with me. Every game I go to, it will always be playing on my mind.”
Noel is 14.
He was in Paris with his brother, James, and their father, Tony, as part of a group of eight. Noel was the youngest member of their travelling party and he is still coming to terms with being attacked outside the stadium by someone trying to steal his ticket.
That, however, tells only part of the story bearing in mind he and his family were also caught up in the crush, on the approach to the stadium, when thousands of fans were funnelled into an underpass where there was not enough space for the number of people.
“People were getting squashed,” says Noel. “I’ve seen pictures of what it was like at Hillsborough and it made me feel like that, and how they would have felt. There was one point when we were heading towards a concrete pillar and I thought we were going to go straight into it. I was scared. People were shouting, ‘This is like Hillsborough’.”
“My dad has a bad back and I put my arm around him. My arm was getting squashed. I was in agony but I had to do it. The next day, we were in the airport and my ribs … I’ve never felt pain like it. I could hardly breathe. I think I must have done something to my ribs because of the pressure from so many people. I’m shocked no one got seriously hurt or, even worse, killed.”
It is going to take time to get over what happened. Noel and his family got into the stadium just before half-time. But how could he enjoy what was left of the match after going through that kind of ordeal?
His cousin, Ava, was also in Paris and took the photographs of Noel, battered and bloodied, after he and his brother were attacked.
“This guy had jumped the queue,” says Noel. “People were telling him, ‘We’ve been queuing for two and a half hours’. But he wouldn’t move. He started telling me he wanted my ticket. We made it clear to him that I was 14 and ‘Why are you going to try to take my ticket off me?’. Then he whispered in my brother’s ear that he was going to slash my dad, stab him. And then he just started lashing out. He hit my brother first, then me. It all happened so quickly.”
Their attacker — in his late twenties or thirties and well over six feet tall — was English, speaking with a southern accent. The Athletic has heard many stories about Liverpool’s fans looking after their own. It hurts that the person responsible might have been another supporter of Klopp’s team.
James, who is 17, was knocked to the floor and has needed emergency dental work because six of his teeth are damaged. The UK police are involved.
“My dad tried to report it to the French police (on the night) and they just pushed him away,” says Noel. “There was no one to help. They were just spraying everyone with tear gas. Four or five times, we got sprayed.
“I couldn’t breathe. It felt like it (the tear gas) was going in everywhere it could: my ears, my nose, my mouth, my eyes, the back of my throat.
“I just kept thinking, ‘Why are they doing this? And why are they doing it so often?’. I had to tell myself, ‘They’re not going to stop, you just have to get through this’.
“It felt like I was suffocating. My eyes were stinging. I’ve never felt anything like it before. But that wasn’t the end, because they were still spraying us when we came out of the ground. It was like they had a new toy and they were using us for their bit of fun.”
Elliott Anderson’s bedroom is a shrine to his favourite football team. The sign on his door reads, “Anfield Road”. A picture of his favourite player, Salah, is emblazoned on the red and white walls. Elliott sleeps beneath a Liverpool duvet. His head rests on a Liverpool pillow. His rug shows that famous liver bird. There is a Liverpool scarf hanging from the windowsill, a Liverpool drinks coaster, a Liverpool clock and on and on.
Elliott is nine.
He has just got back from primary school, munching a packet of crisps on the sofa, dressed in his Liverpool kit. And he is about to say something that even his father, Dean, has not heard him say before.
“When it (the tear gas) started, I thought it was being dropped down from a helicopter. I could hear a helicopter above us. I started coughing. I didn’t know what it was. It just hit us. My nose was hurting, my throat too. It made me cry. People were shouting at the police, ‘There are kids here, this lad’s not even 10 years old’. But the police did nothing. They didn’t care.”
He and his father had flown into Paris on the day before the match and, before everything turned sinister, there was plenty of time for sightseeing. One photo shows Elliott by the Eiffel Tower. Another shows him at Notre Dame. Others are taken at the fan park on Cours de Vincennes.
After that, it is a frightening story. They arrived at the stadium in plenty of time but the gates were locked and thousands of people were outside. They waited, and waited, and slowly it became clear they might not get in. Then came the tear gas and the panic. Other match-goers gave Elliott water to soothe his eyes while he covered his face in his scarf.
They were locked out and, just before half-time, Dean broke the news that it was hopeless. Darkness was falling. It was one of the hardest conversations he has ever had with his son. “I was really disappointed,” says Elliott. “There was nothing that could be done, and I just started crying even more.”
The following day, Elliott was so exhausted and traumatised he did not have the energy to go to the open-top bus parade in Liverpool. Dean had booked flights so they could watch the homecoming for Klopp’s team. Instead, dad and son set off on the journey home to Retford, Nottinghamshire. They have subsequently discovered they were among 2,700 Liverpool fans with valid tickets who did not get into the stadium.
Elliott, though, says it will not put him off going to matches in the future. He has already looked up the date of next season’s Champions League final in Turkey and, if nothing else, he has happy memories from the airport.
“The Liverpool players were flying out to Paris at the same time as us,” he says, now smiling. “They were on the next plane to us. Virgil van Dijk looked across and waved. I waved back. At least we saw the players then.”
The text is still on her phone. At 7.20pm UK time, shortly before the twice-delayed final was originally meant to kick off, Claire Whitehurst picked up her phone to send a message to her husband, Tom, asking for an update. Social media was buzzing with stories about Liverpool fans struggling to get into the Stade de France. She was starting to feel anxious. “Just seen the pictures,” she wrote. “Looks like my idea of hell.”
What she did not know at the time was that her husband was still outside the stadium with their son, Harry, and their big adventure was turning into a nightmare.
Harry is 14. He has Williams Syndrome, a rare congenital disorder, and it is chilling to hear what flashed through his mind in some of the more harrowing moments.
“A bunch of people got tear-gassed right in front of us,” he says. “I remember seeing one lad and he was just ‘out’ in seconds. I was scared. I had a burning sensation in my throat. I thought I was going to be sick. There were a lot of people shouting and panicking and I was thinking, ‘What is this?’. For a second, I actually thought it was Putin starting the gas.”
Harry is part of the Liverpool Disabled Supporters’ Association. He sits at the front of the Kop for home games and helps to put out the banners and wave the flags. Anfield is where he is his happiest. “It’s a big part of my life,” he says. “It feels like home to me. I know loads of people there. It’s just really nice, like a big family.”
He has been going to games since the age of five and, three years ago, he was in Madrid to see Liverpool win the final against Tottenham Hotspur. It was, he says, the happiest day of his life. He and his dad hoped to return from Paris with similar memories.
Instead, they encountered all the pandemonium, the dangerous crushes, the confusion, the hostility of the police, the aggro from Parisian gangs, and the awful feeling that they were in danger. They did not get into the stadium until just before half-time and, by that stage, the football felt almost immaterial.
“It was really hard to enjoy it,” says Harry. “I just felt down. I was upset and angry. I’d been so excited about going. You get so hyped about the good days in your life. You go to the airport, you fly over, you sing, you party. We were having such a great time and then, as soon as we got to the stadium, it just went downhill.”
It is a Liverpool-supporting family. Tom says he is relieved they did not have a third ticket because that would have meant Scarlett, Harry’s 12-year-old sister, being there. At home, Claire was trying not to panic, waiting for updates.
Harry will be back at Anfield next season. But it hasn’t escaped his attention that a number of people in prominent positions, including the Paris police chief, Didier Lallement, and the country’s interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, tried at first to blame Liverpool fans for turning up late and accused them of having forged tickets on an industrial scale.
“We all knew they were lying,” says Harry. “When they said there were 40,000 fake tickets, we knew it was a lie. Now the police have admitted the truth and apologised to our fans, but I’m not accepting it. If they’re saying, ‘We’re sorry, but we still think tear gas was the right thing to do’, why are they apologising in the first place?”
The irony here is that when UEFA switched the Champions League final from Wednesdays to Saturdays it was to make it easier for children to attend. UEFA wanted to create more of a family atmosphere. Then the children arrived in Paris and look what happened to them.
“I’ve been going since I was six and that was definitely the most frightening experience,” says Roman Renoldi. “Everything was scary. I felt trapped. My dad had to shield me, it was just horrible.”
Roman is 11. He, too, was left in tears because of what he saw. He, too, felt endangered, vulnerable, small. And, like all the young fans who are telling their stories here, he understands it is important to get the truth out if the people who are really to blame are trying to pin it on Liverpool’s supporters.
He talks about Hillsborough, too. Even at his young age, he knows what happened on that April’s day in Sheffield in 1989. He knows, mostly, because his father, Simon, was among the Liverpool fans when the crush occurred that killed 97 people. Simon went on the pitch and helped to carry the stricken on emergency stretchers made from advertising boards. What happened in Paris has brought back a lot of difficult memories.
In the crush outside the Stade de France, there was the unmistakable sense that something could go terribly wrong again. “That’s when I started to panic,” says Roman. “My dad has told me about Hillsborough. At one point, when we got to our gate and couldn’t get in, I was asking my dad if we could go home or go somewhere else to watch it in a pub. I didn’t want to be there any longer.”
The saddest thing, perhaps, is that every one of these children will always be distrusting of one of Europe’s great cities. All say variations of the same thing: it has put them off Paris forever. And who can be surprised when their visit to the French capital contained so many dangers?
The story, for example, of one father, Danny Smith, who was set upon by a mob of locals carrying hammers and other weapons. They pinned him to the ground and stole almost everything he had. Danny’s leg was broken in three places. He has had surgery and it will be a long, difficult recovery requiring nine months off work.
His 13-year-old son, Dan, was in Paris with him and witnessed everything.
Kade Corfield was leaving the stadium with his father, John, around the same time. “My dad had tight hold of me and said, ‘No matter what, do not let go of my hand.’ I thought that was quite odd because usually we just walk out the ground together, laughing and singing, but this was different.”
As they tried to find a safe route back to their car, the tear gas started. Kade is 12 years old and asthmatic.
“I started coughing but my dad kept telling me, ‘Please, Kade, keep walking.’ He pushed my head into him to stop me from breathing any more in. I looked up at him and his eyes were streaming. He was coughing. I began to panic because I thought, ‘If I get separated from my dad, what do I do? I’m in the middle of Paris, it’s dark and late and I don’t know anyone.’ I squeezed my dad’s hand even tighter. More and more tear gas was coming.
“When we got back to our car, I took my jacket off and my arms were red. My dad said it was his fault for squeezing me so tight to keep me close and not get separated. I didn’t even feel it, to be honest. I was so desperate to get back to the car. We didn’t do anything wrong, we just went to a football match, to watch the team we love.”
Some of the other families who have spoken to The Athletic have talked about the possibility of their children needing counselling. Their parents are suspicious, to say the least, about the motives for the French authorities deleting CCTV footage when UEFA and the French government are holding separate inquiries. In some cases, the kids have found their experiences too upsetting to talk about.
Nobody really mentions the game, or the result, because it felt secondary to everything else. Liverpool lost 1-0 but that is not the reason why they will remember May 28, 2022, as a harrowing, disturbing experience.
It wasn’t a bomb. It wasn’t Putin starting a nuclear war. They weren’t being poisoned and the tear gas wasn’t being dropped from a helicopter. But who can blame these children, many of primary-school age, for thinking the worst?
“Heartbreaking,” is the word that Blott uses, as the chairman of Spirit of Shankly, which will continue to lobby the French authorities. “I can only hope the effects on those young people are short term and that help and support is available to them.”
Ronan Evain
@RonanEvain
Progress: Senate laws committee’s Chairman confirms that fan representatives will be invited to take part in the #UCL final hearings.
We are now liaising with the Senate and hoping to identify a date which will allow our colleagues from Liverpool and Madrid to attend in person.
Daniel Austin has been reporting on the Senate hearings this morning (same lies being repeated by Michel Cadot, author of the investigative 30 page report for the French PM) and there's a press conference from the Senator in charge of proceedings from the Stade de France at 15:30 UK time
https://twitter.com/_Dan_Austin/status/1537381711457226754