Days out at Football Matches that Ended in Disaster

by Read Listen Learn

These days, many pubs and cafés have huge televisions which cover a wall. When there’s an important football match, you can be sure that you’ll find crowds watching it there. Of course, if you prefer, you can see it in your living room at home, sitting next to your kids or with your friends from work. That means you can run to the kitchen at half-time and get snacks or drinks for everyone. And something else. You can watch the best bits again and again, because the TV channel re-plays the best moments.

But there’s nothing as exciting as watching your favourite team play in a football stadium. Of course, watching football is not always safe. Football hooligans started in England but they can make matches dangerous all over the world these days.

And there’s the weather. It may be icy cold and windy at the stadium in Poland; it can be 45°C in Saudi Arabia; or it can be the rainy season in Brazil. Perhaps you’ll turn your head and miss a fantastic goal or a terrible foul. The man in front of you may be so tall that you can not see all the action. And, of course, watching the best teams play is not cheap these days. Tickets can cost more than some people can easily pay.

But none of this is important. Everybody knows it’s better to watch a match when the players are on the field in front of you. If you love football and go to England, you’ll certainly want to watch the team you follow at their home football ground.

However, there are parents, husbands, wives and children in Britain that will never go and watch a football match again, although they love the sport. That’s because they’ve lost a loved one at a match. Not because they started a fight with fans from another team. Perhaps they were just in the wrong part of the stadium at the wrong time.

In 1902, in Glasgow, Scotland, a local footballer called Bobby Templeton was playing for his country for the first time – and it was against England, the old enemy. He was playing at the home ground of Rangers and, as he ran with the ball at his feet, the large crowd all turned to follow his marvellous footwork. Because so many people moved one way at the same time, the wooden stadium fell down. Many fans fell six or seven metres. More than 500 people were hurt and twenty-five people died. Shockingly, the match did not stop while the police put the bodies at the side of the field. However, no new football stands were made of wood.

Twenty-one years later, in 1923, a building company made a stand for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium. The idea was to break it up after the exhibition was over, but because it cost £750,000 (or nearly one million euros) to build, they decided to keep it for football matches.

Only four days after the exhibition closed, there was the FA Cup Final match between West Ham and Bolton Wanderers. The new stadium was big enough for 125,000 people. West Ham and Bolton usually had only about 20,000 fans at their home matches. But this was no usual match. West Ham is a London club and it was many, many years since a local team was in the FA Cup Final. Another thing was that people saw it as a North against South match in England. 300,000 tried to get in to watch it. More than 1,000 were badly hurt.

Just after the war, disaster came to Bolton Wanderers again. In 1946, again in an FA Cup match, the team played against Stoke City. Although 80,000 fans got into the stadium before the club closed its doors, hundreds more climbed over the walls to watch the match. The stadium was already very full – too full – and the newcomers pushed hundreds of fans inside the football ground forwards. Nobody understood what was happening and the players continued to play the match. Slowly, a police officer walked onto the field and the referee stopped the game when he saw that there were dead bodies at the side of the field. 400 people were hurt and thirty-three died that afternoon.

Again in the north of England, this time at Bradford’s Valley Parade ground, in a Third Division match between the home side and Lincoln City, a fire started because of a cigarette end. The fire moved quickly and the disaster was worse because some exits were locked and the fans could not get out. The wooden roof of the stadium caught fire and fell on people standing under it. Fifty-six people died and 250 more were badly hurt.

But the disaster that nobody will ever forget happened at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium in 1989. Liverpool, perhaps the best side in Britain at that time, was playing Nottingham Forest. Wire fences kept the fans off the field – these were the days of the worst football hooliganism – and these caused the deaths of ninety-six Liverpool fans. The accident happened because the police opened the gates to let more people in to a stadium that was already very full. This was the worst disaster in British sporting history. But it became worse because the families of the dead waited for many years to learn what really happened.