For safety’s sake Champions League final chaos still needs a full investigation

The truly shocking revelation about the disastrous approach of the French police at the Champions League final in Paris appeared in plain sight in the first, flawed official report into the near-disaster released last Friday. Perhaps unwittingly from the report’s author, Michel Cadot, an official working in France’s sports ministry, it illuminated most clearly so far why European football’s showpiece evening descended into brutality and chaos.

The single sentence about police “intelligence” before the match has provided the first glimpse of an explanation as to why the officers were so tooled-up, and acted like self-appointed last-ditch defenders of civilisation rather than guardians of safety for fans attending a glittering final with hope in their hearts.

It appears to confirm the worst suspicions of Liverpool and their supporters: a note that the Paris police had prepared for the 2022 Champions League final by referring to the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. At Hillsborough, 97 people were unlawfully killed in horrific circumstances due to police gross negligence in managing the match, and Liverpool supporters behaved well and heroically. But the French police concluded from that historic disaster that although safety failures had been responsible for the deaths, they needed “a firm policing arrangement, to maintain order in riot gear, in order to be able to respond to a risk of collective phenomena of hooliganism and havoc”.

There are two broad ways in which this was catastrophically misconceived. The first and most obvious, the stinging ignorance, has caused renewed offence and despair to bereaved Hillsborough families and survivors, who established the truth through a 27-year justice campaign against South Yorkshire