- Monday marked the 35th anniversary of the Hillsborough stadium tragedy
- Council minutes revealed a safety inspection in October found myriad issues
- There remain concerns over safety of Leppings Lane and Kop ends of the ground
At the slate memorial stone they have erected on the bank of the River Don, Sheffield Wednesday observed their usual remembrance on Monday for the 97 Liverpool fans whose deaths have made Hillsborough synonymous with tragedy. There was a 20-minute service. Roads were closed. The stadium was open all day for those wishing to step inside and pay respects.
The gestures were welcome, of course, though what those marking the 35th anniversary of football’s worst disaster would have expected, all these long years on, is a stadium exuding impeccable standards of safety and screaming out the message ‘never again’.
A Mail Sport investigation today finds Hillsborough – aged and inadequate for the modern era – to be anything but that. The world has moved on since Liverpool’s darkest day. Standards of policing and crowd control bear no comparison. But some of our findings, telling a story of inadequate turnstile provision, too few stewards and a problem tunnel leading into the Leppings Lane end, have a terrible ring of familiarity.
Council safety committee minutes, which Mail Sport have obtained under a Freedom of Information (FoI) request, reveal that a spot safety check on the stadium before Sheffield Wednesday’s home match against Rotherham United in October found ‘insufficient turnstiles to service the Kop’ – the home stand opposite the Leppings Lane End – and that ‘entry capacity was compromised’, with 1,300 fans outside those turnstiles at kick-off.
The pre-match briefing provided for stewards that day was inadequate. So, too, were the numbers of stewards recruited for that match. Professionally trained stewards were not assigned the key gangways, as they should have been.
Officials were concerned enough to carry out an additional spot check at Wednesday’s home match against Leicester City, in late November. An official from the Sports Ground Safety Authority, accompanied by Sheffield council’s health and safety enforcement team, found four additional turnstiles in operation and a pre-match briefing of a better standard, but the levels of stewarding was still a concern. One of the officials that day found that Wednesday had the lowest proportion of professionally trained ‘Security Industry Authority’ stewards than ‘any club he dealt with.’
The weight of history on Hillsborough suggests that the notion of too few turnstiles would be unthinkable. The one Wednesday official found criminally responsible for his negligence in 1989, club secretary Graham Mackrell, was fined £6,500 for deciding that seven turnstiles would suffice for all 10,100 Liverpool fans.
But this has been a recurrent problem. Minutes from another meeting of the same committee – the Safety Advisory Group (SAG), on which the club, council and emergency services all sit on to discuss safety issues relating to the stadium – reveal a similar problem of access to the ground when Southampton arrived at the start of the season. ‘Some turnstiles not open,’ the minutes state. ‘Significant numbers of supporters not gaining entry to the stadium until after kick-off.’
Our documents also detail concerns about the Leppings Lane End – or the West Stand, as it is now known – where, 15 months ago, Newcastle United fans felt squashed and forced to carry their children on their shoulders as they tried to leave the concourse for their seats before an FA Cup Third Round tie.
The club, local politicians and local media played down those concerns at the time and clarity from Wednesday on the subject was hard to come by. Mail Sport’s own repeated requests for information met no response. We criticised the club for this and have been banned from Hillsborough ever since.
Yet the documents include the conclusion of a safety expert from Manchester-based consultancy, Crowd Dynamics International, that the upper concourse ‘is not capable of accommodating the numbers required.’ The capacity of the Leppings Lane End was immediately reduced by 1,300, at the SAG’s insistence. Wednesday have since found no way to make it safe at the capacity Newcastle encountered.
It took time and effort to bring the concerns of those fans out into the light. An FoI request from Newcastle United on their behalf ultimately revealed that 15 recommendations had been made by the safety committee after the incident, including the capacity reduction, the addition of four new turnstiles, improved CCTV and the appointment of crowd safety consultants at Hillsborough.
Our investigation has found members of that committee struggling to find ways to get the Leppings Lane back up to full capacity.
In one discussion, it is suggested that away fans be encouraged to descend from the upper stand to the lower Leppings Lane concourse, to take the strain off the narrow upper concourse. ‘This would require a robust and proactive stewarding plan together with the club offering concessions in that area to attract supporters downstairs,’ it is suggested.
The club and South Yorkshire police both dismiss the idea, as it risks bringing home and away fans into contact. There has already been a problem of that kind. A group of Derby County fans charged a Leppings Lane gate separating them from Wednesday fans at the end of the previous season.
‘Club is looking at response times and considering a change in design of the area in question,’ one of the SAG meetings heard of that incident. The reduction of seating in the Leppings Lane upper tier remains in place, with no clear solution as to how to make its full use safe.
The Newcastle episode triggered an examination of broader concerns about the risk of overcrowding in a tunnel leading from a holding area, just inside the Leppings Lane turnstiles, to the lower Leppings Lane stand. Another echo of 1989.
Consideration is initially given to installing an electrically operated ‘roller shutter door’ to ‘control access to the central tunnel.’ But a Sheffield council official – whose name, like all others in the documents, has been redacted – tells the safety group that an electrically-operated barrier would make supporters feel uneasy.
It is understood that Wednesday felt the remotest chance of the electricity supply failing and fans being stuck behind such a barrier in an emergency rendered the shutter doors a non-starter. Instead, additional barriers have been made available in that tunnel, with a new queuing system leading into it.
It’s hard to believe that this stadium was ahead of its time when built, with Britain’s first cantilever stand, in 1899 to the design of the legendary football ground architect Archibald Leitch. It hosted four matches at the 1966 World Cup and an extra tier was added on the South Stand for Euro ’96. The club don’t even own Hillsborough now. It was sold to their owner, Thai billionaire Dejphon Chansiri, for £60million in 2019, to ensure that the club didn’t breach spending rules. Wednesday pay rent on it.
Nowhere is the fraying state of the place more apparent than in the Leppings Lane upper concourse – a narrow corridor, 20ft in width, which supporters of the well-supported visiting clubs squash into before a game and during half-time. They pass up into the seating area through five of the narrow little tunnels which caused the problem for Newcastle fans.
But beyond those pressure points, the SAG documents reveal the stadium’s desperate need for a general kind of renewal.
The details in a report on the stadium presented by another expert engineering firm last May tell their own story. ‘Bolts on the North Stand were looked at first, as they are 60 years old,’ states the engineer. ‘Bolts in the steelwork loose or absent – no immediate safety concerns but recommended bolts replaced or tightened before next season. Corrosion of exposed steelwork – minor but advanced in some areas.’ Wednesday were proceeding with this work when the meeting was held.
When the details of our documents were put to the club yesterday, Wednesday said that they complied with all SAG orders, that safety was ‘paramount’ for the club and that if they failed to adhere to such requests, their stadium safety license, up for renewal every year, would be taken away. They said there were no hold-ups getting 30,000 people into the stadium for last Saturday’s home match against Stoke. The club said that they used around 200 stewards, more than the number they were obliged to have.
But those stewards were spread terribly thinly in the upper tier of the Leppings Lane for the Norwich City match last Tuesday night. It was hard to recall seeing any working harder than one of the two individuals in a high viz jackets designated for the central block.
The size of his task was compounded by a drunken Norwich fan who refused to take his seat, had too much to say for himself while manhandling the official. The steward remained courteous, keeping the raucous away contingent with him as he stepped up and down his section, trying to persuade them all into their seats. It was a losing battle. The gangway was full at the back of the stand.
After half an hour, a ‘supervisor’ and ‘area supervisor’ arrived to speak to the drunk fan in the gangway but it was early in the second half before a full squad of officials arrived to lead him off. Nearly all of the Norwich contingent wanted to be in that central section, where the atmosphere was. The Leppings Lane restrictions meant they couldn’t be.
At half-time, space in the upper Leppings concourse was uncomfortably tight as most of the Norwich contingent crammed in there, then into the narrow stairwells to take their seats again to watch their team concede twice and draw 2-2.
Across the course of football history, stadiums visited by tragedy have tended to be changed utterly by it. The 1971 Ibrox disaster led to a huge redevelopment of Rangers’ ground, spearheaded by the then-manager Willie Waddell, who visited Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion for inspiration. The Heysel Stadium was reconstructed and renamed the King Baudouin Stadium, a decade after the 1985 disaster in which 39 Juventus fans died.
Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane stand should have been bulldozed and rebuilt years ago, yet it still stands, just as it always was, as if nothing malign had ever happened, its inadequacies shredding the value of any expression of regret for the events of April 15, 1989.
Olivia Martin is a dedicated sports journalist based in the UK. With a passion for various athletic disciplines, she covers everything from major league championships to local sports events, delivering up-to-the-minute updates and in-depth analysis.
