REAL MADRID have responded to Uefa’s offer to refund some fans affected by events at the Champions League final in Paris last year, describing it as “insufficient” and requesting Uefa “redress the situation and assume its full responsibility.”

The club from the Spanish capital faced Liverpool in the final in May 2022 when negligent planning and inadequate responses from those involved in overseeing the event —  including Uefa, the Prefecture de Police, and other organisers including the French Football Federation — led to chaotic, dangerous incidents related to crowd control and the safety of attendees.

A comprehensive independent review released last month found that Uefa “bears primary responsibility for failures which almost led to disaster.”

The review also praised the actions of Liverpool fans, many of whom were subjected to pepper spray and tear gas from police during the chaos.

“Liverpool supporters on this part of the concourse spontaneously formed orderly queues, regularly admonished those seeking to circumvent these and collectively organised to protect the vulnerable,” reads a passage of the review.

“Indeed, the Panel concurs with Scraton et al (2022) that the capacity of the Liverpool supporters to self-organise within this context was a primary factor in preventing harm and ensuring our inquiry is investigating a ‘near miss’ rather than a stadium tragedy involving fatalities.”

Uefa has responded by offering refunds to fans in some areas of the ground, including all Liverpool fans who attended, but this doesn’t go far enough.

Numerous spectators from the Liverpool side and associated media have pointed out that Real Madrid fans and other attendees also suffered.

Merseyside football journalist Simon Hughes tweeted: “Uefa should be refunding anyone who attended the Champions League final.

“It wasn't just Liverpool fans who suffered. Real Madrid too. And sponsors. And dignitaries.”

These sentiments are shared by Real Madrid, and the club released a strongly worded statement on Thursday going as far as to say it will refuse to co-operate with the restricted offer for fan refunds.

“Regrettably, our club believes that Uefa’s proposal, officially announced last Tuesday, is insufficient,” it said.

“It merely consists of the reimbursement of the ticket price, which is also subject to the fulfilment of a series of requirements, including providing proof of the time of access to the stadium.”

The club also offered to assist fans in making claims against Uefa “for their personal and legitimate interests.”

Real Madrid have been in dialogue with Uefa throughout the process and had every reason to believe the response would be more satisfactory in terms of compensating all spectators and attendees, but the club was disappointed with the outcome.

“The content of the report [independent review], which was commissioned by Uefa itself, stresses that all fans attending the final were victims of its inadequate organisation and their safety and security were compromised,” Real Madrid said in Thursday’s statement.

“Therefore, irrespective of whether or not they were able to enter the stadium, or whether they did so at the expected time, which at any rate was due to the exceptionally good behaviour of the fans of the two clubs, the fact is that all the fans experienced an unacceptable delay in the start of the match.

“In addition, there was unacceptable insecurity both in accessing and leaving the stadium, as well as additional harm such as theft, assaults and threats.

“For this reason, Real Madrid has decided not to co-operate in the restricted compensation procedure proposed by Uefa, which we ask to redress the situation and assume its full responsibility.”

Offers of refunds, compensation, and the acceptance of responsibility by Uefa should go further than it has and not be limited to certain sections of the ground at certain times.

The review also showed that Establishment lies in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster continue to stick almost 33 years later. 

The Hillsborough victims themselves were initially wrongly blamed for the disaster in 1989 which was in fact caused by police negligence and exacerbated by a cover-up by the Establishment and its media, particularly the Sun newspaper.

It took decades of tireless campaigning and solidarity, for victims’ families to get the truth of what happened officially acknowledged.

There were echoes of the Hillsborough disaster during the Champions League final chaos in Paris last year and in the immediate aftermath, but reporting on the ground from some journalists, and from many supporters via social media, meant a narrative blaming supporters didn’t stick this time around.

The independent review on the Paris final states that France’s Inter-ministerial Delegate for Major Sporting Events (DIGES), Michel Cadot, “criticised the police for adopting a security rather than supporter engagement policing model for the game which he says was founded on a completely inaccurate understanding of the Hillsborough disaster.”

The review panel said they were “astonished that the policing model was influenced by a view of Liverpool hooliganism based on Hillsborough” and also criticised the DIGES for not doing more to rectify this prior to the event, given his role and ability to escalate problems and seek a remedy.

Throughout the review, the problem with the police approach is regularly raised and is something that applies beyond this incident to other events and to other areas of society. 

There is often inappropriate belligerence towards communities from the authorities during times of stress when the approach should instead be understanding, co-operative and prioritise welfare.

One line in the review sums it up, stating: “The policing model was inappropriately focussed on public order policing and failed to meet the obligations set out in a 2016 Convention [aka the Saint-Denis Convention]: a safety, security and service model based on engagement with supporters and local communities and a multi-agency approach.”

It could be said that in the case of the Paris final the supporters worked to maintain order more effectively than the police did, and Liverpool fans’ knowledge, and in some cases experience, of such events brought back harrowing memories but meant they were able to organise and prevent a fatal disaster. Something which is acknowledged in the review.

Real Madrid supporters experienced similar trauma at their end of the ground with one fan, Pablo Sanz, saying in the review: “In my view, the main failure of organisation was right when we went out from the subway. We were caught in a trap.

“There were fences to both sides and we were just caught with zero room to move. If anything would have happened there, I guess hundreds of people might have died because we couldn’t move.

“I saw women of 70 years old, children of 10 years old really frightened.”

It is entirely understandable, then, that Real Madrid views the restricted compensation procedure as insufficient.

The offer of ticket refunds across the stadium, not limited to certain sections or situations, would have been a good starting point and should have been part of a wider acknowledgement by Uefa of its responsibility, along with offers of further support from relevant organisations and organisers to those affected.

Real Madrid said the club will announce more details in the coming days of what its own assistance service for supporters will entail.