From The Archive: The Euro 20 Final, Part One; Cause, Culpability and Consequence

From three years ago, the first of a two-parter for paid subscribers on the last final in this competition.

When assessing what we should learn from an event, it’s easy to get trapped in a cul-de-sac. Yesterday evening at Wembley, and more broadly throughout parts of the city all day, the final of the European Championships descended into a shambles, and even though football hooliganism connected to the England team is a decades-old problem, to see it on such a scale as we witnessed last night shouldn’t be easily written off as “a return to the dark days of the 1970s.” In being so glib in our response to this sort of incident, we go some way towards seeing a repeat of it in the future.

In order to try to understand what happened in London yesterday afternoon, we need to be clear in our definition between cause and culpability. Causes aren’t directly responsible for what happens, but they exacerbate situations that might otherwise be controllable. As we’ve seen on repeated occasions in the past in this country, it can only take a short sequence of bad decision-making, poor infrastructure and complacency to turn what should be a festival into something that could turn into a disaster and, tempting though it is to jab a finger of blame in one direction and one direction only, to do so is usually to overlook vital contributing factors.

The causes of what happened at Wembley yesterday are manifold, from a culture which revels in its own immaturity and inability to enjoy itself to specifics of stadium management. We’ll come on to the former of these shortly. In terms of the latter, there have been multiple reports of systematic failures at Wembley yesterday afternoon, from people who were there. When the first shaky phone footage of men breaking down barriers in an attempt to get into the stadium came through yesterday afternoon, it was notable how little security there was, and how hopelessly ineffective it was.