Abstract
This paper presents an account of the two disastrous events that occurred in the final month of the 1984-85 season of the English Football League: the lethal fire at the stadium of Bradford City and the fan violence at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels on the occasion of the 1985 European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus. Some 57 people died in the Bradford fire, and 38 people (mainly supporters of the Italian champions, Juventus) died in Brussels. The two connected purposes of this paper are (a) to interpret and to challenge the conflation of these two, quite different, events in the government enquiry into the Bradford fire, as well as in the ongoing discourse of the mass media, and (b) to provide a critical rebuttal of the increasingly confident and influential writings of radical right journalists and “intellectuals” as to the meaning of soccer violence in Britain in the late 1980s.
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