The Hillsborough Disaster

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And it's just us, and that's okay.
And this is our ongoing Studies Abroad edition.

**Chuck** (0:24)
That's right. And we, you know, this is about the Hillsborough disaster, which was the very unfortunate and super sad and somewhat infuriating, deadly crush that happened at a English football stadium in 1989, so we enlisted Kyle, our one writer from the UK, to put this together for us, and he did a great job and used all the appropriate letters and terminology and his spelling and stuff, you know?

**Josh** (0:53)
Yeah, I was going to say, no Zs throughout. They were all Ss. Yeah.
Yeah, he did a wonderful job with this, summarizing like a really big, giant story that had we done this episode like when we first started, it would have been totally different because around 2015, the public opinion, the entire basically worldview of what happened at the strategy completely flip-flopped and the truth finally came out.
We'll get to all that, but let's say we kind of give everybody some background about what's going on here. The whole thing took place, like you said, in 1989 at Hillsborough Stadium. That's in Sheffield, which is in South Yorkshire, which is a county in Yorkshire, and normally this is the home of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. That's where they play, at Hillsborough. But this day, it was actually hosting a FA Cup Semi-Final. That means it was all England teams, and it was between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. So far, so good. This is just a normal Cup Semi-Final game. It's a big deal, way bigger than the average Sheffield Wednesday Football Club game. But so far, it's pretty normal.

**Chuck** (2:06)
Yeah, for sure. Liverpool had more fans, and I'm not sure how it is now, but in 1989, at least, that was the case. I think it probably still is. But they were allocated the smaller end of the stadium, and the entrance, a lot of times with disasters like these, you're going to see a series of steps that happen to kind of insure unwittingly that something terrible goes down. And this was sort of the first one, was they allocated the larger fan base, the smaller end of the stadium, and the entrance to that was at the end of Leppings Lane, which was a street that dead ended into the stadium, and not only did it dead end, but it bottlenecked. It got more narrow as you got toward that dead end.
And the turnstiles there, which is where you get in, that part of the stadium, there were seven of them, they were old. This is an older stadium and they didn't, they just couldn't move people through as quickly as you would be able to today.

**Josh** (3:12)
Exactly. And under a normal game for Sheffield Wednesday, this was not that big of a problem. This was a very big problem this day because there were 10,100 fans who were just the ones who had standing room only tickets in what are called pens, right? So they're ultimately like basically little terraces with a bunch of little tiny steps on them and some railings, which are called crush barriers. And you just stand in them, you just pack everybody in. But they're supposed to say like, okay, there are no more than this many people can go into this pen, no more than this many people can go into that pen, whatever. So there's 10,000 people who are all going into these pens. They have to use these seven turnstiles. And so very quickly, even outside of the stadium, a bit of a crush starts to happen, in part because the cops aren't doing anything about having people form a line or cue.
They're not directing anybody to do anything. It's just get in where you fit in, and whoever gets there first is the one who gets through that turnstile that moment.

**Chuck** (4:19)
Yeah, but there's plenty of surveillance footage and stuff out, and it was not, as we'll see, the story that was cooked up to evade, I guess, being responsible for this, which is what they were, was that it was an unruly crowd of drunks. Hooliganism was a thing much more back then.
They've basically eradicated that now for the most part. And if you look at the footage, it's a bunch of kids, a lot of teenagers. It wasn't super expensive back then to get into soccer and football games like this. It was six pounds to get in for standing room only. And they were lively. They were having a good time, but it didn't look like anything threatening at that point at all. They were people just like, kind of trying to get into the stadium to see a game they were excited about.