Liverpool singer Jamie Webster urges fans to share experiences of Champions League Final in Paris to help investigation

Singer Jamie Webster is urging fans to share their experiences of Saturday’s Champions League Final in Paris to ensure action is taken over the fiasco at the Stade de France.

He says people need to come forward to make sure there is a full investigation – and so that no other sports fans are treated the way LFC fans were treated, before and after the weekend game against Real Madrid.

Jamie says: “If anyone witnessed anything that day it’s important that you come forward, come forward quickly and document what’s happened, because the more people come out and share their experiences, something is going to get done about this.”

And he adds: “Liverpool FC are requesting this, and all fans should be requesting this – and that’s a formal, transparent investigation into what happened.”

(Picture credit Adam Davy/ PA)

Jamie, who’s famous for Liverpool anthems like Allez, Allez, Allez, and who performed at the fan park in the Cours de Vincennes in the south east of the city on Saturday, has shared his own experiences on Twitter, and encouraged other supporters to do the same.

“This doesn’t just affect Liverpool FC, it doesn’t just affect Liverpool fans – the Rugby World Cup is going to be held in Paris soon, they’re hosting the Olympics not too far away either, there’s plenty of sports fans who are going to be going over there, and I’d hate for them to be subjected to what we were subjected to that day.

“So please, please, please raise the awareness, talk about it, and hopefully we can get this at government level. We need to get things put in place so it doesn’t happen again,” Jamie says.

“People need to be held responsible for what happened that day, they need to be brought to justice.”

Jamie says he got to the stadium at around 7pm after putting his guitars away after finishing his performance.

And he says as soon as he arrived, the scene was one of chaos: “You could just see swarms of people all over the place, bottlenecking at each end of the ground. We went to both ends and it was evident that they weren’t letting anybody freely not even into the gates of the ground, just on the first check, the perimeter.

“There were police vans parked up across the entrances – this was at the Real Madrid end as well at the start. From the time that I was stood at that first entrance I didn’t see anyone pass, so we decided to walk round the other end of the ground; again there was a big bottle neck there, people were panicking a little bit as we were getting to there, there was no ticket check there either (there should have been but there was none). I didn’t show my ticket right until I entered the ground really.”

Jamie goes on: “Then we got round about to Gate Y and it started to get a bit scary. From what I was told everyone at Gate Y was being told to go to Gate A, and everyone at Gate A was being told to go to Gate Y, my ticket was in gate A, and in the middle of Y and A, there was Z… and that was where it was, for me, a really scary moment.

“There were no stewards from EUFA, or whoever the French were employing to steward the event, there was no-one around the perimeters of the ground, there was no police either to be seen.”

Jamie says he witnessed a crush, with people ripping sponsor signs off the outer fencing and putting their faces to the fence in order to breathe, and he and other Liverpool fans urged people not to push.

But he adds: “There was no recklessness, there was no anger; it was just fear.” He says parents and adults were making circles around groups of trembling children to protect them: “It was something that I’ve never experienced going the match as a kid, it’s something I’d never seen before and, because we were in a moment of madness, I don’t think you quite processed what you’d seen, we were just trying to get out of it.”

After the game he says it was like a ‘war zone’ and he knows personally of people who were ‘slashed in the face’.

“I hope people who did suffer that day are managing to get over what they’ve seen, what they’ve witnessed, and any physical harm.

“It’s horrible that it happened, it shouldn’t have happened.”

But Jamie says he does have happy memories of the day too, from the fan park where he played to around 50,000 people.

“The fan park was brilliant, fantastic, everyone acting really responsibly, impeccably, and some of the scenes from that fan park I’ll take to the grave with me, just an unbelievable day.

“It was unbelievable, co-ordinated, conducted, and thank you to the club for putting that on. Thank you to everyone who was there, and thank you to all the other artists who played as well, because when I look back on my trip to Paris that will be the best memory of it all.”