BERLIN, March 15 (dpa/EP) –
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has apologized for the chaos surrounding last year’s Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool in Paris.
“The institutions have apologized and if they want I will apologize too. There is no one in UEFA who does not regret what happened. We were in the VIP section and we were not aware of what had happened. We found out everything after the game”, Ceferin told the German channel ZDF in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.
In addition, he explained that UEFA has “nothing to say in the stadium” and that security is the responsibility of “the organizer”. “But we also made mistakes and we will make sure that a situation like this does not happen again,” he said.
An independent report published last month considered UEFA “mainly responsible” for what happened outside the Stade de France, speaking of a “large number of failures that almost led to disaster”.
Initially, French authorities blamed Liverpool fans for the delayed kick-off, and supporters risked being crushed and tear-gassed by French police.
UEFA said last week that Liverpool’s 19,618 supporters with tickets to the final would be reimbursed. The same did not happen with all the Real Madrid supporters, which provoked an angry response from the club, which described the conditions of the match as “unacceptable”.