African football: Culture of neglect

By CNN's Douglas Herbert

LONDON (CNN) -- A legacy of lax security and poor crowd control at many stadiums is behind a spate of football disasters in Africa.

"It's coming to a head now - decades and decades of neglect, ineptitude and disinterest," said Mark Gleeson, a football commentator who spoke with CNN World News on Thursday.

Gleeson's remarks came a day after as many as 126 people were killed, and hundreds injured, in a stampede at a football stadium in Ghana after police fired tear gas into a crowd of fans who were ripping up seats.

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The ensuing crush -- which occurred as 70,000 spectators rushed the exits of the stadium, only to find the iron gates locked -- marked the third time in a month that fans have died at African football matches in incidents involving stampedes or fighting.

In Europe and the United States, exit gates are commonly kept unlocked throughout the match as a safety precaution.

The calamities, to be sure, have not been confined to the African continent.

Over the past decade, hundreds of football fans have died amid rioting, fighting, stampedes and structural collapses in stadiums from Brazil to Croatia.

In a freak accident in Guatemala City, in October 1996, up to 82 people died when spectators literally tumbled out the stands, en masse, during a World Cup qualifying match.

Yet the frequency of deadly incidents at African sporting venues is obvious to anyone who follows the sport.

Gleeson attributes the drum roll of football disasters to a combination of poor security and stadium management that reflects a "general indifference to the comfort and safety of people who go to watch."

He and others speak of a peculiar "culture" of African football.

At many African matches, police -- ostensibly called upon to provide security -- often sit on the turf and become spectators themselves, fans for rival sides routinely mix in the stands, and admissions controls are inadequate at best.

Unlike in Europe, where matches are organised under the auspices of UEFA, in Africa domestic matches are typically arranged by the home team.

In international matches between teams from different African countries, general organisational oversight falls to the Confederation of African Football, a 52-member controlling body based in Cairo, Egypt.

Poor management skills

Though FIFA, soccer's international governing body, issues guidelines on how to organise football matches, some of these standards are hard, or impractical, to apply in developing societies, according to Simon Inglis, a U.K.-based editor of The Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds and author of a new book, Sightlines: A Stadium Odyssey.

Developing countries, Inglis said, are "dealing with not only a lack of management skills, but societies where crowd management generally - not just in sport - is pretty much an alien concept."

The same lack of management, Inglis notes, was endemic in European football up until 10 years ago. Since then, he said, the British have had to undergo a steep learning curve -- a curve that many believe was spurred by the fallout from Britain's worst football disaster, the deaths of 96 football fans in a stampede at Hillsborough in 1989.

Inglis traces many football stadium tragedies to a basic lack of security controls, including an inability to count -- and control -- the numbers of people entering the stadium, with the consequent risks of overcrowding.

In Europe, entry is contingent on having a ticket, which, at high-profile matches, might be embedded with security devices as a safeguard against forgery. Most stadiums in Europe and the United States are vigilant about ensuring that those operating entry turnstiles are honest and well trained.

That is not always the case in developing countries.

"Many of the disasters and incidents that have occurred around the world have been caused by a corrupt turnstile operator," Inglis said. But implementing turnstile and other admission controls can be costly, requiring computers and training.

Though in the vast majority of cases, stadiums cram in thousands of spectators without incident, it only takes a minor incident sometimes to spark a calamity.

"Once the stadium is occupied a good number of tragedies have arisen due to a breakdown in authority," Inglis said. "That can be triggered by anything: the human element comes to the fore if a disputed goal is scored, or (due to) a referee's decision, or something minor like a group of rival fans sitting together.

"In the majority of occasions, this may cause nothing more than minor irritations, but if have an intermingling which results in violence, then how do you separate the rival elements, and where do the rival elements then go in order to leave that situation? A lot of that depends on the ability of the stadium operators to manage."

In the Ghana disaster, police reverted to a time-honoured form of crowd control: tear gas. Gleeson wants to see a ban on this practice, which he believes "does nothing but set off stampedes and panic among spectators."

Gleeson said the public only tends to hear about the use of tear gas by police at football matches when fans are killed.

"In Nigeria, it happens once a week and people don't write about it."

Ghana mourns soccer crush victims
May 10, 2001
Fans killed as stadium collapses
May 6, 2001
Memorial held for stadium victims
April 15, 2001

FIFA
UEFA
Confederation of African Football (CAF)
Government of Ghana

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