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South America's unique atmosphere comes at a cost

Tim Sturtridge reports...

While the expensive imports to England's top flight may be drying up due to the current global recession, the Premier League remains a profitable export.

Football fans across South America tune in every week to see the action from Fratton Park to the Stadium of Light. The blood and thunder style of football featuring their own homegrown stars maintains a healthy thirst for the Premier League.

What the fans in South America would not trade however is their own match day experience. Attending your typical Brasileirão fixture is a whole different ball game from the all-seater corporate sausage factory of the Premier League.

South American football is famed for it atmosphere, the passionate derbies between the likes of River Plate and Boca Juniors are rightly famed throughout the world. As part of this crowd you become just as integral to the game as Juan Roman Riquelme or Ariel Ortega.

Unfortunately you are also in just as much danger of picking up an injury at El Superclasico as any of the players on the pitch.

It is all well and good to point a camera at these fans and revel in their passion. This is an age when nostalgia for football violence has become its own multi-million pound industry. Footage of these crowds combined with a mockney voice-over will always have an audience on Dave or ITV4.

The shame is that the land that fostered football's top stars from Alfredo Di Stefano onwards is vastly underselling itself. Modern day domestic football in South America is revered for what happens on the terraces rather than on the pitch.

Top their English football is what it is today because of the death of 96 Liverpool fans in Sheffield in 1989. It took a tragedy of those proportions to finally snap the authorities out of their stupor and take some firm action. Out went the terracing and the archaic turnstiles, in came shiny seats and profitable football grounds.

The top echelons of English football on and off the pitch are unrecognisable 20 years on from Hillsborough. There are still those who fondly reminisce about Roker Park but everyone accepts its never coming back.

South America has also endured a series of unfortunate events to rank with Burnden Park, Ibrox, Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough. Despite this a combination of rickety football grounds and insane violence remains. The result this that you take your life into your own hands when you pop along to a game.

Lives have been lost on mass in a series of football related tragedies in Peru, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil in the past 50 years. With scope for investment thin on the ground it seems just a matter of time before another ugly incident rears its head. The lessons from the past have so far fallen on deaf ears.

On a day in late June 1968 Argentina's two biggest clubs met to contest El Superclasico. A scoreless draw between River Plate and Boca Juniors threatened to render the game as instantly forgettable. A crush at the final whistle however meant the game would live on in the memory of those present for a lifetime.

71 football fans lost their lives that day, the average age of the supporters was just 20.

With the country being under a military dictatorship at the time no public investigation was carried out. The only change that was made to the stadium was purely cosmetic. The tragedy occurred at La Puerta 12 (Gate 12) and after the deaths the name was changed to La Puerta L.

"In Argentina, we live in a society with little memory. They changed the numbers into letters so that people don't think about La Puerta 12 or remember that 71 people that died there." Pablo Tesoriere, an Argentine film-maker who produced the documentary La Puerta 12, says.

The testimonies of the survivors, witnesses and officials have so far failed to nailed the definite cause of the events. Theories range from someone forgetting to open the gate, turnstiles blocking the exit, police pushing people back into the stadium and also the official line of too many fans rushing to leave at the same time.

Pablo Tesoriere highlights what he sees as the main difference between the events at River Plate's El Monumental stadium and those which took place at Hillsborough.

"After the similar tragedy in England, there was a full investigation. They changed the policies for entering and exiting the stadiums and the system of police control at matches. Measures were taken so that this would never happen again." Tesoriere explains.

If you go along to River Plate's El Monumental this season you will find things have changed very little in the years following the deaths of 71 football fans.

"If you go to watch a game at River today, you will live the same scenario when you leave the stadium. The crush, exiting in darkness, the problems with the police. It's practically the same and it's pure luck that we haven't had another tragedy." Tesoriere adds.

In was only for the 40th anniversary of the tragedy that a memorial plaque was eventually placed on the site.

This is not to say that England is a shining example, to get grounds up to the level they are today was an arduous process. At Hillsborough itself the warning signs were there long before 1989. Again in an FA Cup semi-final Spurs fans turning up to watch their team take on Wolves found themselves in the middle of a potentially disastrous crush. It was luck alone that saw nobody killed that day nine years before Liverpool came to town.

Through complacency and a lack of funds South American football continues to walk a tightrope. Football fans are put in danger every week and this year will see the number of football related deaths in region rise once again. Unfortunately it looks like it will take yet another tragedy on the scale of Puerta 12 before any concrete action on stadium safety is taken in South America.

Tim Sturtridge

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