Jurgen Klopp: Champions League final defeat was ‘smallest problem’ for Liverpool on ‘crazy’ night in Paris

07/08/2022

“I think in Paris, the authorities would have known about the regional issues there. Anyway, Uefa decided pretty quick that it will be in Paris. There were other cities where it could have been held. I understand that they got the information pretty late [that it was the host venue].

Many Liverpool fans were wrongly accused of having arrived with fake tickets

“There are different things to talk about. Some of them I think it makes no sense to talk about because there is an ongoing investigation. There is the other part of what I did know, even if I didn’t know a lot immediately after the game.

“But a situation outside [the ground]? I heard first-hand from my family because they were in the middle of everything. They texted me before the game: ‘We are in, good luck.’ Stuff like this, but they were pretty much one-and-a-half hours away from being in the stadium.

“What happened to them happened to everyone, pretty much. Two or three people I spoke to were lucky, they got in and were waiting. Then there were all the issues through the game. People sitting on seats next to them [that weren’t theirs]. They were looking: ‘What are you doing here?’

“There was not one Liverpool supporter in the wrong spot. There were a lot of spots occupied definitely by people without tickets, but they were not Liverpool supporters.

“This is pretty much the story everyone told, everyone had this experience. I think I knew 50 people inside the stadium; 47 people told me exactly the same story. That is what I heard. That is obviously not how it should be. In the end, it felt for them – and they are passionate Liverpudlians – that the smallest problem we had that night was that we lost the game. Imagine that around the Champions League final. Crazy.”

Jurgen Klopp: Champions League final defeat was ‘smallest problem’ for Liverpool on ‘crazy’ night in Paris

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