Heysel: the inevitable result of a brutalised era?

There has been no spectacle in the history of televised sport as compelling and atrocious as the night of 29 May 1985, when 39 Italians were killed on the terraces of the Heysel stadium, Brussels, in the murderous prelude to a European Cup final.

Caremani does not flinch from describing all those present at Heysel as victims in the sense that they were playing roles in a larger tragedy that they did and could not understand at the time. This is the perspective of the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard, who devotes a chapter in his book The Transparency of Evil to Heysel.

His analysis is uncharacteristically straightforward and clear-eyed. He says Heysel was a primitive but devastatingly effective form of 'interactive television'. He points the finger at the Thatcher government's war with the miners (which he describes as 'state terrorism'), which he says was bound to lead directly or indirectly to eruptions of violence at sporting 'pseudo-events'.

Heysel, says Baudrillard, did not happen by chance; it was the inevitable result of the desire of spectators to turn themselves into actors. The nature of the violence itself - crude, tribal and pointless - was a cultural reflex conditioned by circumstance and environment.