Latest news with #LiverpoolFans
Reuters
2 days ago
- General
- Reuters
Fact Check: Registration of Liverpool crash vehicle cited inaccurately on social media
Incorrect license plate details for the car driven into crowds of Liverpool soccer fans have been cited as evidence online to baselessly infer the May 26 incident was a 'false flag' attack. Almost 80 people were injured when the Ford Galaxy, opens new tab ploughed into a celebratory parade being held in the city centre for Liverpool's Premier League title victory. Merseyside Police later charged 53-year-old Liverpudlian Paul Doyle with seven offences including dangerous driving and two counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent. On social media, however, X and Facebook posts, opens new tab that claimed to have figured out the car's registration number said there was no record of it in the UK's vehicle database, which is maintained by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). The posts show a screenshot of a search on the DVLA file for 'DC18DPW' which returned zero results. 'The car that was involved in the Liverpool incident cannot be found,' said an X post, opens new tab, saying this was evidence the crash was a 'false flag' operation by Britain's spy agency, further calling it 'An attack on it's own people.' Reuters also searched the DVLA database for 'DC18DPW' and got the same result. However, this is not the correct registration number for the vehicle involved in the crash. The publicly available photos, opens new tab and videos, opens new tab that show the car and its plates are low quality or angled. However, the Metro newspaper, which published a witness video, opens new tab with a clear view of the car's rear plate and intentionally blurred it for publication, shared the unedited footage with Reuters via email. The unedited footage shows the registration number cited on social media is incorrect. A record for a grey Ford, the same make said by police to have ploughed into the crowd, appeared when Reuters searched the correct registration number in the DVLA database. Merseyside Police and the Home Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. DVLA declined to comment. False. The registration number said in social media posts to be on the Ford Galaxy's plate is incorrect. Reuters viewed the correct registration number in a clear video of the car that was supplied by a witness to Metro. The DVLA database has a record for a Ford vehicle under the correct registration number. This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
£10m for a month of Alexander-Arnold exposes absurdity of Club World Cup
Hmm. Ten million pounds. What does that work out to in booing, and boo-deletion? What's the exchange rate here? How much un-booing does £10m get you, in a highly emotive run‑your‑contract-down local‑lad‑departure scenario? This and many more equally strange questions will presumably have to be debated now Real Madrid have agreed a small but significant early release payment for Trent Alexander-Arnold, which will in turn allow his participation at the most heinous footballing entity yet devised, the new Fifa Club World Cup. The whole thing seems less important now. The Trent-Exit saga was something to talk about because the league was done. Time moves on, often in deeply strange ways. For what it's worth, I for one had no issue at all with some Liverpool fans barracking when they realised their favourite player was going to leave for free at the end of his contract. That is, I could see it was illogical and irrational. The answer to which is, duh. Meet: football. This is how the game survives, why absurd amounts of money swill across its decks every day, why the good stuff about connection and collectivism and moments of beauty can also happen. If we all just sat around taking the rational view and refusing to Become Emotional the whole thing would last about three minutes before everyone cleared their throats, looked at their watches and walked off to do some more sensible activity, like picking up litter or preserving hedgehogs. For now Madrid in the mini-window feels like a good thing for everyone. Good for Trent, who is 26, who had those luminous, oddly distant years under Jürgen Klopp, the most creatively brilliant piece of elite tactical freedom in recent times, the invention of a highly new effective role, the flank-libero, the walk‑cross man, the assist-mooch king. Liverpool aren't really a Trent team in the more orderly champion era. Whereas Real Madrid remain an oddly formless entity, a divvying up of roles, super‑strengths, star-freedoms. Madrid want him to play full-back but also to act as a rewilding element, a recreation of the Kroos-era passing range, which already sounds like a recipe for a dreamy kind of chaos. So it's good for the neutral too, good for the basic sounds and colours, the mouthwatering story arc of Trent inside that deeply vicious media‑superstar complex. This is a footballer who will always be an object of confusion, whose passing is brilliant, sui generis and thrillingly odd in its angles, but who continues to wander about the pitch like a man trying very hard not to spill his Pot Noodle. Mainly, though, this is all very good for the Club World Cup, which is of course the real story here. And at bottom this is a Fifa story, the first significant act of the CWC 2.0, a first hum of the destructor ray for this strange new source of gravity. Most immediately, it brings us one step closer to the prospect next month of a mouthwateringly inane Madrid-al-Hilal Trent-Ronaldo celebrity face-off, the descent on the Hard Rock Stadium of a vast ant colony of weeping superfans, lookalikes, holy relic seekers and confused adolescents who really do appear to spend their days poring over the weirdly robotic CR7 Instagram feed as though communing with some plasticised ideal of show, gloss, nature-less acquisitiveness. So, there's that. Otherwise, being good for the CWC is an issue for anyone who loves the game in its existing form. Because this competition is not just a sporting abomination, a skewer of leagues, a force for stratification with its vast and destabilising income stream for the top clubs, but a kind of top-down heist. Above all, the first significant piece of mini-window business is a wonderful moment for Gianni Infantino, because this really is Infantino's baby, gestated, midwifed into being and now clasped, damp and slithering, to the Fifa president's chest through the Trump-centred brand building of the last few months. There is no secret about any of this. The Club World Cup does not need to exist. It is in effect a one-man reordering of the global calendar, a product of Fifa's unique style of government whereby a single random Swiss man is given an autocratic degree of power over the global game. Infantino even looks at times as if he can't quite believe how this thing has happened to him, staring out at the world with those flat, startled eyes, as though there is actually another man inside this man, encased in some compacted substance, a blend of processed ham, varnish and mendacity, mummified into a man-shape, squeezed into a blue suit and given the keys to the world. And now we have this, a competition that exists solely because Infantino wants access to the funds currently being harvested by club football. It fails on a basic level of sporting robustness. This is an invite-only star fest, a financial grenade chucked into every league in the world, and something Fifa has no real mandate for. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Here we have the game's keepers acting with entrepreneurial self-interest, creating not just a competing format, but a competing way of perceiving the sport, a setup that invites only the biggest clubs, and marketing a vision of the game as a kind of star‑driven celebrity circus, sold through the social media feeds of its star players. Why would the clubs go along with this? The obvious reason is that interestingly sourced $1bn prize fund, the first chunk of which is now on its way to Liverpool. But it isn't just greed. There is a more subtle energy in play here, a coincidence of Infantino's ambition and the dynamic of football's new breed of owners. Todd Boehly gave a significant speech at the recent Financial Times Football Leaders conference. Despite giving the appearance of having been sedated shortly before taking the stage, Boehly kept turning to two key themes. First, the urge to create out of football's global cut-through some kind of future streaming platform, a tech behemoth, which is where the real Zuckerberg money is, not mucking about with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall's sell-on value. And second, his bafflement with football's existing culture, its fan-based conservatism. Football wants to grow, to dig its teeth into the wider global market. This is the real key to the Club World Cup, and it speaks again to Trent, to extreme, irrational loyalty, to geographical ties, to all those elements that lasso this thing into its existing shape. The Club World Cup is the first competition where it makes little difference if you boycott it or simply don't watch. It's not about getting you to like it. It's about power and ownership, driven by broadcasting money that exists outside normal market rules, that is basically a bribe to the clubs. It is instead about the dissolution of those old bonds, of the ties to physical place, about players as mobile marketing tools, teams not as mobile brands. It wants you to like it enough to subscribe and click, but not to feel any sense of obstructive ownership. This is also why the booing matters. Booing at least makes sense, speaks to those old sustaining structures, the link to place, colours, family, something that is the opposite of pop-up moves and individualism as a Fifa sales technique. It will be impossible to ignore this thing, to no-platform it, because it's already here, already eating away at the ground beneath football's feet. And who knows, in time Trent to Real Madrid in the mini-window might come to look like a first step, an Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment, the day the world shifted just a little on its axis.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Driver charged with Liverpool soccer parade tragedy appears in court
LONDON — A driver charged with multiple counts of intentionally causing grievous bodily harm for ramming into a crowd of Liverpool soccer fans celebrating their team's Premier League championship was ordered held in custody Friday at his first court appearance. Paul Doyle, wearing a black suit, white shirt and gray tie, looked emotional as he spoke only to confirm his name, address and birth date in a hearing in Liverpool Magistrates' Court. He did not enter a plea.
Associated Press
3 days ago
- General
- Associated Press
Driver charged with Liverpool soccer parade tragedy appears in court
LONDON (AP) — A driver charged with multiple counts of intentionally causing grievous bodily harm for ramming into a crowd of Liverpool soccer fans celebrating their team's Premier League championship made his first court appearance Friday. Paul Doyle, wearing a black suit, white shirt and gray tie, looked emotional as he spoke only to confirm his name, address and birth date in a hearing in Liverpool Magistrates' Court. Doyle, 53, faces a charge of dangerous driving and and six serious offenses alleging he caused or tried to cause grievous bodily harm. The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison if he is convicted. The charges are related to four adults and two children who were among the 79 people injured following the team parade on Monday. The victims ranged in age from 9 to 78, police said. Seven people remained in the hospital on Thursday. The city had been celebrating Liverpool's record-tying 20th title when Doyle turned down a street full of fans and joy quickly turned to tragedy. Police said they believed Doyle got past a road block by following an ambulance that was trying to reach a possible heart attack victim. Videos showed the car hit and toss a person wrapped in a red Liverpool flag into the air and then swerve into a sea of people packed on the side of the road. At least four people, including a child, were rescued from beneath the vehicle when it came to a halt. Merseyside Police said the driver was believed to have acted alone and they did not suspect terrorism. They have not disclosed an alleged motive for the act.
Japan Times
5 days ago
- General
- Japan Times
Man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after Liverpool parade crash
A 53-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, dangerous driving and driving while unfit through drugs after a car ploughed into a crowd of Liverpool fans during a Premier League title parade, injuring more than 50, British police said. Eleven people remained in the hospital in stable condition on Tuesday, police said, adding that they all appeared to be recovering well. British police believe the incident, in a packed Liverpool city center on Monday, was isolated and not an act of terrorism. They said the driver of the gray Ford Galaxy minivan involved in the incident was believed to have followed an ambulance into a closed street when a road block was lifted to allow paramedics to attend to a suspected heart attack victim. Videos posted online showed the vehicle driving through the street crowded with fans, sending several flying into the air and dragging at least four under its wheels. When the vehicle stopped, angry people converged on it and began smashing the windows as police officers battled to prevent them from reaching the driver. Police said 50 people, including children, had been treated for their injuries, with 11 still in the hospital. "They are all in a stable condition, and I am pleased to say that they appear to be recovering well," Deputy Chief Constable Jenny Sims said. King Charles III, who is visiting Canada, said he was "deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the terrible events." His sister, Princess Anne, met medics who had treated some of the injured at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. With most people off work for the Spring Bank Holiday, officials estimated that around 1 million people descended on the 16-kilometer parade route to watch the Liverpool team travel through the city on an open-top bus with the Premier League trophy. Liverpool last won the league in 2020, ending a 30-year-wait, but fans were unable to celebrate due to lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Police said the car hit the spectators as the event was winding down. In the aftermath, a Reuters photographer saw emergency services carrying victims on stretchers and in their arms to nearby ambulances. One source told MailOnline that it looked like the driver panicked when he realized he was in the crowd and people started banging on his car. The driver, who was sounding his horn, reversed and then accelerated forward, according to reports from other witnesses. Police were unusually quick to provide a description of the man they arrested, saying around two hours after the incident he was a "53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area." Former police officers and local politicians said that statement was needed to cool social media speculation that the episode was an Islamist attack. "That was one of my first concerns, that we needed to get the story out quickly," Mayor of Liverpool City Region Steve Rotheram told the BBC. "If there's a vacuum, we know there are some elements that will try to inflame the situation and to create that speculation and to put misinformation out there." The same police force oversaw the response to the murder of three young girls in the nearby town of Southport last year, an incident which sparked days of rioting, fueled initially by speculation online over the identity of the attacker.
