Dr Geoff Pearson, a law lecturer at the University of Liverpool and author of Football Hooliganism: Policing and the War on the English Disease
“This is a crowd issue, this isn’t a football issue. Other sports and non-sports events, including religious ceremonies, have suffered `stampede’ deaths, too.
“But, of course, football is the biggest sport in the world by an absolute mile and the crowds tend to be bigger. Also, unfortunately, football fans have a reputation now for being more disorderly than other types of crowd groups. Now that’s not necessarily fair, but it does mean that policing methods used to police football crowds tend to be more aggressive.”
“They tend to depart from the norms of good policing and good crowd management that normally you would expect, and I think that does play a key role for why it’s more likely that these type of things would happen in football.”
BBC story: Scores killed in Egypt football match riot.