There are close parallels between Hillsborough and Heysel -- disasters waiting to happen at two dilapidated stadiums, which hosted major games with poor ticketing arrangements and "negligent policing."

Heysel Stadium's Sector Z terrace had grass poking through the crumbling concrete. Flimsy wire-netting separated the Liverpool and Juve fans while a minimal police force battled to keep control of thousands of fans. A police force whose walkie-talkies had no batteries.

"I felt a lot of anger and bitterness towards UEFA that allowed such an important match to be played in an inadequate stadium," said Conti. "The curved sector where we were should not have been open to the public, because it wasn't up to hosting 15,000 people.

"In that sector there were hooligans as well and the police weren't able to keep order."

Then came the charge of the Liverpool fans.

"There are dozens of points that are usually offered to explain the context, but the context does not begin to excuse anything," writes Liverpool fan Tony Evans, football editor of British newspaper The Times.

"No amount of context could. That stampede might have been considered standard terrace fare, a token act of territorialism and intimidation, but it led innocent fans to flee in terror.

"Some tried to climb a wall to escape. The wall crumbled. Thirty-nine people were crushed to death. The world was appalled. Turin went into mourning. Liverpool and their supporters were left with the stigma and the stain."

With corpses lying in the stadium car park, UEFA ordered the game to go ahead for the sake of public safety. Juventus won the final 1-0 thanks to a penalty from Michel Platini, who is now president of the European governing body.

"I was at home watching the match on television, but I had the feeling that something terrible had happened to my loved ones," said Gonnelli. " I spent the whole night at Pisa airport waiting for them to come back."

Platini's celebration after scoring the penalty was widely criticized, though he justified playing the game by arguing that if it had not gone ahead, it "would have been the end of football."

Another relative told CNN that Juventus had always wanted to put a veil over Heysel to forget this page in the club's history and that the Serie A side's then president Giampiero Boniperti should have handed the European Cup back.

Juventus insist that the club has never forgotten the suffering of the family victims and that the disaster's anniversary is always religiously marked.

A commemorative monument was unveiled in the main courtyard of the club's headquarters shortly after the disaster, and there was a dedication to the victims at the opening of Juve's new stadium last year.

"The families of the victims are alway welcome at the club, our museum and the stadium and they can come for free," said a Juve spokeswoman.

Liverpool FC also marks the anniversary of the tragedy, with flowers placed on the memorial plaque and flags flown at half-mast, while its website features stories of remembrance.

The right punishments?

In the aftermath of Heysel, then UEFA president Jacques Georges and general secretary Hans Bangerter were threatened with imprisonment, before being given conditional discharges.

Albert Roosens, the former secretary-general of the Belgian Football Union (BFU) and Johan Mahieu -- who was in charge of policing the stands at Heysel despite having never supervised a football match before -- were given six-month suspended prison sentences for negligence.

"Heysel is the tragedy of the century," said Caremani. "UEFA and Belgian institutions are the guilty ones -- they chose that stadium and it was the worst stadium in Europe for a final of the European Cup.

"UEFA, the Belgian institutions, England and Italy try to forget about it. They don't care about the victims. It is only after Heysel that UEFA took responsibility for stadium safety."

Conti added: "The Italian state, the Italian Football Federation and Juventus took little interest in the case."

That critique of establishment inertia might strike a chord with those relatives of the Hillsborough tragedy who have campaigned so tirelessly for the true story of their family members' deaths to be told.

In the aftermath of Heysel, 25 Liverpool fans were subsequently extradited from the United Kingdom and, after a five-month trial, 14 were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in April 1989 -- the same month of the Hillsborough disaster -- with each of them serving a year in jail

English clubs were excluded from Europe for five years, with Liverpool handed an extra year's ban.