It can be argued that referee decisions are mostly subjective. Fans can get heavily frustrated by these decisions. Violence is never the answer. Fans in Peru went too far in invading a pitch after a goal was disallowed.
A referee’s call in a fotbal match between Peru and Argentina sparks a riot on 24 May 1964. More than 300 fans were killed and another 500 people were injured in the violent melee that followed at National Stadium in Lima, Peru.
The match was a qualifier for the 1964 Olympics and the Peruvian fans were fiercely cheering on their team with only a few minutes left in a close game. When the referee disallowed an apparent goal for Peru; the stadium went wild. The resulting panic and crowd-control measures taken caused stampedes in which people were crushed and killed.
The world's worst stadium disaster occurred in the Peruvian capital Lima. More than 300 people died - but the full story has never been told and possibly never will be.
"The police didn't let their dogs loose but they did let them tear his clothes off," recalls Hector Chumpitaz, one of Peru's football legends, who was playing at the time and saw the tragedy beginning to unfold.
"The people were getting disturbed by the way in which they were taking the pitch invader away. It was driving them mad. We don't know what would have happened if they had removed him in a peaceful fashion, but we can't think about that now."
Chumpitaz went on to gain more than 100 caps for Peru. He captained the side at the 1970 and 1978 World Cups but he almost gave up football after this disastrous match, at the start of his international career.
Hosting Argentina on 24 May 1964, Peru were second in the table at the half-way stage of South America's Olympic qualifying tournament. Confidence was high but with Brazil awaiting in their last game. Peru realistically needed a draw at least against Argentina.
The stadium was packed to its 53 000 capacity; a little over 5% of Lima's population at the time.
"Though we were playing well, they took the lead," Chumpitaz recaled. "We attacked, they defended and this continued until a play came where their defender went to clear - and our player, Kilo Lobaton, raised his foot to block and the ball rebounded into the goal - but the referee said it was a foul, so he disallowed it. This is why the crowd began to get very upset."
In quick succession, two spectators entered the field of play. The first was a bouncer known as Bomba, who tried to hit the referee before being both stopped by police and manhandled off the field. The second, Edilberto Cuenca, then suffered a brutal assault.
While some fans who escaped from the stadium managed to open the gates and free those trapped inside; others became involved in a battle with armed police.
"Some lads from my neighbourhood were going by and spotted me. I was quite skinny and eventually they pulled me out," he said. "But then the shooting began and they started running. The shots were outside - bullets were everywhere. I started to run and didn't look back."
For most of this time, Chumpitaz was also unable to leave.
"After we made it to the dressing rooms, some people went outside and came back saying there had been two deaths. 'Two deaths?' we asked. One would have seemed a lot. We were in the dressing room for two hours before we could leave, so we didn't know the magnitude of what was going on."
"On the way back to our training base, we were listening to the radio and it was 10, 20, 30 deaths. Every time there was news, the number was rising: 50 deaths, 150, 200, 300, 350."
The official number of those who died is 328 but this may be an underestimate; as it doesn't include anyone killed by gunfire.
There are many eyewitness accounts of people dying of gunshot wounds, but the judge appointed to investigate the disaster, Judge Benjamin Castaneda, was never able to find the bodies to prove it.
Hearing of two corpses with gunshot wounds in Lima's Hospital Loayza, he rushed to inspect them, he tsaid. As he arrived, a vehicle was just leaving.
"Reaching the mortuary, I met someone I knew," he said. "I asked him if there were two corpses with bullet wounds. 'Yes,' he told me, 'but they've just taken them away.'"
Some months after the tragedy, Castaneda was visited by an elderly man who said his two sons, both medical students, had travelled fom the provinces to attend the game and never returned.
"Even though he had looked for their names among the dead, he could not find them," Castaneda said.
"He had made further inquiries but found nothing. So I told him I had news that some people had died after being shot and that, lamentably, I could never discover their identities as everything had been hidden from me."
In his report, Castaneda said the death toll given by the government didn't "reflect the true number of victims, since there are well-founded suspicions of secret removals of those killed by bullets."
He went on to accuse the then-interior minister of orchestrating the pitch invasion and the brutal police response; in order to incite the crowd to violence - thus providing a pretext for a violent crackdown. The show of strength was intended, he said, to "make the people learn, with blood and tears" the risks they ran if they challenged the authorities.
For its part, the government laid the blame for the trouble on Trotskyist agitators.
Jorge Salazar, a journalist and professor who has written a book about the disaster, says Peruvian society was at the time unusually turbulent. "It was the sixties, it was Beatles time, Fidel Castro was in fashion - everything was changing in the world," he says.
"In Peru, people were talking for the first time about social justice. There were a lot of demonstrations, worker movements and communist parties. The left was quite powerful, and there was a permanent clash between the police and the people."
Many of the football fans who escaped from the tear gas, certainly wanted revenge on the police. Two policemen were reportedly killed inside the stadium, and battles continued on the streets outside.
Fifty years on, Peruvian Congressman Alberto Beingolea, who has called this weekend for a minute's silence to honour the dead, doubts that the violence was pre-planned by either the government or revolutionaries.
He doesn't discount the idea that people died from gunshot wounds.
"Two such deaths are possible, especially if you are in a climate of chaos - as happened in that era," he says. "When one generates chaos, the police have to respond - and at any moment, that can result in shooting."
Peru has never made a serious attempt to get to the bottom of the Estadio Nacional disaster, and this may never now be possible.
What we do know is that those punished can be counted on two fingers.
Jorge Azambuja, the police commander who gave the order to fire the tear gas, was sentenced to 30 months in jail. The other was Judge Castaneda himself. He was fined for submitting his report six months late and for failing to attend all 328 autopsies as he ought to have done. His report was thrown out.
"I asked everywhere about the bodies but never found anything. They said - without official confirmation of any kind - they were interred in Callao."
In 2014, the head of the Peruvian Institute of Sport - one of the country's four Olympic medallists, Francisco Boza - has made an unprecedented effort to contact families affected by the tragedy and to invite them to a long overdue mass, to be held at the Cathedral of Lima.
To quell the unrest in Lima, the government ordered the suspension of civil liberties, enforced a state of emergency and imposed a modified form of martial law. A state of national mourning was also ordered.
The government attributed the riot to Trotskyist agitators. Pope Paul VI called on fans to subdue their celebrations out of respect for the victims of the disaster.
As of 2026, the Peruvian government has not conducted an in-depth investigation into the disaster
After the incident, all remaining matches of the CONMEBOL Pre-Olympic Tournament were cancelled. With both Peru and Brazil tied in the points standings, it was decided a play-off game was to be played to determine which team would qualify for the Olympics. Brazil defeated Peru 4-0 and qualified for the Olympics in Tokyo.
Early radio accounts reported 500 had been killed with almost 1 000 injured. At 328, the death toll is still greater than the Hillsborough disaster; the Bradford fire; the Heysel disaster; the 1902 Ibrox disaster; the 1971 Ibrox disaster and the Burnden Park disaster combined.
After the incident, a decision was made to reduce the seating capacity of the stadium from 53 000 to 42 000 in 1964; although this was later increased to 47 000 for the 2004 Copa América.
The extent of this disaster has only been surpassed once. In 1982, 340 people died at a match in Moscow when a late goal caused fans who had exited the game to attempt to return suddenly. Meanwhile, police were forcing people to exit; those caught in the middle were crushed.
Large-scale soccer disasters date back to 1946 when 33 fans were crushed to death in Bolton, England, when overcrowded conditions caused a barrier to collapse onto fans
Fans can be uncontrollable. They can get overly agitated if the team they support doesn't get their way. They seriously need to control their anger and understand that they can't always get their way. Violence is never the answer.