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AI-DRAFTED — PHYSICIAN REVIEW IN PROGRESSThe citation for this entry was checked against Crossref and PubMed, but its summary and interpretation were drafted by an AI model from the published abstract and have not yet been individually read by a physician. Read the linked source before relying on this operationally.
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Determination of the causes of stampedes, deaths and injuries in football stadiums[1]

Kara FS, Yıldırım GÖ · 2026 · Am J Disaster Med

Summary

Cross-sectional perception survey of disaster-trained professionals (population 2,750; final analysed sample 341) using a semistructured online questionnaire (Sept 2023-July 2024) on the perceived causes of crowd-induced stampedes in football stadiums and the drivers of the resulting deaths and injuries. Respondents identified the leading causes as ticket overselling; inadequate physical infrastructure (notably insufficient emergency exits and locked gates); fanatic/hooligan behaviour; lack of public awareness and training; excessive crowd density; and inappropriate security-force actions such as tear-gas use. The perceived primary causes of fatality and injury were trauma (falls and crushing); respiratory emergencies (suffocation and asphyxia); substance and alcohol use; cardiac events; psychological distress (panic and aggression); and neurological factors. The authors conclude that stadium stampedes arise from combined environmental, organisational and behavioural factors and call for a comprehensive risk-management strategy (infrastructure, crowd control, staff training, public education).

So what

A recent, disaster-medicine-journal catalogue of the upstream, organisational causes of stadium crowd disaster - and it lines up with the crush-physics doctrine the library already holds. The causes named are almost entirely design and management failures (oversold tickets, locked gates and too-few exits, tear gas fired into a packed terrace, unmanaged density), not spontaneous "panic," reinforcing the page-#11 thesis that crush is engineered before it is medical and that prevention lives in the risk assessment, not the aid post. On the clinical side the respondents put respiratory emergencies - suffocation and asphyxia - alongside trauma, consistent with the established finding that crowd-crush death is compressive/positional asphyxia rather than trampling; that is a useful reminder for the medical plan that the crush casualty needs airway and chest-decompression thinking, not just limb-trauma triage. The hard caveat is the study type: this is expert PERCEPTION/opinion (341 professionals in one country), not an epidemiological analysis of actual stampede incidents, so cite it for the causal framing and the professional consensus, never as incidence or as event-level data.

Key findings

  • Perception survey: 341 disaster-trained professionals (of 2,750), online questionnaire Sept 2023-July 2024
  • Perceived stampede causes: ticket overselling, insufficient emergency exits / locked gates, hooliganism, poor awareness/training, excessive density, inappropriate security actions (tear gas)
  • Perceived death/injury drivers: trauma (falls/crushing), respiratory (suffocation/asphyxia), substance/alcohol, cardiac, psychological (panic/aggression), neurological
  • Causes are dominantly organisational/environmental - prevention sits in design + crowd control + training, not the medical tent (aligns with crush-doctrine #11)
  • OPINION/perception study, single-country professional sample - cite for causal framing, NOT incidence or incident data

Read the paper