A London bus driver claims he was wrongfully fired after being accosted by Chelsea supporters for driving a rail replacement bus while sporting a Liverpool shirt.
Isaac, the driver, was working in west London on Saturday night when exuberant Chelsea fans swarmed his bus as they celebrated their team’s 2-1 victory over Liverpool at Stamford Bridge.
Social media footage shows fans yelling and beating on the windows of Isaac’s bus after spotting his white and green Liverpool away shirt.
His company claims that the incident resulted in “significant disruption and delays,” which ultimately led to his termination. Isaac, however, maintains that he did nothing improper, claiming that the garment was just “the first clean T-shirt” he came across before leaving for work that day.
Speaking on TalkTV while wearing the same Liverpool jersey, he explained: “I didn’t know what route it was. The first clean T-shirt I had was a Liverpool one. I later realised I was going to go past Chelsea and then I saw the fans outside the stadium. I saw the funny side to it when I was watching the videos, but when I was sat in that cabin at that time, it wasn’t so funny. I was holding the window shut. The window on the driver’s side is supposed to lock from the inside, but it didn’t, so I was holding it shut.”
Police eventually showed up to disperse the crowd, he remembered. They encircled me in the bus, literally. Eventually, the police moved them away from the bus and I got back to the depot,” Isaac said.
Isaac was notified of his termination via email by his agency the following Monday. “We will be dismissing you due to a uniform policy regarding the events of Saturday, October 4th,” my agency stated in an email. They informed me that the bus company had also seen the video, which had gone viral on social media,” he said.
Later, citing data privacy laws, the agency declined to comment, saying only: “We are unable to comment on this matter due to GDPR.” The internal procedures are being used to address this.
Isaac, a lifetime Liverpool fan, criticized London’s transit authorities and insisted that his managers had no problem with his shirt before to the incident. Nobody found it problematic. I was urged to “carry on doing your thing”; no one instructed me to hide it. “I don’t see any care in TfL anymore,” he added, adding that they weren’t very concerned about what I was wearing. It’s not operating properly, in my opinion. Perhaps we could see better light in TfL under a different mayor. But at the moment, there’s no common sense in the operation whatsoever.”