“Evening of chaos”, “Flop of the organization”, “Hordes of barbarians”. The European press did not go out of their way to qualify the scuffles which took place last Saturday during the match between Real Madrid and the Liverpool team at the Stade de France. Place than the tabloid The Sun of London does not hesitate to rename it “Stade de Farce”.
Rarely has the image of France been so damaged abroad. Mayhem, fraud, drip entries, serial assaults, tear gas, arrests: these are just some of the incidents that marked the Champions League final which took place in Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris.
On the very evening of the events, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, did not hesitate, on Twitterto attribute the responsibility to the “thousands of British “supporters”, without tickets or with counterfeit tickets [qui] forced entry, and sometimes assaulted the stewards”. According to him, between 30,000 and 40,000 people with counterfeit tickets, or without tickets, had to be filtered at the entrance to the stadium, which caused the crowd. The French Football Federation and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) rather estimate the number of “counterfeit tickets scanned” at “2800”, according to Agence France-Presse. Among these 2,800 counterfeit tickets may be real tickets that have been incorrectly activated, specifies Pierre Barthélemy, an observer present near the stadium for the Football Supporters Europe association.
Although families and the elderly have complained about the inconsiderate use of tear gas, the Paris police chief, Didier Lallement, defended the 6,800 police officers mobilized for the occasion. They did the essentials, said the prefect, since the match took place and security was ensured “without deaths or serious injuries”.
Chaos
But, once the testimonies were collected, it quickly became apparent that the reality was more complex. It is known that thousands of Liverpool supporters who arrived late due to a public transport strike were still queuing outside the gates when the game was normally due to start. We also know that, since many were beginning to panic at the prospect of missing the start of the match, the prefect decided to lift the pre-filtering of the RER D in disaster to “avoid a tragedy”, he said.
It was during this crowd movement that, according to the French press, several hundred young people from the surrounding area interfered among the supporters to rob them and sow chaos. “It was people who did not support either team who forced access,” the magazine told The Obs Pierre Barthélemy of the Football Supporters Europe association.
Neither the images nor the figures for entry into the territory seem to corroborate the “30 to 40,000” holders of counterfeit tickets mentioned by the Minister of the Interior. Gérald Darmanin indicated during an interview on TF1 that 29 arrests had taken place in the stadium, half of which concerned Britons without tickets. He adds that out of the 52 arrests that took place outside the stadium, there were only 12 foreigners, mostly North Africans. The others would all be French. According to several media, including
angry london
The scandal is such in France and abroad that Gérald Darmanin and his colleague from Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, will have to answer questions from members of a Senate committee on Wednesday. In London, the reactions were quick. Judging the images of these events “deeply disturbing and worrying”, Prime Minister Boris Johnson demanded that UEFA investigate with the French authorities. Present in Paris, the mayor of Liverpool, Joanne Anderson, described the actions of the French police as “absolutely disgusting”.
The most scathing retort came from Liverpool club chairman Tom Werner, who believes the British supporters “have been treated like cattle”. He described as “irresponsible” the accusations of Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who incriminated the English supporters and who maintained that the British club “had left their supporters in the wild”.
Less than two weeks before the first round of legislative elections, President Emmanuel Macron has chosen to remain silent. These incidents come at the worst time for the new government, appointed just over a week ago. On the left, the candidate of La France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, castigated “a complete failure of the police strategy”. On the right, we rather incriminate “the scum” of the suburbs. A controversy that cannot fail to scratch the president, who had personally taken the initiative to host this match originally planned in Saint Petersburg. This also explains why the organizers only benefited from three months of preparation, instead of the usual year.
Major upcoming events
The controversy is all the more heated as the country expects millions of visitors for the Rugby World Cup in the fall of 2023 and the Olympic Games in the summer of 2024. In high places, we wonders about the capacity of the country and the security forces to face such a challenge. “In France, faced with an altercation, the authorities do not seek de-escalation, they send police officers to the field who make indiscriminate use of their means”, underlines, in the daily The worldsociologist Sebastian Roché.
For others, this violence is a symptom of the exacerbation of tensions in French society. “The stands have become battlefields”, writes in Le Figaro philosophy professor Robert Redeker, author of Sport, I love you too (Robert Laffont). According to him, the violence of the stadiums is the same that we now see in almost all union or political demonstrations.
“France has subscribed to violence […] the public authorities accepting it as if it were ritual”, says Redeker, who sees in it an effect of the atomization of French society. “Our country is less and less a people, less and less a nation, more and more a crowd of individuals immersed in anomie. »
On RMC radio, a young man from Seine-Saint-Denis told how, taking advantage of the chaos, he had slipped into a crowd of supporters to enter the stadium for free. Since then, he says, he would have become the “star” of his high school.