Whose fault is it for the Champions League final fiasco? After the incidents that occurred on Saturday May 28 near the Stade de France, an emergency meeting was held Monday morning at the Ministry of Sports to clarify everyone’s responsibilities. Around the table, all the stakeholders: the Ministry of Sports, the Minister of the Interior, the Paris police headquarters, the French football federation or even UEFA, the European football association which organizes this competition. . There is urgency in view of the magnitude of this disaster televised in mondiovision.
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The investigations will have to determine who is responsible for this chaos but the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, hastened to put the blame on “thousands of British or ticketless supporters who forced entry”. The police headquarters even filed a complaint. However, this way of discarding has aggravated the wrath of the British authorities, in particular because many testimonies have praised the phlegm and patience of these English supporters who are sometimes mistreated.
In fact, it seems that multiple problems have added up: an undersized and above all badly organized security device, disastrous management of the flow of spectators, untimely reactions from certain members of the police whose brutality has shocked foreign journalists, English supporters without tickets or with invalid tickets who piled up at the entrance gates, young Parisians or suburbanites who took advantage of the disorder to enter the stadium by sowing a little more trouble. .. In short, to observe all these malfunctions, we measure that we probably passed Saturday evening very close to a large-scale disaster. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries or deaths, which was not always the case in the past during jostling in football stadiums.
These events, however, tarnish the reputation of France for the organization of major events, with the approach of the Rugby World Cup and especially the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. In the middle of the electoral campaign for the legislative elections, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen jumped at the chance to overwhelm their pet peeves, Gérald Darmanin and the prefect of police Didier Lallement.
Emmanuel Macron, he can bite his fingers to have recovered the final of the Champions League, initially scheduled for Saint Petersburg. But given the challenge of welcoming millions of spectators on the occasion of the Olympic Games, which is approaching, we especially hope that the protagonists will overcome the petty political controversy to learn from the fiasco of Saturday evening and thus avoid a catastrophe. in two years.