Overflows at the Stade de France: the number of counterfeit tickets at the heart of the controversy

Tuesday, May 31, a police note made public revives the debate. Four days before the final, the national division of French hooliganism had warned the government in a report that approximately “50,000 English fans present in the capital will not be ticket holders”and “some of them will be in possession of counterfeit tickets and will try to use them to gain access to the stadium”. The French authorities therefore had an estimate of the number of British fans.

How do you know if the figure of 30,000 fraudulent banknotes, put forward by the French authorities, is correct? Saturday evening, a single individual was arrested for trafficking counterfeit notes. “I’m very interested to know how they get this unverifiable data to exactly match what the French interior minister said”, commented Ian Byrne, MP for Liverpool (United Kingdom). The British criticisms also relate to the management of flows. On the evening of the match, traffic on RER B was disrupted due to a strike, and supporters were redirected to RER D, an access route that turned into a bottleneck. Was the number of stewards sufficient? This is one of the many questions that still remain unanswered.