"It was a mess": story of a chaotic evening at the Stade de France

Jean-François Pérès and Thibaut Hue, edited by Gauthier Delomez with AFP 2:10 p.m., May 30, 2022

Crowd movements, tear gas … The supporters, who had to pay crazy sums to attend the final of the Champions League on Saturday evening between Real Madrid and Liverpool, finally experienced hell.

An interministerial meeting on this chaos took place Monday morning to try to "identify the dysfunctions".

While many point to the behavior of English supporters, other witnesses speak of young people from Seine-Saint-Denis who came to play spoilsports.

"We can say that the chain of responsibility is dizzying", explains Jean-François Pérès, journalist with the sports department of Europe 1 present on the spot that evening.

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"It all started around 7 p.m., two hours before kick-off," explains the journalist in

.

"English fans are known to arrive late at the stadium. The RER B was on strike. So almost everyone arrived with the RER D along the A1 motorway, and very quickly there was congestion “, he says at the microphone of Romain Desarbres.

A first filtering that ended up "jumping"

Jean-François Pérès specifies that there were "not enough pre-check points. There were police valves which blocked everything, thousands of people found themselves stuck. This first screening ended up blowing up “, he adds.

"Young locals who know the place by heart mingled at that time with the English supporters. Many testimonies report assaults, thefts... In short, it was a mess. Everyone ran towards the stadium entrance gates, but they were closed to prevent counterfeit tickets or people without tickets from entering."

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"There, it's the second mess", continues the journalist from Europe 1. "At about an hour before kick-off, there were crowd movements. People are suffocated, some individuals take the opportunity to pass above the railings. They did not have Liverpool or Real supporters' outfits on. The police fired tear gas," said Jean-François Pérès.

"Families with valid tickets are targeted, some spectators who had tickets will not see the match," he said.

Individuals penetrated inside the enclosure

Finally, at one o'clock in the morning, the journalists of Europe 1 saw a security "totally overwhelmed still tracking young local individuals inside the stadium. Some entered the press room, others in the area interview or even in the car parks. There too, it was not English supporters", underlines our journalist, who considers that they were "convenient scapegoats of an evening which will have proven, once again more, that the French authorities do not know how to manage neither the crowds of supporters, nor the security problems around the stadiums.

Two days after these incidents, a ministerial meeting was therefore held in the morning.

Why were the security forces overwhelmed?

Why was the influx of supporters not contained?

The Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, said Monday morning that she wanted to shed light on these excesses.

"The purpose of this meeting is to identify all the malfunctions, to draw all together the lessons, the consequences, the necessary lessons so that it never happens again, and that we are ideally prepared for the upcoming major sporting events.

In sight, the Rugby World Cup in 2023 and the Olympics in 2024.

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Darmanin denounces "a massive fraud of counterfeit banknotes"

Also around the table, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who denounced a "massive, industrial fraud of counterfeit banknotes".

"30,000 to 40,000 English supporters found themselves at the Stade de France, either without tickets or with falsified tickets," added the Minister of the Interior.

These counterfeit tickets, scanned by the thousands, would have bugged the turnstiles at the entrances to the stadium.

This is the explanation put forward by UEFA, which is at the discussion table.

Lessons should therefore be learned.