System flaws: why riots at football matches in France have become the norm

For the third day, talks about the Champions League final do not stop, but they discuss not the brilliant game of Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and not a record number of titles by Carlo Ancelotti.

The riots that took place before the start of the match at the Stade de France came to the fore.

Recall that the start of the game was delayed by almost 40 minutes due to the fact that the fans could not take their seats in the stands on time.

According to UEFA, thousands of fans tried to enter the match with fake tickets, as well as without them at all.

As a result, the police fired tear gas at the crowd.

Everyone got it, including women and children.

As it turned out, Liverpool fans suffered the most.

On Monday, May 30, the French Ministry of Sports opaquely hinted that the British created problems for themselves.

According to the head of department, Amelie Udea-Kastera, the difficulties arose due to the large accumulation of Merseyside fans: up to 40,000 fans tried to break into the arena, which the club left to themselves.

“They were either without tickets or with fake tickets,” the minister said, adding that 2,700 real ticket holders were eventually unable to attend the match.

All of them will be compensated for the cost.

However, the problem probably lay not only in the influx of fakes, but also in the failure of the turnstile system.

So, according to Liverpool defender Andrew Robertson, his friend could not get to the match on the tickets that the player received at the club and personally handed over to his friend.

They did not work at the entrance and were invalidated.

In this regard, Robertson noted that the organization of the final match left much to be desired.

Former England footballer Gary Lineker was not shy about expressing himself and said that it was hardly possible to organize the event even worse.

“Absolute mess and non-compliance with safety standards,” he wrote on Twitter.

According to the former head of the organizing committee of the 2022 Champions League final in St. Petersburg, Alexei Sorokin, the organizers had difficulties due to insufficiently serious preparation and the lack of elaboration of all kinds of scenarios during such a serious event.

He added that it is extremely difficult to organize the final match of the tournament in a short time.

“Obviously, a lot of fake tickets create huge difficulties for the security services, for the staff who work on the“ last mile ”with the fans.

To cope with such a situation, special training is needed.

We need a large contingent of people who are studying the situation, a large number of stewards who immediately accompany people with unconfirmed, non-working tickets to the side, ”Sorokin said in a conversation with RT.

According to the expert, he also has questions about the behavior of the police, who used tear gas against the fans.

He also explained that, probably, the security service of the organizing committee had not worked out: information was not received and processed that a large influx of fake tickets was being prepared, and, accordingly, the stadium employees were not ready for this.

“Throwing a large number of fake tickets can be foreseen.

The security services have special methods, a special analytical department is working on this, which collects data and assesses the situation.

Psychologists are involved.

It can be predicted that it will not be 100 or 200 fakes, but many thousands,” said the head of the organizing committee for the 2018 World Cup.

Fans who had to deal with this situation reacted extremely emotionally to it.

For example, British MP Ian Byrne compared what happened in Paris with the 1989 tragedy in Sheffield, when 97 Merseyside fans died during a stampede.

He also urged that fans not be blamed for what happened, as happened 33 years ago.

“I came to Paris for the match as a Liverpool fan and I can sincerely say that what happened next to the stadium is one of the worst events of my life.

I survived the tragedy at Hillsborough, so these are not empty words, ”Byrne wrote in a letter to Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

He stressed that chaos was happening on the approaches to the stadium, and people who were going to peacefully go to the match were treated unreasonably badly.

Byrne stressed that he did not see behavior from Liverpool fans that would merit police intervention.

“It was just the scared fans who wanted to watch the game.

Someone was marinated for three and a half hours, filled with pepper spray and strangled with tear gas, and people just came to the football game.

UEFA and the French authorities should be ashamed of what happened on Saturday evening,” the politician stressed.

Riots in the stadiums

The fact that the riots at the Champions League final happened not only through the fault of British fans is indirectly confirmed by the fact that just a day after the match another high-profile story thundered in France.

This time it “blew” in Saint-Etienne, where the local team of the same name, having lost the play-off match to Auxerre, flew out of the top league.

Angry fans ran onto the field and began to throw flares and smoke bombs at the players of their own team.

The 500 stewards present at the stadium were unable to contain them.

The referees had to hastily take the players to the locker rooms.

The madness continued outside the stadium, where fans began vandalizing parked cars.

As a result, the police, as the day before, used tear gas.

According to the prefecture, 14 police officers, 17 fans and two Auxerre players suffered minor injuries, and the perpetrators are under investigation.

And such incidents in France are no exception.

Football matches there quite often end up in the summary not of sports news, but in the incident section.

So, in December 2021, the match of the 1/32 finals of the playoffs of the Cup of the country between Paris and Lyon was interrupted due to clashes between fans that the stewards could not cope with.

In the fall, before one of the meetings of Ligue 1, the already mentioned Saint-Etienne fans burned the goal net, expressing their dissatisfaction with the results of the team.

At the end of August 2021, riots led to the early termination of the match between Nice and Marseille.

It all started with the fact that the Olympic forward Dimitri Payet was thrown a bottle from the stands and the footballer fell to the lawn.

Rising to his feet, he tossed the bottle back.

This provoked a run of spectators onto the field and a fight involving both teams.

One of the fans even managed to hit Payet.

At the same time, in most cases, the organizers were powerless to prevent aggressive outbursts and only stopped the matches, rescuing the players in the stands under the stands.

However, similar episodes occur again and again.

Obviously, UEFA cannot be unaware of these regular problems.

From which a reasonable question arises: what was the organization based on, urgently transferring the main match of the Champions League to a country with such a near-football background?

Alexey Sorokin found it difficult to answer this question, but at the same time he emphasized that one should not equate all the events that took place with the same brush.

“The French recently held the Euro, they have accumulated a lot of experience in holding events.

It happens: individual decisions of individual competent authorities are not always successful, ”the specialist noted.

One way or another, most football experts in Russia are sure that if the Champions League final had stayed in St. Petersburg, nothing like this would have happened.

“We are able to organize events of the highest level.

The final would have been perfect.

Remember the 2018 World Cup - fans from all over the world recognized it as the best in history.

They were very comfortable in Russia, ”said the former national team coach Yuri Semin on this occasion.