After the chaos of Saturday then the controversy on Sunday, the first explanations: the French Ministry of Sports brings together the organizers of the Champions League final, the police and the local authorities on Monday morning to “learn the lessons” from a fiasco which occurs one year from the 2023 Rugby World Cup and two years from the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Two days later, chaotic scenes around the Stade de France, jostling, attempted intrusion by individuals without tickets or fans in shock at the intervention of the police or victims of theft, the new Minister for Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castera, must manage her first crisis.
“With the Minister of the Interior, we deplore the incidents which marred the evening of the Champions League on Saturday evening at the Stade de France and regret that some supporters with tickets were unable to attend the match”, a-t- she explained in a statement released on Sunday.
Alongside the Minister of Sports and the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, will be present the organizers of the final – won by Real Madrid (1-0) against Liverpool -, UEFA and the French Football Federation, as well as representatives of the Stade de France, the Paris Police Headquarters, the Prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis and the town hall of Saint-Denis, the town where the stadium is located.
“Dysfunctions”
“The priority is now to identify very precisely the malfunctions (…) in order to learn all the lessons to prevent such incidents from happening again for our future major international sporting events”, insisted the Ministry of Sports and Games. Olympics.
Even if there were no serious injuries, the questions abound.
How was the long-awaited celebration of European football ruined and could have turned into a tragedy when nearly 7,000 police officers, gendarmes and firefighters were mobilized, not to mention the private security guards? Why was the pre-filtering system 200 meters from the stadium quickly overwhelmed by the influx of Liverpool supporters and created bottlenecks? How did gangs of young people find themselves in a position to force their way into the compound?
The questions also come from England, where the supporters, back from Paris, the Liverpool club, the local authorities, like the mayor of the city “disgusted by the calamitous management and the brutal treatment”, and national, do not take off. .
Monday morning on RTL the Minister of Sports Amélie Oudéa-Castéra was not kind to the Liverpool club accusing him of having “left his supporters in the wild” unlike Real Madrid who accompanied him his supporters from start to finish.
“Multiple responsibilities”
What goes particularly badly – while the Liverpool police, present around the Stade de France, judged that the “vast majority” of English supporters “behaved in an exemplary manner” – is the implementation cause from Saturday evening by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, of “thousands of British supporters without tickets or with fake tickets who forced entry”.
In a report submitted to the French Minister of the Interior on Sunday, the prefect of police of Paris, Didier Lallement, estimates the number of spectators who showed up “probably between 30,000 and 40,000 people beyond the 80,000 eligible in the stadium “.
He also decided to take legal action for a “massive counterfeit fraud”.
Asked specifically about the proportion of counterfeit notes in the 30,000 to 40,000 cited since Sunday, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra did not give a figure. “We are going to look at all this (…) We have to look at where these counterfeit notes come from”.
Whatever the outcome of the meeting at the Ministry of Sports, the Stade de France fiasco should have consequences. The Minister of Sports has already mentioned “plural responsibilities” citing “certainly a lack of stewards at the level of what had been planned by the French Football Federation, a problem of cramped control areas”. And the idea in the background of “optimizing everything that needs to be optimized in anticipation of the Rugby World Cup and the Olympic and Paralympic Games”.
Football even continued to invite itself to the government table, because on Sunday for the very last match of the season which sealed Saint-Étienne’s relegation to L2, the ground at the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium was invaded and smoke bombs fired, in line with a whole season full of incidents that neither the state nor the world of football have managed to curb.
