Three days after the incident, the controversy over the incidents at the Stade de France on Saturday 28 May, on the sidelines of the Champions League final, has not subsided. But this time, the accusations have changed sides. Liverpool’s club president Tom Werner is not happy with the French authorities’ claiming that British fans were responsible for the chaos. He is particularly angry at the new French sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, who suggested on her Twitter account that Liverpool had “left their supporters in the wild“. In response, Tom Werner wrote a letter to her, a copy of which was published in the Liverpool Echo. “Your comments were irresponsible, unprofessional, and wholly disrespectful to the thousands of fans harmed physically and emotionally he wrote. On behalf of all the fans who experienced this nightmare I demand an apology from you.” On Tuesday 31 May, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra appeared to hear the Liverpool chairman’s request. “We have Liverpool supporters who were in good standing, whose evening was either ruined or some were unable to attend the match, and we clearly owe them an apology,” she said. Another bone of contention was the numbers. The day after the match, the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, mentioned the number of 30,000 to 40,000 English supporters without tickets or with falsified tickets. He said he was dealing with “massive, industrial and organised fraud of fake tickets“. But two of the parties involved, the French Football Federation (FFF) and UEFA, put forward much lower estimates. According to RMC Sports, the number of counterfeit tickets scanned last Saturday at the Stade de France is close to 2,800. The number could be even lower, according to Pierre Barthélémy, the lawyer for French supporters’ groups present at the Stade de France on Saturday. “There were breakdowns, computer bugs at the gates that caused some real tickets to be scanned as fake,” he told AFP.
