Amazing scenario. The scenes of chaos on the sidelines of the final of the Champions League football, Saturday evening at the Stade de France, led on Monday May 30 to an extension little expected in such circumstances: a battle of figures and accusations between France and Great Britain.
Pointed out after the organization's fiasco, the French authorities took the lead. An emergency meeting was organized late Monday morning at the Ministry of Sports. It brought together all the stakeholders, including UEFA, the French Football Federation, the Paris police headquarters and representatives of the Stade de France. At the helm, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, and the new Minister of Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra (photo above).
At the end of the meeting, the two members of the French government did not struggle for long for words to name the culprits. They pointed out the responsibility of the British supporters.
Gérald Darmanin spoke without nuance of a “ massive, industrial and organized fraud of counterfeit notes“. Then he cited his figures, without specifying the source: “ 30 to 000 English supporters found themselves at the Stade de France, either without tickets or with falsified tickets. We believe that fraud comes from across the Channel.".
According to the Minister of the Interior, the results could have been dramatic without the decisions taken by the police and the prefect, Didier Lallement. “ There would have been deaths“, said Gérald Darmanin.
More nuanced, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra explained that she wanted “ learn all the lessons to prevent such incidents from happening again for our future major international sporting events. We saw that we had to improve, especially in high-risk matches, on certain aspects of the management of flows at the end of transport in areas of first filtering, second filtering. »
The message is clear: France cannot be judged responsible for the chaos of a Champions League final initially attributed to the Russian city of Saint Petersburg.
Really ? On the British side, the version of the evening and its excesses turns out to be very different. Opposite, even.
British MP Ian Byrne, present on Saturday evening at the Stade de France, evokes a situation “ horrible. » He told it to the channel Sky News : " Treating fans like animals during the biggest European match of the year, as they did, is unforgivable. Policing was dismal, stewards dismal, with poor management around the stadium and stadium gates closed"
The English daily The Independent explained on Monday May 30 that he had interviewed numerous people present at the Stade de France. All accounts agree to suggest that the main problem was “ the absolute inability of the authorities to adapt to a strike by RER B workers on the day of the final. This created a bottleneck, then a domino effect. »
The Independent continues: “ The strike led to the closure of the main station, which initially meant that fans due to sit in the Liverpool section were directed to a secondary RER D line. This has only four lanes, whereas the usual entry point has twelve. The problem was that no one changed the plan, meaning thousands of fans were stuck in this one area, immediately creating huge congestion three hours before the match. »
The daily quotes the testimony of a regular traveler from Liverpool, Phil Blundell. “ We got off the train around 18:30 p.m., he says. We were then directed to the stadium via an underpass under the highway. But our progress has been very, very slow. You had to take a ramp about 200 meters after the stairs, a real bottleneck"
Same story on the Spanish side. Enrique Cazorla, a Real Madrid sociologist, told the daily El Mundo having been targeted by snatch thieves. “ It was the police who threw pepper spray and rubber bullets at us, he explained. We got off in the metro but it had already become a mousetrap. Find a taxi? They asked us for 300 euros to get us out of there"
For Ronan Evain, the executive director of the Football Supporters Europe network, the figures for ticket fraud and the explanations put forward by Gérald Darmanin do not hold up. “ This absolutely does not correspond to our feedback, he entrusted to The Team. And I don't see how the ministry was able to arrive at this estimate so quickly.. In our opinion, it is extremely marginal, in the same proportions as usual, or even a little less than in Madrid (during the Liverpool-Tottenham final in 2019)"
UEFA, for its part, announced it was ordering a “ independent report on events surrounding the Champions League final“. It will be entrusted to the former Portuguese Minister of Youth and Sports, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues.
Gérald Darmanin and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra will be heard by the Senate, Wednesday June 1, on the incidents at the Stade de France.
