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Gérald Darmanin persists et signs : those responsible for the scenes of chaos, same day 28 May, aux abords du Stade de France, before the coup d’envoi of the finale of the Ligue des champions de football between Real Madrid and Liverpool, ce sont Englishmen. On Monday, during a press conference at the Ministry of Sports, the Minister of the Interior completed these accusations: “30,000 to 40,000 Liverpool supporters”figure confirmed by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) according to Beauvau, would have ended “either without a ticket or with counterfeit tickets” at the entrance gates of the Dionysian precinct.
For Gerald Darmann, “a massive, industrial and organized fraud of counterfeit bills” of “across the channel” would be the “root of evil” breakdowns that delayed the start of the game by more than thirty minutes. Seven out of ten red fans would have appeared at the first screening controls with forged tickets -many times at their expense-, argues the minister, who is based on the figures of the commissioners. Up to 2,600 entries “Not validated” were counted at the gates of the enclosure, ” then just like [leurs détenteurs] He had passed the first test.
“One hundred twenty thousand fans wanted to enter a stadium with 80,000 seats, hence the magnitude of the push to the doors”, add a font near the folder. But are these figures presented by the French authorities and UEFA credible, when several tens of thousands of English fans gathered on Saturday in the fan-zone installed in the Cours de Vincennes and planned to hold 44,000 people?
disputed figures
Under pressure from Liverpool, UEFA had authorized the printing of 22,000 tickets for English fans, while Real Madrid had only received an envelope of 5,000 tickets in paper format, which were not printed and were not subject to any counterfeiting.
If UEFA had warned the two clubs about the problem of fraudulent resale and the black market, the European organization had never faced, according to him, the presence of such a large number of fans without tickets, despite a precedent in Madrid, during the 2019 edition of the Champions League final that already faced Liverpool with the London club Tottenham. Ronan Evain, executive director of the Football Supporters Europe network and present at the Stade de France on Saturday night, questions the figures presented by the authorities and speaks of a marginal phenomenon.
On Monday, the Minister for Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, called on UEFA to launch an investigation to understand the extent of the fraud. Officially, the boss of European football shows his concern to make his self-criticism and analyze the dysfunctions observed in terms of ticketing. UEFA also announced on Monday the opening of an investigation. “Independent” on this fiasco, headed by the Portuguese parliamentarian and former Minister of Education, Youth and Sports Tiago Brandao Rodrigues (2015-2022). The conclusions and recommendations of your report will be “made public” in the coming months.
In Nyon, at the UEFA headquarters, some directors ironically about the will of the French authorities “get rid of” Where “blame the English” or the party’s organizing bodies. On Monday, the spokesman for the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, told himself “extremely disappointed” for the treatment given to Liverpool fans.
For its part, the French Football Federation (FFF), co-organizer of the match, did not want to comment on these suspicions of “massive fraud”which led the Paris prefect of police, Didier Lallement, to arrest the Bobigny prosecutor, which led to the opening of an investigation entrusted to the deputy directorate for economic and financial affairs of the police prefecture.
The FFF, whose director general, Florence Hardouin, participated in the interministerial meeting on Monday, was in charge of private security agents on Saturday for filtering and pre-filtering and for transporting the coaches of the fans of the two teams, including a third of the 160 chartered vehicles. to transport the scousers they were actually used.
“Protocol Failures”
Faced with the incidents at the Stade de France, the senator (Les Républicains) of Isère Michel Savin urged Mr. Darmanin not to “underestimating the deficiencies of the security protocol put in place by the administration”. Because the fiasco on Saturday is also due in part to the poor organization of the French authorities, denounced the next day by the British. “Horrible security and organization putting lives at risk”, said West Liverpool MP Ian Byrne, who confessed to having lived “One of the worst experiences of [sa] life “.
The RER B strike – announced at the beginning of the week – forced most spectators to use RER D, encouraged to do so at Châtelet station by messages from the RATP and public authorities. Except that when leaving RER D, the route to reach the Stade de France takes much narrower lanes than those of RER B, in particular the passage under the A86 bridge, where a chokehold was formed on Saturday. Some 40,000 red fans sometimes waited more than three hours before the start of the game to pass the first pre-filters, where only twenty agents were in charge of controlling the tickets.
Given the flow of supporters, Didier Lallement decided to lift the pre-filter, a prelude to overflows (intrusion attempts, indiscriminate use of tear gas by the police, etc.) that they later observed around the stadium. “Nobody could have predicted the additional 30,000 or 40,000 spectators who showed up at the Stade de France with tickets that weren’t real”justified Mr. Darmanin.
Amélie Oudéa-Castéra recognized that “We need to improve certain aspects of flow management when exiting transport” in the run-up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. An Elysian source confirmed on Monday that it was considering closing the road network in the event of such an unpredictable situation. “Obviously, we’re not quite ready. [au report] on the RER D »acknowledged the Minister of the Interior.