It is a cold, dark December evening in south-west Paris and kick-off in Paris Saint-Germain’s home game with Nice is less than two hours away.
Beneath the white awning that overhangs the heated outdoor terrace at the Aux Trois Obus brasserie, just around the corner from the Parc des Princes, PSG supporters in parkas and puffer jackets while away the time before the match, their face masks pulled down below their chins as they sip from their glasses of beer and take drags on their cigarettes.
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At the entrance to the Porte de Saint-Cloud metro station, a ticket tout weaves his way through the crowd. “Cherche des places, qui cherche des places?” (“Looking for tickets, who’s looking for tickets?”). Further along, a female steward in an orange high-vis jacket is using a loudhailer to direct fans towards the stadium. In front of a white police van parked across Place du Docteur Paul Michaux, three male officers stand and watch the fans stream past.
Nearer the ground, the road that runs past the stadium’s south-western corner, Rue du Commandant Guilbaud, has been closed to traffic. It is via this road that the 700 Nice fans who are due to attend the match will access the stadium.
On the corner of the street, where it meets the broad, busy Avenue de la Porte de Saint-Cloud, two stewards in bright yellow vests turn away any home fans trying to use the road as a cut-through. The Nice supporters pass through in twos and threes. There are police officers nearby, but the atmosphere is relaxed.
“It’s Nice, so it’s OK,” explains a smiling female steward. If it were PSG’s arch-rivals Marseille, or a big Champions League game, there would be tension in the air.
Although all is calm outside the stadium, no chances are being taken. There are 350 police officers on duty for the game, including 240 from the CRS (Republican Security Force), France’s Robocop-style riot police. Around 1,300 stewards will help to provide security. The fans in the away section, in the bottom tier of the corner where the Tribune Paris meets the Virage Boulogne, are monitored by 81 stewards, 11 of whom represent a travelling delegation from Nice.
Shimmering in the floodlights, a huge net stretches from ground level to the stadium’s concrete roof to protect the away fans from having anything thrown at them by the hardcore supporters on the Virage Boulogne. The Parc des Princes is equipped with 300 ultra-sensitive security cameras, which beam images back to a giant 32-screen television wall in the stadium’s security control room.
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Everybody in French football is on high alert when it comes to fan security at the moment, following a spate of incidents that have plunged the game into disarray. There have been attacks on players, violent pitch invasions, bloody battles between supporters and two high-profile abandonments.
Amid warnings from the highest levels of government that French football faces an existential crisis, a specially convened working group comprising ministers and leading officials from the sport has been tasked with plotting a way out of the mire.
It is another gala occasion at the Parc. Before kick-off, Lionel Messi and Gianluigi Donnarumma parade the Ballon d’Or and Yashin Trophy awards that they received at the previous evening’s ceremony in central Paris. The pyrotechnics fizz and bang, the music booms. With Messi having joined forces with Neymar and Kylian Mbappe at PSG this season, the pitches of the French top flight should have had more eyes on them than ever before. Instead, the country’s unruly supporters have turned attention squarely onto the stands.
A list of the season’s most high-profile flashpoints to date reveals the extent of the problem that French football is facing:
– August 8: Montpellier fans throw missiles at Marseille players celebrating a late winner, with OM substitute Valentin Rongier hit in the face by a plastic water bottle. Montpellier are ordered to close two stands at the Stade de la Mosson for three matches.
– August 22: Nice fans flood onto the pitch at the Allianz Riviera after Marseille midfielder Dimitri Payet responds to being hit on the back by a water bottle by lobbing it back into the crowd. Refusing to return to the pitch, having been taken off by the referee, Marseille’s players are adjudged to have forfeited the game, but the disciplinary commission of the Professional Football League (LFP) orders the match to be replayed in full behind closed doors at Troyes in late October. Nice are docked two points, one of which is suspended, and ordered to play three games behind closed doors. Payet receives a suspended one-game ban and his team-mate Alvaro Gonzalez is banned for two games for fronting up to the Nice fans. Marseille fitness coach Pablo Fernandez is banned until June 2022 for punching a Nice supporter. A fan who kicked Payet is given a suspended 12-month prison sentence and a five-year stadium ban.
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– September 18: Around 100 Lens fans stream onto the pitch to confront visiting Lille supporters who had attempted to gain access to their section. Lens are ordered to play two games behind closed doors and Lille’s fans are banned from travelling to away games until the end of the year. Lens issue around 40 fans with stadium banning orders.
– September 19: An 11-year-old PSG supporter is hit on the head by part of a plastic seat thrown by Lyon fans at the Parc des Princes.
– September 22: Trouble erupts at three Ligue 1 games on the same night. Fans throw missiles at each other during PSG’s 2-1 win at Metz. Sixteen people are hurt in clashes between supporters during Montpellier’s 3-3 draw with Bordeaux and the Bordeaux team bus is pelted with stones. After a 0-0 draw between Angers and Marseille, fans exchange missiles and then fight on the pitch. Angers are hit with a partial stadium closure. Marseille are given a suspended one-point deduction and their fans are banned from travelling to away games until the end of the year.
– October 22: Kick-off in Saint-Etienne’s home game with Angers is delayed by an hour after fans protesting against the club’s owners throw flares onto the pitch.
– October 24: There are 21 arrests for disorder during Marseille’s 0-0 draw with PSG. Neymar is repeatedly targeted by missiles as he prepares to take corners and a fan runs onto the pitch towards Messi. Marseille are ordered to play one game behind closed doors.
– November 21: In the fourth minute of Lyon’s home game with Marseille, Payet is struck on the side of the face by a plastic water bottle as he prepares to take a corner. After a delay of close to two hours, the game is called off. The fan who throws the bottle is given a six-month suspended prison sentence and a five-year stadium ban. Lyon are provisionally ordered to play one game behind closed doors, pending the conclusion of a full disciplinary investigation on December 8.
It has been a disastrous few months for the image of the French game, exacerbated by the organisational paralysis that has taken hold when certain matches have been interrupted (delays of over 90 minutes before the Nice-Marseille and Lyon-Marseille games were eventually called off) and the occasional refusal of club officials to admit fault. The Nice president, Jean-Pierre Rivere, was widely criticised after accusing Marseille’s players of inflaming the situation that erupted at the Allianz Riviera in August and questioning their refusal to resume the game.
When the recent meeting between Lyon and Marseille was abandoned, Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas railed against the decision live on Amazon Prime Video France, arguing that it had been safe for the match to proceed. A picture of Amazon pundit Thierry Henry staring blankly into space while Aulas attempted to justify himself beside him went viral on French social media.
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There is a twitchiness now at stadiums across France. When will the next water bottle be thrown? Which will be the next match to be plunged into chaos? Payet has confessed that he no longer feels safe taking corners at away matches. France’s National Union of Professional Footballers has registered an increase in phone calls from anxious players.
Two days after the abandonment of the Lyon-Marseille game, a meeting was held in Paris at which government officials including Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin and Minister of Sport Roxana Maracineanu and leading figures from within the sport pledged to come up with an action plan to stem the tide of violence at Ligue 1 grounds. The taskforce will focus on four specific areas: stadium banning orders; security within stadiums (notably the use of video surveillance); the employment of private security staff at stadium access points; and, in particular, the need to speed up decision-making regarding the abandonment of matches.
It is due to present its recommendations by mid-December.
In the meantime, French football holds its breath. “Whatever the cost, we have to succeed,” LFP president Vincent Labrune told L’Equipe in a recent interview. “It’s a question of survival for our sport.”
So what’s going on? Have France’s match-going supporters collectively lost their minds? And is there any end in sight?
Inevitably, the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely pinpointed as a contributory factor. Fans who spent the best part of 18 months cloistered away at home, unable to set foot inside a stadium, are simply happy to be back and in expressing that happiness and relief, some have perhaps got carried away. For the hardened, die-hard supporters — the ultras, who can be found at every Ligue 1 ground — there are other, darker motivations.
For them it has been a case of flexing their muscles again, marking their territory, showing who’s boss.
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“For people who are a bit isolated, a bit de-socialised, the stadium was the place where they all met each other every Saturday or Sunday,” says Patrick Mignon, a sociologist and author who was the former head of the sociology laboratory at France’s National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance. “For more than a year, that disappeared. We also know that the lockdown had very negative effects in terms of cutting people off from society. People were left to chew over their frustrations for months on end, so now there’s a kind of boiling over.”
The clubs, meanwhile, have seemed out of practice. With the 2019-20 season having been curtailed in March 2020 and the majority of matches last season taking place behind closed doors, Ligue 1 clubs went nearly a year and a half without having to cater for large numbers of supporters, only to find themselves staging games at 100 per cent capacity from the opening weekend of the current campaign. After such a long period of relative inactivity in terms of crowd management, oversights that would ordinarily have set alarm bells ringing — such as failures to install protective netting beside the pitch for high-risk fixtures or the stationing of rival supporters in close proximity — passed by unnoticed.
“There have been significant organisational problems, especially at Nice-Marseille and Lens-Lille, which were due to the fact that the public authorities and the clubs went 18 months without having to organise matches (at full capacity) and lost the hang of it,” Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe (FSE), tells The Athletic. “I think the organisers, the leagues and the public authorities focused too much on the COVID protocols when fans returned and not enough on the security/organisational side of things.”
A nationwide shortage of stewards has further complicated matters. Most stewards in France are part-time and when the outbreak of the pandemic shut down the football matches, music concerts and exhibitions upon which they relied for some vital extra cash, they were forced to look for alternative sources of income.
“When COVID arrived, all those people who needed to top up their salaries no longer had jobs because there were no fans in the stadiums,” says Stephane Boudon, president of the Securite-CTFC trade union. “So they had to find other professional activities and maybe they found something that was more interesting than working as a steward, so they haven’t returned to the profession.”
With so many stewards leaving the industry, the firms that employ them have been obliged to take on less experienced replacements. The need for all staff working at stadiums to possess valid COVID-19 passes (a condition of entry to a range of establishments in France) has provided an additional administrative hurdle. Stewarding work is irregularly timed, poorly paid (stewards generally receive the French minimum wage of €10.48 per hour before tax, plus occasional bonuses) and physically demanding.
“You’re working outside, whether it’s rainy, windy, warm or cold,” says Boudon. “They’re not ideal working conditions.” In addition, there is no formal training programme for stewards who work in football.
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So when trouble erupts, those in the firing line do not always possess the know-how — or the motivation — to intervene.
“When incidents occur, you can’t ask someone who’s so poorly paid and who has such a precarious (economic) status to put themselves in harm’s way in order to keep the pitch secure,” says Evain.
“The problems are the same as the problems we saw at Wembley for the European Championship final (when thousands of ticketless fans rushed the gates) and they lead to exactly the same outcomes.”
Watching with friends at a bar in Poitiers in western France, Sacha Houlie had more reason than most to curse the abandonment of the Lyon-Marseille game on November 21.
A Marseille fan and lawyer, Houlie is also a rising star of the French Parliament and the co-author of a widely praised 2020 report into how to improve the experience of football supporters in France.
“There was disappointment and there was anger,” the 33-year-old politician tells The Athletic of his reaction to what happened at the Groupama Stadium. “The disappointment of the supporter who’s come to see his team play and who understands very quickly that it’s not going to happen. And anger because these incidents in stadiums keep being reproduced in France, which only serves to cast supporters in a bad light.”
The unfortunate irony of the current situation is that prior to the incidents of recent months, France had been moving away from its traditional, repressive mode of supporter management towards a more cooperative model rooted in dialogue and proactive planning, inspired by the approaches found in England and Germany.
In 2016, a proposed law aimed at cracking down on hooligans that had been set in motion by Guillaume Larrive, an MP from the centre-right Les Republicains party, was taken up by Thierry Braillard, then-Secretary of State for Sport in Francois Hollande’s Socialist government, and given a new, progressive strand that sought to place football supporters at the centre of all future dialogue about the organisation of matches.
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The Loi Larrive, which was adopted in May 2016, created the Instance Nationale de Supporterisme (National Supporters’ Authority), which acts as a forum for dialogue between supporter representatives from a range of team sports and officials from the police force, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Sport, the French Football Federation and the LFP. It also obliged professional clubs to appoint a “referent supporter” (supporter liaison officer) to act as a point of contact for fans.
“Those measures launched a dialogue and enabled us to put people who’d stopped talking to each other in the same room,” says Houlie, who is an ally of French President Emmanuel Macron.
Other supporter-friendly initiatives to have been introduced in recent years include flat-rate ticket prices for away supporters (€10 in Ligue 1, €5 in Ligue 2), trials of safe standing areas and a limited number of test events at which fans were authorised to light flares during matches.
Houlie’s report, which he wrote with former Minister of Sport Marie-George Buffet, proposed further measures including more trials of safe standing and authorised flare displays, an end to the widespread practice of banning away supporters from attending certain high-risk fixtures and limits on the use of stadium banning orders.
Previously, when the French authorities have sought to address the hooligan problem, the response has been to swing the batons first and ask questions later.
Mignon, the sociologist, cites a previous “moral panic” in the early 1990s that resulted in a number of repressive laws being passed. “The French political and social elites don’t really like football,” he says.
“They considered football the opium of the people. The reaction, which was shared by the football authorities and the public authorities, was that the only causes for such unrest could be wickedness and a desire for disorder. So what do we do in that case? We punish, we send in the CRS (riot police) to stop the violence and we introduce punitive laws.”
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Those who have pushed for a more progressive approach to supporter management in recent years are optimistic that the advances they have made will not be undone when the hooliganism task force announces its proposals later this month.
In any case, Evain points out, France already possesses “the most extensive arsenal of judicial and security measures in Europe” when it comes to punishing unruly fans.
“Our work today is to say that, yes, there are certainly problems, but we can’t throw away the hard-won progress that we’ve made,” says Houlie. “Our goal is to protect those advances and keep working.”
The hope is that the authorities will move away from collective punishments, such as games behind played closed doors, in favour of targeted individual sanctions.
Many Ligue 1 grounds are now equipped with sophisticated video-surveillance technology that allows troublemakers to be quickly identified. (As a case in point, the Lyon fan who threw the water bottle at Payet was arrested in a matter of minutes and prosecuted within 48 hours.)
Supporter groups would also like to see an end to the use of indiscriminate bans on travelling supporters, which can be summarily announced by the local authority of the host club only days before a game is due to take place.
“When you ban travelling fans, it’s an admission of failure from the public authorities,” says Evain. “It’s saying: ‘We’re not capable of providing security for 500 fans’. It’s a French exception and there are very few countries in Europe that use it as much as France does. In a democratic country like France, we shouldn’t be banning people from travelling around inside their own country.”
There exists a vision of a new, cooperative, technology-led response to supporter management in France, which would include better training — and pay — for stewards. While the current crisis has provoked much wringing of hands, the debate it has sparked could serve to herald a watershed moment in the long, fractious relationship between French football and its fans.
It has been an uneventful night on and off the pitch at the Parc des Princes. PSG and Nice draw 0-0 and there are no reports of trouble. By the time the away fans are allowed to start filing out of the ground, shortly before 11.15pm local time, the last PSG substitutes are trotting off the pitch after their warm-down and the stadium is practically empty.
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Fifteen minutes later, when the Nice supporters emerge onto the Rue du Commandant Guilbaud, they are met by a phalanx of wary-looking CRS officers, some of whom carry riot shields. The fans come out in dribs and drabs, chins tucked toward their chests against the cold. From behind a protective visor, a helmeted male police officer urges them to move down the street quickly, instructing those who have forgotten to remove their Nice scarves to stuff them into their pockets lest they run into any unfriendly locals.
The fans reach the Avenue de la Porte de Saint-Cloud, turn left and melt away into the night.
For now, for tonight, all is calm. But in France this season, trouble has rarely been far away.
(Top photo: Getty Images; graphic: Tom Slator)