Thirty-six minutes late. Saturday, May 28, the kick-off of the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool was delayed. An extremely rare decision, taken due to scenes of chaos taking place outside the Stade de France, where the meeting won by the Spanish club took place.
It took less than three hours for the situation to degenerate. In the early evening, from 6.30 p.m., many supporters with tickets were blocked before they could enter the first security checkpoints. At 8 p.m., several dozen fans tried to climb the barriers to enter the stadium. Faced with these overflows, the police used tear gas. An hour later, when the match was originally supposed to start, nearly a thousand supporters were still stuck near the sports arena.
If there were no serious injuries, 238 people were taken care of by the emergency services, and there were 105 arrests. Organizers and public authorities point to British supporters as solely responsible for the chaos. Problem of filtering spectators, poorly distributed control barriers and circulation of counterfeit notes… Several other explanations are however put forward to explain a fiasco which questions: is France still capable of organizing events of this magnitude? Interview with Mathieu Zagrodzki, associate researcher at CESDIP, specializing in internal security and the police, author of What does the police ? The role of the police in society (Ed. of Dawn).
L’Express: How to explain that such a crowd pressed against the gates on Saturday, then on the forecourt of the Stade de France?
Matthew Zagrodzki: The filtering was not done correctly upstream. On very big events, normally, when you get off the metro, you have a first filtering which aims to ensure that people entering the area have tickets. After this first screening, you scan a ticket and you are checked. I find it hard to understand why so many people who had no business there found themselves around the stadium. We talked about English without tickets. There were no doubt also local delinquents who either tried to snatch tickets or climb the gates. A lot of people must have been missing from the organizational side to handle this step, and law enforcement had to take charge of a situation that had already escalated. But how they went about it raises questions.
Should the police have checked the spectators more beforehand?
Nope ! The role of the police is not to control. It is, on the other hand, to manage crowds and flows. Once again, shortcomings related to the organization in general undoubtedly occurred upstream. In a second step, however, law enforcement had an unfocused reaction. We see it in these images where we see crowds of people receiving tear gas. Among them, people try to force entry, of course. But there are also families. We often talk about tear gas by evoking a technique that has little impact on the physical integrity of people, but this explanation is difficult to hold against people who have invested tens of euros to attend a match.
Was the use of tear gas to disperse the crowd a mistake?
We can clearly see the short-term effects of this method: its purpose is to disperse the crowd. This is what has been done. But has anyone considered the long-term effect, where images circulate of completely innocent and harmless people who have been gassed and dispersed? On the British side, it is difficult to grasp the reaction of the French police. Across the Channel, people are responsible for dialogue with the crowds, to try to organize things. That’s not the case here.
Saturday, we went from everything to nothing: at the beginning, there was no police intervention, and the supporters crowded together until it degenerated. Then, we overreacted without making any difference between the supporters. The British therefore reproach us for criticisms that had already been made to the police from Euro 2016: first, not to anticipate enough. Then, not to get in touch with colleagues abroad – in this case, the forces of order in Liverpool, to better communicate on the situation.
Should we look first and foremost at the behavior of the police to understand what happened on Saturday?
It’s not all the fault of the police! Organizational concerns have already been mentioned, with in particular a problem of distribution of roles between private security guards and the police. Delinquent behavior was also observed around the stadium, in particular. And nuance: there were not many injuries and there were no deaths on Saturday. It’s not a tragedy.
But this evening will have effects in terms of images and legitimacy which are not – or very little – taken into account by the Ministry of the Interior. Again, how to explain to people who were there for the best reasons in the world – to see a football game with the family – that it was justified to gas them?
We have an organizational problem in this type of event. The norm in France has become a travel ban. Result: the police are no longer so used to managing large movements of supporters. For example, those from PSG can no longer go to the Vélodrome and those from OM can no longer go to the Parc des Princes. As this type of event has become exceptional, having to manage one can catch the police and gendarmerie off guard.
Especially since this match was not planned in advance: Saint-Denis was appointed to replace Saint Petersburg three months ago. But does that explain everything? Have we lost our touch?
There is a loss of habituation of the forces of order to the management of these events, which occurred in two stages. The first took place in 2010. After the death of Yann Lorence, lynched near the Parc des Princes, the Leproux plan, named after the president of PSG at the time, was put in place. It leads to a big repression of PSG supporters. Then you have the second stage: the period 2013-2015, with the demonstrations against the Labor law, but also the attacks, and three years later, the yellow vests.
A doctrine is being put in place, according to which we want to mobilize the police as little as possible on football matches in order to preserve the workforce. To do this, we organize the stadiums, and we limit the movement of supporters to the most risky matches. Add to that several months of Covid where the matches were played behind closed doors… When an event of the magnitude of Saturday takes place, with large movements of supporters, we end up perceiving a certain problem of preparation.