Liverpool football fans were treated as if they were “a drunken 1980s hooligan stereotype” as they were falsely blamed for trouble at this year’s European Champions League Cup final, the French have admitted.
The results of a comprehensive parliamentary enquiry into the match in the Paris suburbs showed that the authorities at first did everything “to blame Liverpool supporters”.
This included unfair assumptions that Reds fans were drunken troublemakers, looking for a fight, the Senate report notes.
The May 28 match at Stade de France, which Liverpool lost to Real Madrid, saw fans tear gassed and beaten with truncheons, after they were accused of trying to break into the ground.
In fact, many of them were themselves attacked by local thugs, and police riot control officers.
Afterwards, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin claimed that “30 to 40,000 fake tickets” were in circulation.
Mr Darmanin later apologised for the bad management of the showpiece event but stopped short of extending the apology to Liverpool fans.
The new report, presented by inquiry co-chairmen François-Noël Buffet and Laurent Lafon, was severely critical of Mr Darmanin.
Mr Lafon said: “It’s unfair to have blamed Liverpool supporters for the disturbances, as the Interior Minister did has done to deflect attention from France’s inability to adequately manage the crowd.”
And Mr Buffet said: “Liverpool fans have been presented as the people who were mainly at fault for all these problems. That isn’t right.”
The report pointed to “a chain of administrative errors” from the authorities involved in the organisation of the match.
Mr Lafon said: “There was no real coordination between the different organisations and nobody had any foresight.”
Mr Buffet said “most of the delinquency took place around the stadium after the match. This should have been foreseen”.
He added: “The police were negligent on the petty crime around the stadium and the failed pre-filter check meant criminals were able to enter the stadium.”
Ronan Evain, executive director of the Football Supporters Europe association, told French investigators: “Liverpool supporters were treated exactly as we are treated all year round –as a threat.”
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And Joe Blott, chairman of the Liverpool Supporters Union, said: “The police stayed in the 1980s thinking that we were hooligans.”
The report also criticised the police’s heavy-handed approach to crowd control including the use of tear gas on pensioners and children.
France will host the Rugby World Cup next year and the Olympics in 2024, and the government has insisted they will be well prepared.
Liverpool fans were involved a number of serious hooligan scandals in the 1980s, including the Heysel disaster of 1985, when 39 people – mostly Italians – were killed and 600 were injured when a wall collapsed before that year’s European Cup Final in Brussels.
This resulted in 14 Liverpool fans going to prison for manslaughter, and English clubs being banned from European football games until the 1990s.
