{"id":30748,"date":"2022-05-31T17:11:39","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T17:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/liverpool-fans-paris-nightmare-do-the-french-sports-and-interior-ministers-claims-stack-up\/"},"modified":"2022-05-31T17:11:39","modified_gmt":"2022-05-31T17:11:39","slug":"liverpool-fans-paris-nightmare-do-the-french-sports-and-interior-ministers-claims-stack-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/liverpool-fans-paris-nightmare-do-the-french-sports-and-interior-ministers-claims-stack-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Liverpool fans ‘Paris nightmare: Do the French sports and interior ministers’ claims stack up?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Last night, Liverpool chairman Tom Werner sent a letter to the France’s sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera asking her to apologise for her comments about the supposed causes of a 37-minute delay to the start of the Champions League final in Paris on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Monday, Oudea-Castera and French interior minister Gerald Darmanin held a press conference where they blamed \u201cBritish fans\u201d for arriving late to the Stade de France, despite the enormous photographic and video evidence to the contrary. The pair also blamed \u201cfake tickets\u201d, claiming there were as many as 40,000 in circulation around the northern outskirts of Paris, near where the ground is located.<\/p>\n
Here, The Athletic<\/em> looks at each of those claims, which do not align with the conclusions of Matthieu Valet, a spokesperson for France’s Independent Union of Police Commissioners, who believes local youths were responsible for causing the disruption\u2026<\/p>\n French interior minister Gerald Darmanin: <\/strong>“At 21:00 (Paris time, 8pm in the UK), when the match was supposed to start, 97 per cent of the Spanish supporters were present, only 50 per cent of the British supporters had got into their section, which does show the difficulties that arose only from the entrance relating to the Liverpool supporters and not the other entrances. “<\/em><\/p>\n Does this stack up?<\/strong><\/p>\n While the numbers might tell the truth, the respective access points allocated to the two clubs made it easier for Real Madrid fans to get into the stadium. This, however, ignores the reality that Madrid fans faced their own problems at security, with their supporters telling Spanish media about their anger at dismal policing, stolen tickets and violent attacks on their way to the game, as well as on their way out after it.<\/p>\n Before kick-off, while Madrid fans came from the north, from their fan park at Parc de la Legion d’Honneur just 1.5km away, and passed through a ticket checkpoint where there was lots of space and enough stewards and police to deal with any approach, the geography at the other end of the ground, where Liverpool supporters were meant to be situated at kick-off time, invited huge challenges.<\/p>\n There were far more than just the 20,000 fans for the Liverpool section of the stadium traveling from the center of Paris, because many thousands of fans with tickets in the neutral parts of the ground, as well as some Real fans who did not attend their fan zone, and journalists, used the same RER line and the same Metro stop. From that station, there was just one route to the \u201cStade\u201d, which was supposed to take 17 minutes but for many took as long as three hours.<\/p>\n From the Metro, Liverpool fans, Real Madrid ones and \u201cneutrals\u201d were directed to a narrow passageway on the side of a dual carriageway where police vans clogged up lots of space.<\/p>\n Three hours before kick-off, the build-up had already reached an uncomfortable level. The Athletic<\/em> writers James Pearce and Oliver Kay traveled to the match separately but had exactly the same experiences. Concerned about the pressure in the crowd, both managed to climb over a barrier before approaching the Stade de France.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n After walking around the stadium to reach the accreditation center, it became clear Madrid fans were not facing the same geographical issues. The Athletic<\/em>‘s Caoimhe O’Neill, who approached the stadium via the Madrid end because her ticket was in a neutral zone, experienced two ticket checks, one by the police and another by stewards.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the French authorities do not seem to have acknowledged that there were very different arrangements in place at the two ends of the stadium.<\/p>\n They might have felt they had reason to make different arrangements for the respective fanbases. But if that was the case, that should be made clear.<\/p>\n Darmanin: <\/strong>“There was massive fraud to an industrial level and organization of fake tickets because the pre-filtering by the Stade de France and the French football federation saw that 70 per cent of tickets were fake.”<\/em><\/p>\n Does this stack up?<\/strong><\/p>\n By simple mathematics this is impossible, because it would mean more than 40,000 fake tickets were in circulation. For the authorities to know that, in a three-hour period, even the low end of this estimate would require 167 people to be trying to get in illegally per minute. That’s roughly three per second. <\/p>\n There’s no doubt there were some fake tickets in circulation, but the numbers the French government are talking about do not seem remotely credible. <\/p>\n Dan Nicolson, who has run big events aimed at Liverpool’s fanbase, says the claim is absurd: \u201cTo shift tens of thousands of units of anything in just three weeks is exceptional business. If you’re doing that offline without retail outlets you’d need a network of at least 500 willing people doing an average of 80 tickets each. “<\/p>\n If a forged ticket operation were to be launched online instead, Nicolson believes scammers would need a fulfillment service to rival some of Europe’s biggest e-commerce operations, while avoiding the attention of the authorities over a three-week period. \u201cIt isn’t happening,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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