French police, football fans, and a history of violence: ‘They don’t care’

It is almost three years since a stark verdict was delivered on the chaotic scenes that preceded the 2022 Champions League final in Paris. “It is remarkable that no one lost their lives,” concluded an independent review of that fraught evening that ended with Real Madrid beating Liverpool.

UEFA, as event organisers, was found to bear the greatest responsibility for the “failures which almost led to disaster”, but within 220 pages of evidence and analysis were pointed criticisms of those that had been tasked with maintaining order around the Stade de France.

The panel — commissioned by UEFA three days after the final took place — called it a “defective policing model” that was slow to react and needlessly heavy-handed. Tear gas and pepper spray had been used indiscriminately by officers from the Paris Prefecture de Police. “Weaponry which has no place at a festival of football,” the review said.

The findings presented an opportunity for policing reform around major sporting events in France, but the past 12 months would indicate it is yet to be grasped. To cite examples involving just English clubs:

• Manchester United fans were subjected to tear gas following their Europa League quarter-final away at Lyon on April 10.
• Newcastle United supporters offered multiple accounts of police using what they felt to be unnecessary force after a Champions League tie in Marseille on November 25.
• Crystal Palace fans were pepper-sprayed outside Strasbourg’s Stade de la Meinau in the Conference League on November 27.

The pattern repeats, on and on.

“The way the French police football games is completely outdated,” Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, tells The Athletic. “It doesn’t meet any of the modern standards of de-escalation. It’s a very basic psychology. If you treat people like they are dangerous, they are more likely to act in an anti-social way.”

It will be Liverpool’s turn to head back to France tomorrow for their Champions League date at Marseille and, inevitably, those making the journey will be braced for problems.

European fixtures in France often bring friction for travelling supporters, either in the restrictive measures imposed upon them before and after games or the aggressive policing methods.

“It’s pretty safe to conclude that across France there are some very serious problems in their approach to policing,” says Professor Clifford Stott of Keele University, an expert on crowd psychology and public order policing, and a panellist in the 2022 Champions League final review.

“They are too reliant on old school methodologies and perspectives, control-based methodologies, and almost entirely absent of capability for dialogue and engagement.”

It was in the hour that followed Newcastle United’s 2-1 defeat by Marseille that the mood darkened for the 3,000 or so travelling supporters. Ordered to vacate the seating areas inside the Stade Velodrome, concourses became overcrowded in front of a line of riot police.

“There wasn’t enough room for everyone, so we were stood shoulder to shoulder, bordering on crushed,” says Steve Mallam, a Newcastle fan in attendance that night.

“There were people there with kids, so there was an air of panic then. It was so tight that if someone on one side of the room moved a bit, then the person on the other side would move a few feet. The riot police were holding us there and if anyone went too close, they were shoving us back with a shield.”

Mallam says that lasted for over an hour before fans were released in groups of 500 to catch trams back into the city. “I was off my feet at one stage, just being held in the air by the crush of people,” Mallam adds. “I was amazed we got down the stairs without someone being seriously hurt. All it would have taken would have been for someone to trip or fall and they would have been trampled. That would’ve been unavoidable.”

Newcastle made their displeasure known the next day. A club statement cited “unnecessary and disproportionate force” from the police, who were alleged to have used “pepper spray, batons and shields, with numerous supporters being indiscriminately assaulted”. A complaint to UEFA, Marseille and the French police was also lodged, with an investigation ongoing. Newcastle officials have spoken with counterparts at Marseille in an attempt to improve security measures and bring an element of change to the experiences of visiting fans.

Marseille can be a daunting place for visiting fans and is no stranger to football-related disorder. There was widespread trouble around games staged in the city for the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2016, and the threat of violence from locals has led authorities to impose draconian measures.

Liverpool fans, like those from Newcastle, have been told they must gather at a designated meeting point, Place de la Joliette, four and a half hours before kick-off tomorrow, where they will be escorted by police to the stadium via a mandatory metro train. There has already been a warning that it could take as long as two hours after the full-time whistle to return to the city.

Heavy-handed policing, though, is not unique to Marseille. In the same week Newcastle visited, Crystal Palace supporters encountered their own problems in France. Although there had been minor disorder between rival groups of Palace fans in the city centre earlier in the day, supporters at the ground were confronted with a familiar sight as they attempted to leave following their team’s 2-1 defeat.

“The police had blocked off a way to the tram stop and there was a high presence of them, maybe 20 or 25,” says Liam Doe, a Palace season ticket holder. “A few Palace fans went up to them to speak and they were pepper-sprayed.

“There was one lad I know, home and away with Palace, and he said he was going to go and speak with the police because he could speak French. He walked over and he was banged with the spray as well about 30 seconds later. He was in agony. There were a couple of fans on the floor.

“It felt so unnecessary. I don’t know what had been said, but it wasn’t like it was 200 or 300 people having a row with the police. It was a handful of people who were speaking with them.

“It felt as though they were eager to have a pop. It was strange because none of our other European trips have been like that.”

Palace are European first-timers this season, but these problems — in France, at least — are nothing new.

Manchester United launched their own investigation on the back of a trip to Lyon in April, the first leg of a Europa League quarter-final. Again there was tear gas used on crowds after full time, again there were attempts from the local authorities to justify what they called in a statement issued to the BBC “moderate, proportionate and necessary” actions.

Duncan Drasdo, the Manchester United Supporters Trust chief executive, wrote on X that “there are almost always problems with the French police. All too often, they create the aggro they are supposed to be preventing”.

Stott, who is a regular observer of European football in his professional capacity, would not disagree.

“It would be wrong to attribute this to every police force in France, every local jurisdiction and every stadium, but you’ve only got to look at the evidence to see a general pattern,” he says.

“Across the French context, there are several key locations where football fixtures with an international dimension, i.e., UEFA, are consistently and systematically running into problems where fans experience heavy-handed, disproportionate and often quite dangerous policing.”

The French authorities are not well-versed in the challenges posed by large numbers of away supporters. Domestic games, most notably in their top division, Ligue 1, often see visiting fans banned or numbers capped at less than 500. Ten years ago, in the wake of the Paris terror attacks, a blanket ban was imposed on all away fans across the country due to stretched resources.

Government ministers and police point to a pattern of violence and widespread disorder within their domestic leagues to justify their regular interventions.

A Nantes supporter died in 2023 following fighting with rival fans from Nice; the same year, Lyon’s team bus was stoned by fans in Marseille. Fabio Grosso, then Lyon’s head coach, was left with a bloodied face and 12 stitches in an incident that drew condemnation from FIFA president Gianni Infantino.

AP reported that Gerald Darmanin, the former French Interior Minister, claimed that more than 100 police officers had been injured in football-related incidents during the 2022-23 season, with a surge in violent incidents attributed to fans returning to stadiums after the Covid-19 pandemic. That, in part, has increasingly led to zero-tolerance policing becoming the norm.

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Football policing in the UK has not been without controversies — West Midlands Police are embroiled in a major political row over the process that led to fans of Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv being banned from attending a Europa League tie at Aston Villa this season — but their approach has markedly altered in the past 20 years.

They favour engagement and interaction, with an emphasis placed on intelligence-led action. Even uniforms worn by police at football matches are casual, with baseball caps worn to soften the optics.

In France, it is the polar opposite. Shields and batons are routinely at the ready. Visiting supporters can be seen as a problem the authorities would rather not have to deal with.

This was made clear for two Champions League games in 2025.

Feyenoord supporters were prohibited from attending the fixture at Lille last January, before Ajax fans were stopped from travelling to Marseille in September. Supporters from PSV, Besiktas, Basel and Sevilla have also faced travel bans for European fixtures in France since 2023.

Allowing travelling fans, however, still brings complications. Bayern Munich, Germany’s biggest club, were told on the eve of facing Paris Saint-Germain in November that all fans travelling by coach had to gather at a toll booth outside of the French capital. Their return journey to Germany, meanwhile, would only be allowed to begin at 5am once escorted out of the city.

Bayern called the measures “unacceptable” in a club statement and followed that up with a promise of legal action against the local authorities. The Paris Administrative Court found in favour of the police prefecture, who had claimed as many as 150 “risk” fans would be expected at the Parc des Princes. “This approach is unprecedented,” Jan-Christian Dreesen, Bayern’s CEO, said.

Fans of Freiburg encountered similar issues ahead of their Europa League tie in Nice. The visitors had to travel to the ground on designated buses without access to bathroom facilities, only able to redeem their tickets at a meeting point. Head coach Julian Schuster addressed the matter in his post-match press conference. “These are things you don’t want to hear about,” he said. “We don’t wish such conditions on anyone.”

But the cycle, whether it is focused upon so-called “bubble” travel conditions or the use of chemical munitions on groups, is yet to be broken.

“Part of the equation here, and it was perfectly demonstrated in Paris, is that the police are undertrained because there are so many strict restraining orders around French football,” says Evain.

“There is a more general problem with the police, that goes way beyond football, that it’s a force that resists any sort of recommendation or input or feedback from the outside world.

“In the UK, you have dialogue with fans, feedback and relations with fan groups and authorities. That’s how policing improved in the UK. That hasn’t happened in France. It’s a very closed mentality.”

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France is not alone in facing these problems. Turkish football has regularly had to tackle violence from supporters, and European away games, such as Galatasaray, have long forced strict restrictions upon those attending. Switzerland and Portugal, too, are also seeing strong-arm policing methods.

The concern with France, though, is an apparent reluctance to learn the lessons of the 2022 Champions League final.

The independent review into events in Paris that day outlined a litany of police failings. It drew parallels with the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, which resulted in the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans who attended an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

“The similarities include the fact that both events were preventable, and both were caused by the failures of those responsible for public safety,” the review said.

It was found that thousands of fans were “corralled in an unsafe environment, unable to progress or escape”. Compounding that was the violence of local youths, who attacked match-going fans without the intervention of the police.

Ticketing problems, with Darmanin claiming at a press conference held two days after the final that there had been “industrial-scale fraud” without any evidence, caused further issues against a chaotic backdrop that saw tear gas and pepper spray used, predominantly on Liverpool fans. That was said to be “completely inappropriate as it was both life-threatening and disproportionate”.

“The Paris police acted in ways that created potentially fatally unsafe outcomes,” says Stott. “That is widely understood to have been a near miss.

“Our conclusion to that was that the Paris police acted autonomously, they didn’t inform stakeholders about key decisions they made on the day, and they did it independently, without communication.”

Stott feels that “part of the reason for that is that they don’t care. They act autonomously and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. They have a level of power that has no checks and balances against what they do.”

Newcastle are still to receive a response from Marseille and the local police to their complaints in November and will return to France for their final fixture of the Champions League group phase when facing PSG later this month.

That is widely considered to be a more attractive journey to make than Marseille, where Les Wright, 61, is heading with Liverpool. It will be his 120th European away trip, with his 18-year-old son, Eoghan, travelling with him.

“Marseille is like Saint-Denis (where Paris’ Stade de France is based), but about 10 times worse,” says Wright. “In places like that, you find that the police tend to overreact to situations around football matches, which causes problems in itself. They’re heavy-handed and it puts people on edge. It’s the kind of place where you need to be risk-averse.”

Wright was in Paris for the Champions League final, too. “Horrendous,” he says. “Some Liverpool fans understandably vowed never to travel to France again. We’ve played PSG and Toulouse away since then without any serious bother, thankfully.

”It’s not just an issue in France. Too often, police abroad have this outdated concept of ‘English hooligans’. The stats speak for themselves in terms of the behaviour of Liverpool fans in Europe in recent years. If you show people respect, you get respect back.”

Stott calls Marseille “problematic” ahead of Liverpool’s visit.

“I worry for every club side that goes there,” he says. “The fans need to be extremely cautious and recognise the threat and vulnerability that they are likely to encounter in that environment.

“It’ll be British fans who are treated as the problem. And they are the problem, simply because they’re there. The whole thing is completely unacceptable, so you have to ask UEFA: ‘What are you doing about this? Why are you allowing this to continue?’

“People are travelling to watch a game of football organised by them, but their well-being is being put at risk as a function of the policing enacted by your local hosts. There’s very little indication it’s getting better.”

Additional reporting by James Pearce and Chris Waugh