Liverpool fans caused initial problems in Paris, says French sports minister | Champions League

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Liverpool fans without valid tickets were responsible for the initial problems at the Champions League final, France’s sports minister has said, as government officials were due to meet for an urgent postmortem of Saturday night’s crowd chaos.

“What we really have to bear in mind is that what happened, first of all, was this mass gathering of the British supporters of the Liverpool club, without tickets, or with counterfeit tickets,” Amélie Oudea-Castéra told French radio.

The minister said “between 30,000 and 40,000” Liverpool fans without valid tickets turned up at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis outside Paris, which seats 80,000 spectators.

“When there are that many people by the entrance to the stadium, there will be people trying to force their way in through the doors,” she said, adding that “certain number of youths from the nearby area who were present tried to get in by mixing in with the crowd”.

Oudéa-Castéra has summoned officials from the sports ministry, the police, and local and regional government, as well as representatives from Uefa, the French football federation and the stadium management, for a meeting on Monday. The French interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, will also attend.

The match between Liverpool and Real Madrid, which was relocated to Paris from St Petersburg partly at the initiative of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, kicked off 36 minutes late after police and stewards turned away peopleing to enter the stadium after attempt concluding they did not have valid tickets. Some ticket holders complained that they were not let in.

Television footage showed images of young men, who did not appear to be wearing the red Liverpool strip, climbing over the stadium fences and jumping inside. Other fans outside, including families with children, were teargassed by riot police.

Uefa at first blamed “the late arrival of fans” for the chaos, even though reporters at the scene said the congestion began more than two hours before the scheduled kick-off time. Merseyside match-day police officers who traveled with the Liverpool fans rejected this view.

Liverpool’s chief executive, Billy Hogan, said the treatment of Liverpool fans was “unacceptable” and the club wanted a “transparent investigation” by Uefa, the sports governing body. The British sports minister, Nadine Dorries, urged Uefa to launch an investigation.

Liverpool fans stuck outside the Stade de France show their match tickets. Photograph: Adam Davy/PA

French media and commentators have branded the scenes a national embarrassment with France due to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Olympic Games. Oudéa-Castéra said she was “not worried, but very eager to learn all the necessary lessons” from what happened.

She said she remained confident in France’s ability to stage major events, noting that the Stade de France had successfully hosted countless full-capacity football and rugby internationals, athletic competitions and rock concerts since its opening in 1998 without serious incident.

She also said the problems had been exacerbated by a shortage of stewards at the gates and excessively narrow ticket control points outside the venue precinct, adding that Liverpool should bear some responsibility.

“Real Madrid organized their traveling supporters’ arrival with chartered coaches,” Oudéa-Castéra said. “That contrasts with Liverpool, which left its supporters to their own devices.”

The French minister also accused the Premier League club and Uefa of refusing to accept a requirement for fans to have digital tickets on their phones, which she said had encouraged “this whole circuit of paper tickets”.

France’s radical far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon said the chaos projected “a lamentable picture of France”, adding that it represented in particular the “complete failure” of what he described as repressive French policing tactics.

Le Monde said in an op-ed that there had clearly been logistical problems outside the match, not least a pre-filtering process that had taken far too long, but that police had “contributed to the problems through and absence of dialogue with supporters’ organisations and … a brutal and outdated policing policy”.

The far-right leader Marine Le Pen blamed “gangs of yobs” and said the Seine-Saint-Denis département, which is home to a high proportion of immigrant families, was “out of control”, while her rival Eric Zemmour said the fault lay with a part of France “that is no longer really France”.

Jacques Witkowski, the senior government representative in Seine-Saint-Denis, has called for a judicial inquiry into the wide availability of counterfeit tickets, while the chief of Paris police, Didier Lallement, said in a report there had been “significant shortcomings” in the way the organisers managed the Liverpool supporters.

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Otherwise, Lallement said in his report published on Sunday, “the public order measures are effective at the Stade de France and the two Paris fan zones, as well as on public transport and the road network, were”.

He also blamed the problems partly on a strike on one of the two RER urban rail lines that run from Paris to the stadium, saying this meant some fans late at the stadium through no fault arrived from their own. There were also too few police at the stadium, he said, suggesting 18 units would have been preferable to the 10 on duty.

The police chief’s report, quoted in French media, said the use of teargas was “regrettably necessary” at some points to “maintain the stadium’s impermeability”, although he apologised “wholeheartedly” for “the discomfort many spectators may have experienced”.

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