Dimitri Payet is getting used to a stinging feeling on the side of his face. In August, during Marseille’s game against Nice, Payet was hit by a bottle and threw it back, sparking a brawl between supporters, players and staff that caused the game to be abandoned. On Sunday, Payet was again struck with a bottle. This time he stayed on the ground – twice bitten, once shy – but, again, the game could not be finished. The Marseille corner-taker, so the joke goes, has become the most dangerous job in football.
Ligue 1 has reached a crisis point as fan violence makes more headlines even than Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe. Marseille are regular attendees, still French football’s most disliked club despite the jealousy provoked by Paris Saint-Germain’s billions.
Their matches this season against Montpellier and Angers were delayed and fixtures against Nice and Lyon abandoned. In February, Marseille supporters stormed the training ground in protest and threw projectiles, one of which injured defender Alvaro Gonzalez. Their next match was postponed through fears for the players’ safety.
But this extends far beyond Provence. The Derby du Nord between Lens and Lille was delayed for 30 minutes after supporters clashed at half-time. A bus carrying Bordeaux supporters was attacked on the way to Montpellier, leaving 16 supporters injured. Le Havre striker Khalid Boutaib scuffled with a fan. Nine Ligue 1 matches have been delayed or abandoned this season due to fan violence, comfortably more than in every other major European league combined. French football has become western Europe’s wild west.
It is as if the hooligan element of club support simply bottled up – literally, in the case of poor Payet – their fever over the long period of lockdowns and empty stadia and have sensationally made up for lost time. French football’s last decade has been littered with similar issues – Mathieu Valbuena’s effigy hung by Marseille supporters, Bastia fans fighting with Lyon players and throwing wooden sticks at then-PSG winger Lucas Moura, Metz fans injuring Lyon goalkeeper Anthony Lopes with a firecracker – but there is grave concern at the rapid acceleration of incidents.
To an extent this is a failure of ownership. On Sunday evening, Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas blamed Marseille’s players for influencing the referee and ensuring that the match could not restart; the referee challenged that view. The LFP (governing body of the French professional leagues) blamed regional authorities for the two-hour confusion over a possible recommencement; those authorities subsequently claimed that was nonsense. Owners are predisposed to defend, ignore or tacitly accept misbehaviour by their own supporters for fear of a backlash. Each incident typically begins with missile-throwing and ends in mud-slinging.
And the issues are fuelled by historic inaction. A group of MPs have called for regulatory change that would allow for stadium bans to be increased in length but insist that such bans must be far more freely imposed for proven serious offenders. The French sports ministry wants to create a national unit to tackle violence, formed of specialist gendarmes with a remit to identify and arrest offenders. Given the ease at which supporters have entered the field of play, something must change there.
Another issue lies in the punishments handed to clubs through stadium closures or, in the case of Nice, a points deduction. Fan groups believe that these community sentences – punishing the club as a whole rather than purely targeting the individuals concerned, actually exacerbates the problem because it forges a determination to defend the honour of the club. Incidents are so widespread that the actions of one set of supporters provokes a retaliation from another. And so a situation spirals out of control.
“The response has to be as individualised as is possible,” said executive director of the Football Supporters Europe network Ronan Evain. “The feeling of solidarity will be stronger if everybody is punished. I’m yet to see any substantive evidence that collective punishment works.”
French football has created the perfect petri dish for violence to fester. Supporters are amongst the most passionate in Europe and contain large pockets of extremism. The rivalries are historic and intense. The policing has been inadequate and the system to organise them too piecemeal. The lack of effective punishments has not dissuaded potential perpetrators. Authorities are left playing catch-up on a problem they never truly had a hold of in the first place.
But this matters for French football. This week, sports minister Roxana Maracineanu has warned that the “survival of French football is at stake” and that hardly feels hyperbolic. Nobody wants to sanitise the verve of French supporters or the atmosphere at derby matches, but the reputation of the league is now in the gutter. After losing one broadcast deal halfway through last season, that reputation has never mattered more to the financial future of Ligue 1.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2ZfazIa
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