Liverpool supporters were officially absolved of any blame for the chaos which marred May’s Champions League final on Wednesday, at the end of a French senate investigation which instead found that a series of organisational failures led to the “avoidable fiasco.”
Fans including women, children and the disabled were left with serious physical injuries and mental trauma after European football’s showpiece event at the Stade de France, where they were beaten with riot shields and tear gassed by police, locked in dangerous crushes outside the stadium, and mugged by armed gangs of local thieves.
Though senior government figures including interior minister Gérald Darmanin and the Paris chief of police Didier Lallement sought to blame fans for the disorder, claiming without providing any evidence that up to 40,000 fans had tried to storm the stadium with fake tickets, senate inquiry co-chairman Laurent Lafon said: “Liverpool supporters wanting to support their team are not responsible for what happened. It is unfair to have sought to blame Liverpool supporters for the disturbances as the interior minister [Darmanin] has done, in order to deflect attention from the state’s inability to adequately manage the crowd.”
The senate’s report makes 15 recommendations of changes to legislation so that the mistakes of organisations including the police, the French Football Federation and train operators are not repeated in future. Fans, British politicians including Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, and Liverpool FC itself have all demanded an apology from the French government in light of the report’s conclusions.
It is now irrefutable that Liverpool supporters were “unfairly blamed”, as the report says, for the incidents in Saint-Denis. Anybody who says they were is ignorant to the truth which the inquiry has proven, six weeks after the event.
Lafon’s colleague in the senate François-Noël Buffet added: “If [Darmanin] had admitted to mistakes and apologised, there would have been no huge controversy.” While that point is valid, it is also true that the French government’s cover-up would have been allowed to stand if fans had not organised themselves immediately in order to counter it.
Even before the delayed final eventually kicked off, supporters were posting audio-visual testimony of their experiences online, providing time-stamped documentation of the organisational failures to prevent the false narrative that fans were at fault to take hold.
Once the investigation was announced, fans contacted the French senate in order to make clear their desire to testify, with representatives of both Liverpool and Real Madrid appearing in Paris in order to contest the mistruths spread by the state to protect its own reputation.
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Anybody who has travelled to a European away fixture will know that fans are so often treated like animals by law enforcement, without any dignity or respect, merely for trying to attend a sporting event. Buffet even explained how outdated and frankly xenophobic stereotypes about English football fans had played a significant role in how the Champions League final was policed in France.
“One lesson learned that football supporters have not been listened to and have been misunderstood. Liverpool supporters have been identified as hooligans, throwing them back to the stereotypes of the 1980s.” Lafon added: “We want the authorities’ view of football supporters to change, that is a strong recommendation that we are making.”
What became increasingly clear throughout the investigation, every time Darmanin or Lallement falsely referred to “the English” as violent, drunken trouble-makers, is that any set of English supporters would have been treated with the same disdain and violence by the French authorities had their club qualified for the final instead of Liverpool.
The fact that a foreign senate has recorded the truth so quickly and so accurately is an enormous win not just for Liverpool fans, but potentially for all English football supporters hoping to travel to matches in Europe. Supporters have demonstrated that by organising themselves and communicating effectively they can enact positive change and cause the authorities’ stance to be altered.
However, much of the reaction from fans of other clubs, both on the night and in reaction to the senate’s findings subsequently, has been disappointing. Rather than demonstrations of empathy of understanding for what fellow football fans - fellow human beings - have been through, so many have descended into the juvenile depths of football tribalism.
“Got what they deserved”, “It’s never their fault”, and other dreadful clichés have been dished out by fans of clubs with similar aspirations of reaching showpiece finals, including clubs who could easily draw Paris Saint-Germain in Europe next season leaving them to face the same police force.
The fact that so many supporters choose to blame those who share the same passion as them, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is a major reason the authorities in France, the UK and beyond can continue to get away with treating them as sub-humans.
This time, Liverpool supporters have earned a swift and significant win against powerful opposition. It can be the starting point for a huge change in the match-going experience of spectators across Europe, but only if fellow fans are willing to suspend their petty jibes and point scoring for the greater good of all.
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