French football wrestlers riot in stadium violence

Just 3 minutes 54 seconds after the match, Dimitri Payet jogged to the corner flag at Groupama Stadium. The match between his team, Marseille and the host, Lyon, is young and out of shape. No target. Almost no time to take a chance. Everyone, the fans and the players, is still settling in.

In the stands above him, 32-year-old Wilfried Serriere, a food delivery driver, looked down and saw a half-liter bottle of water at his feet. It was full. Payet took the corner. Turn back. In images captured by the stadium’s security cameras and later shown in the courtroom, Serriere can be seen picking up the bottle, lowering his hood and throwing it.

A beat later, Payet fell to the grass, clutching his face. The bottle that caught him blush on cheeks.

Payet’s teammates rushed to his aid. Lyon goalkeeper Anthony Lopes, pointed at his fans, begging for calm. Later, Serriere told a court he “didn’t know what was going on in my head: the euphoria, I don’t know”. He accepts that he threw the bottle at Payet, but he cannot explain why.

The rest of France have spent the first months of the football season asking themselves the same question. A wave of violence has swept through Ligue 1, the country’s top league, since fans returned to their stadiums in August after a year-long absence caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Two matches, both involving Marseille, were suspended – and ultimately postponed – after Payet was thrown by an object from the stands. In Lyon, the players were able to play quickly. In the previous incident, in Nice, there was an angry confrontation on the field between Marseille players and hundreds of opposing fans. That confrontation also had consequences: A Nice fan was given a 12-month suspended prison sentence for kicking Payet, and a Marseille coach was banned for the rest of the season for punching a pitch invader.

However, those are just the two most famous incidents. Fans flooded the field during matches at Lens and Angers. There have been intense battles between rival groups of extremists before and after the match in several cities. Missiles were dropped at Montpellier and Metz and Parc des Princes, home of Paris St.-Germain.

In total, nine Ligue 1 matches have been affected by what the Dauphiné Libéré newspaper has described as an “epidemic” of violence, one so pervasive that French football authorities consider it to be an epidemic. an existential threat. Vincent Labrune, president of the French federation, has called it nothing more than “a question of the survival of our sport”.

If that sounds hyperbolic, it’s at least rooted in realism. There is a fear that violence could cause financial diversion; Roxana Maracineanu, the country’s sports minister, has said that French football cannot “collectively afford” not to deliver the content that the league’s broadcasters have paid for. But there is also concern that it could make France an unsuitable place for players to work.

At Serriere’s sentencing, Axel Daurat, a lawyer representing Payet and Marseille, testified that the player had suffered “significant” psychological effects from being attacked twice in three months. “The fear is there every time he puts the ball down for a corner,” said Daurat.

But while the potential effect is clear, there is less progress on the cause. Labrune has suggested that the rise in disorder is best read to reflect the state of French society in the post-pandemic era: “Anxiety, anxiety, rift, debate and – I must say – a bit crazy .”

That explanation, however, has not entirely stood up to scrutiny. France is hardly alone in feeling a certain amount of civic discomfort as it emerges, paused and uncertain, into an uncomfortable new reality. Most of Europe’s other major leagues, facing similar realities, have yet to witness anything quite like the outbreak of violence faced by Ligue 1.

“It feels a bit like cod psychology Ronan Evain, chief executive of Football Supporters Europe, said it had something to do with the tension in society showing on the stadium. It is more likely that the violence illustrates structural, institutional failure, he said.

“It’s like the clubs have lost a bit of their expertise,” he said. “In problem between Lens and Lille, there is no buffer zone between the home fans and the away team. I haven’t seen that at a game in 20 years, maybe more. Clubs are heavily focused on Covid protocols for getting back into stadiums. Perhaps there was not enough focus on security.”

Evain argues that could be related to the loss of experienced managers and security personnel during the pandemic, and he draws a parallel between the French experience and the scenes at Wembley Stadium in London in July, when thousands of ticketless fans stormed through the gates as England played Italy in the Euro 2020 final. ONE important report This month chronicled the policy failures that left stadium security officers in an impossible – and potentially deadly – situation that day. “You can’t ask someone who’s underpaid, untrained and in terrible working conditions to risk their health to keep someone from playing,” says Evain.

Nicolas Hourcade, a sociologist at the École Centrale de Lyon who specializes in fan movements, attributes a lack of expertise to the financial difficulties faced by the French teams. France, alone among the major European leagues, chose not to conclude The 2019-20 season was disrupted due to its pandemic and its teams are still reeling from the subsequent collapse of the league’s broadcast deal.

“It is possible that clubs have not invested enough in security,” he said, “which would explain why measures are sometimes not enough.”

But while that provides a possible explanation for why French football has created fertile ground for violence, it offers no insight into its roots. Maracineanu, the sports minister, has blamed France’s extremist groups, calling on their leaders to “take control of your army.” But it’s not quite that simple.

At Serriere’s hearing it was reported that he had been a Lyon fan for 15 years – although reports said he attended the trial in a Bayern Munich shirt – but not be a member of any organized group. In other words, he is not an extremist.

Pierre Barthélemy, a lawyer representing the extremist movement, said: “There have been cases involving extremist groups. He cites two, specifically, including the field invasion at Lens, which he said was triggered by the presence of “Belgian thugs” among visiting Lille fans, and a tried at a match in Montpellier that extremists boycotted.

“When the game in Nice was suspended, it was because the authorities had people throwing rockets on the pitch for 40 or 50 minutes,” Barthélemy said. “These are not organized incidents. They are spontaneous, and most do not come from extremists. “

However, that only makes them harder to police. France has some of the harshest penalties for disorderly conduct in Europe, including the possibility of closing stands or even entire stadiums, Evain said.

He fears the current outbreak will be met with a “populist” response: increasing calls to monitor fans at stadiums and celebrate any incident, even a personal act, with collective punishment. At least one club owner has privately confided that he would agree to play behind closed doors if the problem continued.

But perhaps more importantly, the atomic nature of the incidents in France makes them more difficult to understand. Sociologist Hourcade said: “Violence perpetrated by extremists and incidents perpetrated by other fans are unrelated.

Violence can be an organizational failure, he said. Or perhaps long-standing grievances among extremist groups are emerging after lying dormant during the pandemic.

But putting it all together is the feeling that the stadium has become a place where boundaries and taboos can be crossed, and 3:54 entering a game, when the final whistle has just ended and the game not yet started, a fan can look at a bottle and not know why, pick it up and throw it at a player, and deal another blow to the image French football presents to the world.