CL Final Liverpool v Real Madrid (Paris)

[Irishnev]

Saw some video of a Madrid fan getting kicked on the ground and driven over…. No idea if real or not - won’t post here

Also this

[ame="https://twitter.com/joe_co_uk/status/1531289415489929216"]https://twitter.com/joe_co_uk/status/1531289415489929216[/ame]

[ame="https://twitter.com/matty95davies/status/1530859575812968451"]https://twitter.com/matty95davies/status/1530859575812968451[/ame]

[Buzzo]

That all sounds and looks absolutely horrific.

Feels like there is something more sinister behind it.

[Maxiedge]

This is heartbreaking. I don’t think the gravity of what happened has sunk in yet.

It’s meant to be an amazing day with a carnival-like atmosphere ffs

[Kenneth]

The locals attacking Madrid fans after the match:

[ame]https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1531241993053032449[/ame]

[wiw]

https://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/lfc-asks-fans-share-champions-league-final-experiences

Liverpool FC is asking supporters who attended the Champions League final in Paris to complete a feedback form in order to support the investigation into the operational management of the event.

The club officially requested a formal and transparent investigation into the issues supporters faced in and around Stade de France, before and after kick-off.

The form can be accessed online here and will also be sent via email directly to supporters who purchased a ticket for the game.

LFC would like to thank all fans for taking the time to complete the form and share their experiences with us.

[S-RED]

Ok... it said "70% of tickets coming in were fake". That leaves the other 30% as genuine.

If that 30% is 80,000 tickets the stadium holds, then the other 70% must be 187,000.

My brain.must work.different to everyone else [emoji16]

Are you Oliver Kay?

[ame]https://twitter.com/OliverKay/status/1531249805837705216[/ame]

[Shaggy]

[ame]https://twitter.com/henrywinter/status/1531297807151276033[/ame]

[RedAndWhite]

https://twitter.com/henrywinter/stat...97807151276033

And all of a sudden I sense UEFA becoming interested in investigating this properly.....

[Kenneth]

Yep. If the sponsors are complaining, they’ll believe them.

[Buzzo]

Some very disturbing details here.

Special report: The Champions League final horror – ‘It was starting to crush. We were shaking’

Simon Hughes and more
May 30, 2022

Late on Saturday night in the dank underpasses of a suburb in the northern outskirts of Paris, Neil Salinas was trying to make it back to his hotel after the collapse of the security operation at the most watched club football match on the planet.

Real Madrid had beaten Liverpool, the team Salinas supports. He was in the French capital with his wife and his 18-year-old son. It had been the perfect weekend until the event they were actually there for. None of them really cared about the result anymore. All they wanted to do was get home in one piece.

Upon leaving the stadium, tear gas was fired at the group of Liverpool supporters Salinas was walking with towards the nearest metro station. He says this prompted him to cover his wife’s eyes with his Liverpool scarf and together with his son, they tried to guide her away from danger.

After being held somewhere by police, he thinks beneath a bridge because he could not really see, they progressed towards the station where gangs of local men were trying to hide in the bushes by the road side.

From there, all he remembers is being pinned to the floor, with several of the men on top of him as they tried to take his valuables. When he realised they had his wife by the hair, he managed to fight them off. With blood on his face, he gave chase with his son.

“It was like The Walking Dead,” he tells The Athletic. “I’m 6ft 1in and 17 stone. I’m not easily intimated but I’m really shook up. I’m done with going to the game now.” Salinas says French police were standing close by, no more than 50m away while all of this happened. When five officers showed up on motorbikes, he was given what felt like a stock answer. “‘We can’t help you,’ they kept saying.”

The Stade de France is situated in Seine-Saint-Denis, which is often referred to by its department number, 93. In 2019, the country’s office for national statistics claimed it to be the poorest part of mainland France and it has been portrayed as an area where deep social problems have made it a breeding ground for gangs, hooliganism and radicalisation. By Sunday morning, local authorities had revealed that 68 arrests had been made in the vicinity of the Stade de France around a fixture that was delayed for 37 minutes. Though UEFA initially explained that this development owed to the arrival of late fans, the organisation rowed back due to overwhelming evidence online which contradicted that claim.

On Sunday night, it was suggested in a formal police report that as many as 40,000 attempts were made to enter the stadium with fake tickets or no tickets, causing a huge build-up outside as long as three hours before kick-off. This however, ignores a very inconvenient detail in that as far as two hours before kick-off, in some parts of the ground, stewards had ceased checking tickets as security crumbled away.

That's it for me! Game over, not arsed about me! but my 9-year-old suffered the effects of tear gas after the match, a football match! The police were throwing them for fun! I got hit directly! So toxic, defo not a place for kids! Football is finished #LFC pic.twitter.com/Bg2D9SuOrz

— Carl Clemente (@clemente_carl) May 28, 2022

So far, nobody in a position of significance locally has been willing to openly acknowledge the mistakes of the authorities in charge of the match, including testimonies and footage that show police repeatedly spraying tear gas into the eyes of fans, including children. Such was the disorganisation outside the ground that thousands of fans were kept outside the stadium for between two and three hours just trying to get in, funnelled through a tiny gap in an underpass and with not enough entry points for the 20,000 Liverpool supporters.

Police have also failed to discuss the role of the roaming gangs who caused injuries to people like Salinas. On Sunday, The Athletic considered the testimonies of more than 50 supporters who travelled to the Stade de France separately – including those from Liverpool and Madrid. Their accounts do not tally with the current official version of events and descriptions leave serious questions for match organisers to answer. The police did not answer a series of questions posed by The Athletic during this process, which we have listed at the bottom of the article.

At a press conference on Monday afternoon, French interior minister Gerald Darmanin said that the problems were due to “massive fraud” on “an industrial level” of fake tickets and that the actions of police had “prevented deaths or serious injury”. He said that “the pre-filtering by the Stade de France and the French football federation saw that 70 per cent of tickets were fake”.

French sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said that: “there are witnesses of this and figures corroborate that 30,000 to 40,000 without tickets or with fake tickets. The fake tickets looked incredibly like normal tickets which meant some controls didn’t notice it.”

So far there has been little evidence produced to support this.

UEFA, meanwhile, was also sent 10 questions which it has yet to answer.

Real Madrid’s fanzone was in Parc de la Legion d’Honneur, 1.5km away from the Stade de France. Any supporter arriving from the centre of Paris was asked to use line 13 of the French capital’s metro, disembarking at Porte de Paris to the north of the arena. The geography of this arrangement, according to Madrid supporters in contact with The Athletic, made the process of entering the stadium’s estate very straightforward.

Liverpool supporters, meanwhile, would have to make it through another entry at the other end of the stadium that accounted for as much as three quarters of the venue’s 80,000 capacity. Here, beside a dual carriageway, a single checkpoint at the exterior of the stadium was manned by no more than a dozen stewards two hours before kick-off.

The Liverpool fanzone had been much further away, in Cours de Vincennes, to the east of the city centre. From the Stade de France metro stop on line B, signs outside the stadium suggested a 17-minute walk. For many, that walk would instead take as long as two and a half hours.

The graphics below show that route. X and Y mark the gates Liverpool fans were supposed to enter by. M is the train station.
















After initially approaching the ground from Av. Francois Mitterrand, the route swung left on the Av. des Fruitiers.

At the end of that road, more than two hours before kick-off, there was a build-up of fans with gendarmerie (a French national police force) forming a cordon. After a 10 to 15-minute wait, thousands were allowed to turn right onto Rue Jean-Philippe Rameau, where there were more fans socialising in a row of bars and restaurants.

The Stade de France is essentially situated on an island. To the north and to the east is the water of a canal, and to the south and west is a dual carriageway flanked by slip roads. Liverpool supporters had to negotiate the latter via a 100m underpass that was incredibly narrow and especially tight at its point of entry.

Identifying the potential for a crush, some fans decided to take their chances by crossing the dual carriageway, where they met friends the other side of the busy thoroughfare. Here, the problems really started. Flanking Av. du President Wilson is the narrow Mail de l’Ellipse footpath, which runs beside the carriageway and underneath a motorway. At this tangle of concrete, a phalanx of police vans was parked, reducing an already tight space — less than 2m at one point due to the awkward position of the vans — for supporters to access the gates of the ground.

https://twitter.com/draper_rob/status/1530610400022126592

One hour and 55 minutes before kick-off, the queue from the underpass to the first check point was around 200m long. Police positioned themselves not at the checkpoint but on the other side of the wall that separates Av. du President Wilson and Mail de l’Ellipse. Initially, the police did not assist the stewards in their searches. This included paper ticket markings and body inspections, but there was no scanning machine validating those supporters in possession of e-tickets.

Some supporters, who arrived at the checkpoint before the bottleneck reached a near critical state, have told The Athletic that locals, identifiable by their non-football clothing, made attempts to clone e-tickets as stewards tried to look at them.



Quietly, gangs of locals were also in operation within the queues and some fans were pickpocketed while they waited. David Dunne, a 58-year-old solicitor from Formby, saw several of the pickpockets standing on the left side of the ramp in front of him. “Some of them were jumping down and joining the queue.”

Anyone who tried to escape the huge queue was pushed back by the police. Two female Spanish journalists attempting to reach the accreditation centre were aggressively told to stay where they were. Gary Lineker was caught in the congestion and he has since spoken of his anger in relation to the organisation of a situation which had frightening parallels with the Hillsborough disaster, according to the Merseyside politician Ian Byrne, who was also present.

Concern was etched across the faces of older fans, women and those travelling with children. In the midst of the bottleneck, supporters were not given information about where they were heading, what they were supposed to do, or how long this would last for.

George Bevan was in the queue more than two hours before kick-off: “A couple of people around me were really panicking,” he says. “A young lad had to create some space so he could calm himself down as he was shaken.”

Bevan’s auntie made it through the checkpoint but the stewards suddenly stopped letting anyone else in. A pressure started to build on the small barriers and this prompted the police to intervene, pushing everyone back. “It was starting to crush,” says Bevan, who finally made it onto the stadium’s outer concourse via the ramp on the Mail de l’Ellipse. “We were shaking,” he says. “It took a while for us to calm down.”

Steve Kelly, aged 75, was told by the police to use the tarmac of Av. du President Wilson to approach the checkpoint but 50 yards down the road, more police had blocked the way through, telling him to go back. This led to more congestion and he was only able to make it onto the ramp by climbing over a wall. A video of others doing the same thing, circulating on social media, led to suggestions that Liverpool fans were trying to bunk in but this was not the case. Instead, it was groups of people attempting to escape a crush ahead of three more rounds of ticket checks once inside the concourse of the stadium.

Bastien Cheval, a French journalist, arrived at the checkpoint two hours before kick-off. A steward, he says, suggested his ticket was fake and was aggressive with him. This prompted him to close the UEFA ticket app and reopen it. “I fear this situation happened to too many, hence time being lost and English-speaking ticket holders getting false information.”

Fifty-five minutes before kick-off, stewards appeared to give up on the first check and steadily, supporters were able to pass without having to show their tickets and without being frisked. This placed immediate pressure on the nearby gates, particularly those immediately in front of the ramp that gave access to the stadium beyond the now-abandoned checkpoint. Gates Y and Z, where most Liverpool supporters were supposed to be accessing the ground, were shut and very quickly, the crowd and the tension started reaching uncomfortable levels again.

Twenty minutes before kick-off, a notice on the big screens at each end of the stadium announced a delay because of fans arriving late but the photographic and video evidence against this claim is overwhelming.

The mood on the outer concourse of the ground quickly reached choking point. John Coleman, the manager of Accrington Stanley, had arrived at the Stade de France three and a half hours before kick-off, having flown in from Liverpool on the afternoon of the game.

Forty-five minutes before the scheduled kick-off, however, he was remained outside gate B being crushed against a fence. He says he was just about to enter through the turnstile when the gate was shut. The subsequent build-up of people meant he was unable to move and the pressure was only released when someone else in the crush managed to find a way out.

George Bevan, who got to his seat three hours after leaving the nearest metro stop to the stadium, was held outside gate Z, where many Liverpool fans were entering, for longer than two hours. “Everyone in the queue was far calmer than I thought they would be,” he says. “I was worried what might happen as we got closer to kick-off. The only people regulating the queue and making sure nothing awful happened were fellow fans. We had no idea the game was delayed.”

A police officer operating from the same gate told French newspaper L’Equipe: “We were lucky that the Liverpool fans were patient and calm.” From his position at nearby gate Y, however, Ian Burns could see the level of danger increasing. “There was no queue control on the gate, so as more joined, the queue became wider and longer. Some stewarding outside the perimeter directing fans and helping directing fans would certainly have made things a bit calmer, making their jobs easier.”

John Rogers was at gate X. “It was easy to see it was all going wrong but it was also easy to see why,” says Rogers, who has worked at large-scale events. “Gates were shut with no information or alternative routes to safely enter. The police used an iron fist rather than manage the crowd. You’d never see Glastonbury punters being treated like this.”

The failure of the first checkpoint meant that anyone could reach the outer concourse and the gates. Rogers says he saw a local kid dragged out of the crowd by police before he was pepper-sprayed. The police then started to push the crowd from the back.

According to Rafi Benmayor, a lot of locals were now much closer to the ground without tickets. He saw a number of “kids” trying to jump through the turnstiles only to be turned away. “The problem was, they were not being moved, so they stood at the front of the queue holding things up.”

The build-up of pressure led to stewards closing gates Y and Z for 20 minutes before reopening them, and closing again for another 45 minutes. In one of the queues, Simon Bromwell, a Liverpool supporter, says he saw “numerous” local men with what looked like photographs of tickets sent to their phones via WhatsApp. Burns, meanwhile, saw police chasing locals “over and over again, so tensions grew as people were nervous about what might happen if fighting broke out”.

Richard Banks, a Liverpool fan, says arguments started when locals started to jump the queues. He was five metres away from a gate when the first tear gas was released. “Kids, women and old folk were caught in it, but we couldn’t get away and we still couldn’t get in. People were in tears; a couple had panic attacks. One lad was taken away on a stretcher unconscious.”

Mark Henry-Davies, a Liverpool supporter from Wales, meanwhile, says he saw a fan get through a gate having shown his ticket with minimal fuss before he was hurled to the floor by a policeman. A woman who filmed the incident was stopped and the authorities tried unsuccessfully to seize her phone. Elsewhere, a young man was videoed scanning his ticket successfully before being sprayed by a lone policeman.

https://twitter.com/Watch_LFC/status/1530856356663771138

Burns would experience as many as eight waves of tear-gassing. At one point, in the panic at the closed gate and with nowhere else to go, some fans started rattling an exit gate and this prompted police to raise their weapons, but this came and went within the space of 30 seconds.

David Coe saw fans fainting, vomiting and crying. The situation was not much safer in other parts of the ground. At gate R, close to the Madrid end, three stewards manned the gate and were letting fans in without checks. At gate A, meanwhile, David Dunne experienced a huge crush where a young woman in a Real Madrid shirt became distressed and started to cry. Along with another man to his right, he tried to protect her from the crowd pressure. “But it was difficult. Panic was beginning to set in.”

At the ticket scanning area at gate A, the pressure became intense. The woman Dunne had tried to help became trapped against a metal fence to the right of the machine. “She could not move and a steward then had to pull her up and over the fence before she became injured. He managed to do that just in time.”

Dunne, who had his phone pinched — he believes, as he waited at gate A — thinks a lot of the issues at the gates were caused because the ticket machines would not scan rather than because tickets were forged. One Liverpool fan, having paid €670 for his ticket, was not even asked to show it to anyone beyond the first checkpoint that failed later. Other Liverpool fans have claimed they were instead asked for bribes by stewards. One video shows a local man getting through a turnstile and bragging that he does not have a ticket while those with tickets were held back.

Nicky Kelly, 34 had some sympathy with the stewards because many of them seemed to be young but blames the authorities for not having enough experience on-site. “There were lads stewarding there who were teenagers and didn’t know what they were doing or how to deal with it. I did stewarding as a young lad. You get the minimum wage and it’s not easy to stand up to an aggressive lad twice your age.”

In a neutral zone, a survivor of the Hillsborough disaster was trying his best to calm the crowd but he was visibly panicking. Andy Jones, a Liverpudlian, was directed by a steward to jump a turnstile with his son when his ticket didn’t work. Another fan, Glen Gates, needed five attempts to scan his ticket. “It seemed the scanners were not fit for purpose and contributed towards the slow entry.”

Banks got to his seat just in time for kick -off but there was lots of space around him for the whole game. He describes a “sombre atmosphere with lots of people just sitting there, dazed”.

The Champions League final kicked off 37 minutes late but outside, thousands of fans were still waiting to get in. Some eventually did, as late as half-time. One was Louise Darwin in section Y, who says she was pepper-sprayed for no reason while the game was going on only yards away.

https://twitter.com/avalallana/status/1530648353083641857

Others, however, gave up. Will Sweeney, a student at John Moores University, says his brother was sprayed six times. “There was wave after wave of locals trying to start a fight. At one point, a railing fell on me and me and my brother went flying into a wall.”

He started to tear up because of the pain but due to the spray, it was like “crying acid”. “We had enough of being scared and abused, so we tried to leave but when we asked the police how to get out, they lifted their riot shields and batons, threatening us.”

Like Sweeney, Lynn Rattigan made her way back to her hotel with her husband, Dan Whitehead. Rattigan, aged 57, had assumed this was going to be her last European final following Liverpool, the club she has loved for five decades, because of an MS diagnosis three years ago which has reduced her mobility.

“Because there were no signs outside the ground, I inadvertently went in at the Madrid end,” she says. “This was disorganised, with cursory bag checks and no ticket checks. Loads of locals got through and I would characterise them as organised gangs.”

Half an hour before the original kick-off time, Rattigan asked to be lifted out of the queue at gate Y, intending to wait until the chaos calmed down. She never made it in.

“I tried three different routes out, each of which the police had blocked off as there were running battles with large local gangs,” she says. “Police were getting bottled and retaliated with tear gas. During the hour, I was walking around the stadium trying to get to safety, hundreds of locals scaled the fences and got into the ground.”

Ian Burns says at 10pm, 23 minutes into the game, the queue started to move. “But there were still many non-Liverpool fans who were getting to the gates either with tickets that wouldn’t scan and others with no tickets at all. These people predominantly had French accents. They certainly were not Liverpool fans.”

After the final whistle, the wide exit gates at section S were closed and this meant thousands of people were forced to use instead a small entry gate at section R, potentially causing another crush. The same happened at section U, where police had closed the gates and fans used M and N. “As we tried to leave, they (the police) were still pushing us up against the walls,” says Jack Bookey, a Liverpool fan.

On the concourse immediately outside the Stade de France, some of the scenes were distressing. One man, who was sitting on the floor with a woman who was asking for medical assistance, was surrounded by three local men. As the woman begged in French for help, they rooted through his pockets and stole his money. He was too spaced out to notice. Though police were nearby and supporters, who had seen the theft, asked for help, those officers did nothing.

From there, the route back to the metro lines did not include any provision for safety. The journey back to the centre of Paris via passageways that supporters had struggled to navigate several hours earlier were more intimidating now because they were so badly lit. Here, groups of young local men were either waiting or running towards the stadium, picking off anyone who strayed from the beleaguered stagger towards the station.

Some had their sunglasses swept from their heads. Others had their phones stolen. Darwin nearly lost her bag. One man in his 30s, trying to retrieve his phone, gave chase and suddenly found himself surrounded by a gang after emerging from bushes with knives. He spent the part of the night in hospital receiving treatment for slash wounds.

For Paul Simpson, a Liverpool fan from Sheffield, the worst part of the whole day was now. “There were local gangs trying to mug Liverpool supporters and the police were absolutely not interested,” he tells The Athletic. He is not the only person to describe the situation as being like a scene from “The Purge”. Attacked supporters, without receiving assistance from the police, tried to defend themselves and the result was carnage. “Children had to witness people getting their heads getting kicked in and the police were not remotely interested.”

Matt Roylance headed in the direction of the La Plaine RER station, which serves Paris by faster trains. He experienced sporadic intimidation and thieving all the way down. As he arrived in the station’s forecourt, there were a large number of fireworks shot into Liverpool fans by locals. “The gendarmerie stood watching, focusing most of their attention on LFC supporters.”

Heading in the opposite direction was Dan Davies, to Charles de Gaulle airport. He says the train windows were smashed by gangs of locals. The man sitting next to him had his wallet stolen and he caught someone trying to steal his. “It was the most unsafe I’ve ever left in my life.”

Back in the fanzone, Liverpool fans who had stayed to watch the game in Cours de Vincennes were tear-gassed by French police as soon as the final whistle blew. Supporters reported seeing children spluttering and in distress as they tried to leave.

Shaun Bowden, from Barry in Wales, needed to return to his hotel in Gennevilliers, a 45-minute walk from the stadium. He was happy to travel by foot but every exit out of the concourse in that direction was blocked by lines of riot police. He was ushered in another direction but that exit proved to be blocked as well by police who turned him around before using tear gas “completely unprovoked with kids and elderly people amongst us”.

“As we turned back around with our eyes streaming and throats burning, we were met with a crowd of people coming in the opposite direction who had also been tear-gassed,” he says. “None of us knew where to go. I stopped a policeman and asked him which way the exit was as we got gassed one way and then the other way. He just smiled and shrugged at me.”

Eventually, Bowden was herded towards a train station where “gangs were eyeing up fans and taking advantage of individuals or smaller groups”.

After being directed onto a train back into Paris, the opposite direction to which he needed to go, he arrived in Gennevilliers two hours later. Some of the worst scenes were at the Porte de Paris station, where Real Madrid fans were attacked and for once, it seems, some police decided to at last communicate with those in support of Liverpool.

Despite some of them being obviously wounded, it is said the gendarmerie shouted, “Bye bye. Nice to meet you”.

Questions from The Athletic to the police

Why was the decision taken to have a checkpoint at the end of the underpass at Mail de l’Ellipse?

Why were there no signposts indicating access plans on the underpass?

Why did the police feel it necessary to use space in the underpass to park their vans?

Why did stewards at that point not have access to QR machines?

Do police regret using six narrow funnels at the first checkpoint considering the huge number fans would have to pass through that point?

Why did the congestion begin 2 hrs and 30 mins before kick-off?

Why, one hour before kick-off, did stewards give up on searches and let everyone waiting through at the same time?

To what extent did that cause problems at gates Y and Z?

Why were the gates closed at this point of the ground 1hr and 10 mins before kick-off?

Why did the police not communicate a delayed kick-off outside the stadium to fans waiting?

Why did the police decide to use tear gas and pepper spray, including on children?

Are you aware of reports suggesting organised gangs attempted to steal from fans leaving the stadium?

The French sports minister talked of 30,000 to 40,000 fans with fake tickets. How many fake tickets were seized?

How significant a contributing factor do you think this was?

[Exiled_red]

I'd be interested to know how they know there are so many fake tickets that got in, because this 70% figure seems unlikely (regardless of the maths ) but we know that the people at the gates couldn't tell a real ticket from a fake, because of what Robertson said about who he gave his ticket to, so how have they been able to tell now? If they were able to tell going through stubs now(?), why didn't they properly train staff on the gates properly to identify real ones before the game, if there were 3 choke points and the turnstiles there were plenty opportunities to keep people with fake tickets away from the ground.

[Charly]

Are you Oliver Kay?



https://twitter.com/OliverKay/status...49805837705216

Only when Im not Nat Phillips

[wiw]

Some very disturbing details here.

That was a tough read but an excellent article. It's great to see the journalists rallying together like this

[Shaggy]

French police are ****ing scum.

[Buzzo]

Kelly Cates going after UEFA and the French Government on 5live right now

Gave an excellent monologue as to why this is important no matter whom you support. Seems that this affected enough VIPs to give it real attention. Seems like it affected everyone.

Chris Sutton also caught up in it currently praising the patience of the Liverpool supporters.