CL Final Liverpool v Real Madrid (Paris)

[Buzzo]

Whats mad is Paris, as a city they have so much experience of hosting these large scale events. Why was there a different approach in this instance? It has to have been ordered.

[wiw]

I mean they were tear gassing fans outside the fan park. So how does their bs excuse of "ticketless fans" apply there? Their story collapses under the tiniest bit of scrutiny.

Did you fill in the LFC questionnaire? It splits into 3 sections - fan park/stadium/after the game. Certainly don't think you need to have been at the ground to fill it in

[Shaggy]

Did you fill in the LFC questionnaire? It splits into 3 sections - fan park/stadium/after the game. Certainly don't think you need to have been at the ground to fill it in

I didn't know it included fan park - I'll get on it.

[Shaggy]

Whats mad is Paris, as a city they have so much experience of hosting these large scale events. Why was there a different approach in this instance? It has to have been ordered.

I'll be honest, I've had some mad conspiracy theories running through my mind.

[wiw]

I didn't know it included fan park - I'll get on it.

Hoping my recollection of the form is accurate..pretty sure it did refer to the fan park though. There are 3 distinct sections of before/during/after. I'd fill it in regardless, you're a fan and you were in the city

[Buzzo]

I'll be honest, I've had some mad conspiracy theories running through my mind.

Thats why it is almost reassuring to know that the Real supporters experienced the same. It rules out some of the theories.

[Shaggy]

Hoping my recollection of the form is accurate..pretty sure it did refer to the fan park though. There are 3 distinct sections of before/during/after. I'd fill it in regardless, you're a fan and you were in the city

Nice one, will do.

Thats why it is almost reassuring to know that the Real supporters experienced the same. It rules out some of the theories.

Indeed.

[Exiled_red]

Alot of the arseholes on twitter have been posting **** about it only happens to Liverpool fans... etc but the stories from the Madrid end whilst fewer in number do suggest that there were issues there.

I have also seen stories about Madrid and LFC fans getting together on the way out to protect one another from the local gangs.

Interestingly I heard this morning an academic saying that if the numbers of fake tickets being claimed is anywhere near true then it's the biggest ticket fraud ever, by some margin.

Even giving the benefit of the doubt to the claim of 70% of tickets being checked were fake and assuming that he is just talking about the LFC end and he meant that for every 100 real tickets there were 70 fakes (rather than what he said which would imply that there were 70 fakes for every 30 real tickets). Assuming there were 20k real tickets that puts a projection (not all tickets were checked) of 14k fake tickets. Now even if you assume that a single fake ticket was presented multiple times (because the holder was unable to get through so tried elsewhere) if each fake ticket were presented 3 times that reduces the number to ~5k. That's still a hell of alot of people!

According to this there should be 5000 people with fake tickets who didn't get inside the ground that have to leave at some point, or for every 4 people who went into the stadium 1 person should be walking the other way going away from the stadium. Where is the footage of all these people? There were plenty of pictures and videos and even TV coverage closer to/after the original kick off time but I haven't seen anything close to 5000 people walking away from the stadium while the match was on. On this alone it smells like BS.

I imagine there would be some fake tickets floating around, for an event such as this with such high demand there always will be. But again there must be questions for UEFA as to why tickets were so easily able to be faked. Also if staff were able to spot fake tickets (which they must have been able to if they know 70% were fake, but people with real tickets were also turned away so not sure this stands up either) why was there not a procedure for getting the people with fake tickets out of the area?

[Buzzo]

Yeah it is clearly bull****, they have put this figure out without any investigation to deflect from the real issues, zero organisation possibly backed up by a tech issue.

BT showed the inside and outside of the stadium during that 30 minute delay. There were thousands of fans outside and thousands of empty seats inside. Where were these supporters without tickets who were denied entry at this point? You cannot hide that many supporters.

[calvoboy]

I always think that cock-up and cover-up tend to provide a more accurate understanding of what goes on in these kind of incidents than conspiracy. I don't think that the French wanted to make themselves look like incompetent and nasty clowns incapable of organising a piss-up in a vineyard.

In that context, I find this post on RAWK very interesting and plausible in terms of explaining how things started to go wrong.

If it's too long to read, the summary is that there was a metro strike which resulted in 4 times as many fans as usual having to take the RER D line to Stade de France. The standard stadium access plan couldn't cope with the unbalanced numbers arriving, and their response on the ground just made things worse.

Like many others, I was caught in some of this ****ing ****show on Saturday. I've been talking to friends today, and we have stumbled upon something which we think is one of the (many) root causes.

I arrived at the stadium with 4 others. 3 of them had tickets in the neutral end, me and my brother had tickets in our end (genuine tickets, from the ballot, as if it needed to be said :). My brother and I experienced the absolute joke at Gate Y, along with the various pepper spray / tear gas incidents. Also got caught in the pepper spray on our way back post-match. But we didn't go through the hell of that approach to the Gates that others did.

I believe a big reason we got "lucky" was that we were able to take the RER B, which was not at all busy when we took it at around 7pm. My understanding is that the RER B was only operational from Gare du Nord, and NOT any earlier stations. A friend of mine changed at Chatelet and was specifically told to get the RER D. Others at Gare du Nord were specifically directed to the RER D due to a strike.

We have done some research on this, and found this article from Le Parisien suggests 37000 people took the RER D to the ground on Saturday, compared to 6000 on the RER B. For a “normal” event, they expect 10000 to take the D, and 15000 to take the B. So it was completely “flipped”, and then some. The reason for this flip was a partial strike on the RER B. The problem, however, was that despite it being only a partial strike, all comms was to avoid the RER B. And despite the comms to use RER D instead of RER B, the organisers at the Stade de France DID NOT CHANGE THEIR PLANS TO ACCOMMODATE THIS.

See the map below (credit to Pata, formerly of this parish) to illustrate this issue. They planned for 10k via the Red route, but got 37k. They planned for 15k via the blue route but got 6k. Eventually, they did stop directing everyone via the Red route and started directing people from RER D via the green route. If this had been done from 6.30pm...



Here is the Le Parisien link with the numbers quoted above: https://www.leparisien.fr/seine-sain...27AIWSOHQA.php

Here's a Tweet from RER B telling everyone to take the RER D: https://twitter.com/RERB/status/1529841892929810434

To be clear, though, this (again, one of many) root cause doesn’t excuse how slow they were to react, their inability to deal with the violent local youths, the aggression the police showed, the lack of stewarding in the queues for the gates, or the lack of communication. This was ALL avoidable. It was ALL something they could have dealt with in good time if they'd have tried instead of just acting as if it was all our fault. It's ****ing unacceptable. All of it. Heads should roll.

[calvoboy]

**** me, sorry to hear ya had this experience, man. I was worried watching on tv, that I could be watching the early stages of another heysel/hillsborough…

****ing unbelievable. Glad you're ok now.

Thanks both

Still angry, but it's good to see the French authorities being ripped apart for their lies. My only worry is that it could provide a huge boost for Le Pen as it becomes clear in France that the only ones actively causing trouble at the stadium were large groups of locals from Saint-Denis.

[rodo]

this is obviously done for a reaction but **** me

https://www.justarsenal.com/liverpool-fans-embarrass-england-once-again-in-paris/311340?fbclid=IwAR0Ceyws_8Q0XSM_jQbjBY4vPRvPZ2GAEWbockKOsSOpd572XfTdexrR6yE

[rodo]

[ame]https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1531530086809317376[/ame]

[wiw]

this is obviously done for a reaction but **** me

https://www.justarsenal.com/liverpoo...572XfTdexrR6yE

Of course, genuine customers missed kick off when the doors were locked, but if I was being tear gassed, I wouldn’t be angry at personnel paid to protect the public, I would be fuming with those next to me, wasting our time by trying to jump the queue.

Of course you would mate.

[Galb]

Think it was just after 6 when I was trying to get in and even then you could see problems building - the bottleneck they created under the bridge was absolute madness. That immediately led into the slow moving queue for the initial ticket checks that I think had four people on it that I saw. For potentially 40,000 fans. It was this checkpoint that they abandoned after a while which led to the locals storming in.

Throughout the whole thing there was no explanation, signs or communication, just had policemen in our face. A guy near me said to a policeman that it was dangerous and he either blanked him or shrugged, can't remember now. Just after that I text my family saying that it would be a delayed kick off - it was so obvious. This was all at least 2.5 hours before kick off

Exactly this. I was there at 6 when gates opened. Having been tailed up from our bus by some dodgy locals. There werent that many fans there yet and it took 20 minutes to get through the first half-arsed check with people already being pushed together. My 7 year old was getting squashed at that stage. It was already obvious three hours ahead of kick off there was going to be an issue when bigger crowds arrived later.

We were lucky to be in early but even then managed to get pickpocketed on the way out before we'd even left the stadium gates. Organisation was a shambles.