The problem at the Stade de France was laziness
The police and the French government are ill equipped to put on a sporting event
Dear readers,
It’s a busy weekend in the sporting world, with the French Open wrapping up in Paris and the NBA Finals underway between the Golden State Warriors and the Boston Celtics. Amid all this excitement, we want to revisit a slightly less sunny incident that took place last weekend at the UEFA Champions League Final — the details of which have slowly trickled out over the past week.
Happy reading,
Calder + Ian
The cops prove useless once again
Last Saturday, Real Madrid defeated Liverpool FC to claim the Champions’ League crown, the biggest prize in international club soccer in Europe. The match, which took place at the Stade de France outside Paris, was a tight, defensive affair, with Real’s goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois, putting on a masterclass in the net to keep Liverpool off the board, despite the fact that the Reds put nine shots on goal compared to Real’s two. Madrid ultimately came out on top, 1-0.
The play on the pitch, though, was quickly overshadowed by the events that took place before it. In the hour before the match began, a chaotic spectacle unfolded outside the 80,000-seat stadium, as thousands of ticketed fans remained trapped in bottlenecking lines that quickly overwhelmed the stadium’s staff. The scene outside the venue took a dark turn when the police suddenly turned on the fans. According to reports from fans in attendance, supporters at the Liverpool gate were pushed under a bridge, surrounded on either side by police vehicles, and then, without any clear warning, attacked by the police. Videos taken outside the stadium show police spraying fans with tear gas from behind a fence. The chaos had not subsided by the match’s planned start time, forcing officials to delay the beginning of the match by almost 37 minutes.
As the post-mortem began earlier this week, UEFA, the Champions League governing body, and the French government searched desperately for someone to blame. They first attempted to point the finger at “late arriving fans,” and when this didn’t work—as it was obvious that fans were waiting for hours before the game to get into the stadium—they pivoted to blaming the fracas on fans with “fraudulent tickets.” In a typically Gallic move, Gérard Darmanin, France’s interior minister, blamed the English. He said that the “root cause” of the issue was 30,000 to 40,000 English fans with fake tickets, claiming that “as much as 70 percent” of the tickets presented at the Stade de France were fraudulent.
Apparently unsatisfied with blaming only the dirty Liverpool supporters, a handful of far-right politicians also cast blame on the residents of the Saint-Denis, the working class banlieue (or suburb) of Paris where the stadium is located. For some context, French police and far-right politicians have a long history of picking fights with the residents of Paris’s direct suburbs, which are generally poorer and more densely populated by immigrants and people of color than central Paris. Parisians’ condescending attitude toward these neighborhoods was nicely illustrated before the match by Thierry Henry, the famous retired French star, who said: “The final is in Saint-Denis, not Paris. Trust me, you don’t want to be in Saint-Denis.”
Unfortunately for the French authorities, neither of these explanations stands up to scrutiny, either. Documents reviewed by The New York Times show that the actual number of fake tickets presented was closer to 2,589, a typical number for a huge event in a stadium with a capacity of 80,000. And despite the wishcasting of the French far-right, there’s no evidence that the residents of Saint-Denis were somehow uniquely responsible for the mayhem. Imagine our surprise.
Given the absence of a credible alternative explanation, it seems pretty obvious that the French authorities were simply unprepared to deal with the standard displays of hooliganism that typically accompany major international soccer matches. When that lack of preparedness became apparent, the French police simply did what they do best: they blasted fans with tear gas.
Seen in one light, this is a pretty massive failure on the part of the French police. But on the other, it’s exactly what you’d expect. As Alex Pareene, a contributing editor to The New Republic, argued in a recent newsletter, cops, when confronted with two divergent approaches to a problem, almost always choose to take the path of least resistance. As Pareene wrote:
“Having spent many years observing cop behavior, reading news about cops, and occasionally even asking them for help, I have come to a pretty simple but comprehensive answer: They do what is easy, and avoid what is difficult. … Alexander Sammon just wrote a piece for the Prospect asking why the police are so bad at their jobs, based on their dismal “clearance” (arrests) rates and even more dismal conviction rates. The semi-glib leftist response is that they aren’t. They’re doing exactly what we pay them for.”
This rule applies pretty well to the Champions League Final, too. Instead of developing a plan to manage the crowds ahead of time—including contingency plans to deal with the (entirely predictable) possibility that a bunch of drunk soccer fans might misbehave—the police, when caught in a difficult situation, just started blasting. They scared kids, injured fans, and created even more chaos. All the while, the Champions League organizers decided to go ahead with a performance by the pop star Camila Cabello inside the stadium, prompting a chorus of boos from the frustrated fans who had managed to make it into the stadium. It all made for a dystopian, if utterly familiar, scene.
In the French police’s reaction to the unrest on Saturday, it’s not hard to see a mirror of the broader dysfunctions and incompetencies that mire our governing institutions. The people and institutions that we have tasked with performing the fundamental tasks of well-functioning society—like protecting children in schools, or keeping people from trampling each other at mass gatherings, or even, god forbid, building a normal subway station—increasingly seem unable to perform these basic functions. It is not only cops who always choose the easy thing; it’s seemingly most people who have ascended to a position of power. Increasingly, it’s obviously that the ruling class just can’t be bothered to do the right—if difficult—thing, even as the signs of societal disfunction accumulate by the day.
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