The weekends are starting to follow one another and look the same for French football fans. Since the death of a member of the Tribune Loire, on the sidelines of the Nantes-Nice match at the beginning of the month, the government has raised the tone regarding supporters by banning five new trips, for Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 matches counting for the 19th day: Angers-Guingamp on December 19 at 8:45 p.m., Montpellier-OM, Brest-Lorient, Nice-Nantes and OL-Nantes on December 20 at 9 p.m.
These meetings, which do not concern PSG, were deemed “risky” because of “relations marked by animosity” between supporters: “There “exists a real and serious risk of clashes” informs the decree.
It was enough to get the INS moving. The national supporter body will meet on Monday under the aegis of the Minister of Sports, with the aim of curbing the violence which is plaguing French football. If no decision is expected on Monday, this plenary session, at 10:30 a.m. at the Ministry of Sports, should allow the dialogue to resume and Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra to clarify her project.
Since the death of a supporter in Nantes at the beginning of December, the government has decided to tighten the screws with multiple travel bans on supporters. An emergency policy confronted with the decisions of the Council of State, which suspended several ministerial and prefectural banning orders, including that of the match between Lille and PSG on Sunday (8:45 p.m.), raising “a serious and manifestly disproportionate attack on freedoms fundamental”.
“For the moment we are repressing but we are not repressing effectively”
“We must build a global architecture to effectively tackle the problem, because for the moment we are repressing but we are not repressing effectively,” sociologist Nicolas Hourcade, specialist in supporterism and member of the INS.
Unlike England or Germany, which have managed to contain violence since the 1990s, “the difficulty France has is not having a clear guideline, being incapable of identifying individuals violent and to keep them away from the stadiums for the long term,” he continues.
A government source explains that the plan is to organize, at the beginning of January, “a moratorium at the initiative of the League and the clubs, as part of a broader action plan and with the aim of taking new measures collectively for the future.
But “for the moment it remains a little vague”, regrets Nicolas Hourcade, according to whom France is “torn between zero tolerance (…) and another articulation between repression and prevention”. France has focused in recent years on collective bans and much less on individual bans: there are only 218 stadium bans in France (as of July 2023) compared to some 1,600 in England and 1,300 in Germany.
This week, by prohibiting on Monday under the leadership of Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin the travel of supporters from Seville to Lens before seeing the Council of State suspend the order a few hours before the match on Tuesday, “France is is ridiculed, believes Nicolas Hourcarde. And we must not forget that we completely missed the 2022 Champions League final at the Stade de France, all of Europe knows it, we lost credibility” before the Olympic Games, he continues.
On the side of the supporters, “all the groups which are represented within the INS believe that the systematic ban on travel is a heresy, a deprivation of freedoms”, underlines for AFP Jean-Guy Riou, president of the Union of Saint-Etienne supporters (USS). Active member of the INS, Jean-Guy Riou “advocates supervision of supporters, and not banning”. He regrets the “loss of management know-how” by “exhausted law enforcement”.
The supporters also ask for the “updating of data” relating to friendships and enmities between ultras as well as the creation of a “coordinating prefect” within the National Division for the Fight against Hooliganism, so that he can give “information instructions and no longer recommendations to prefects.” “There are no miraculous solutions, but they are known,” believes Mathieu Zagrodzki. “First, investigative work to identify, question and sanction individually (…) then work on dialogue and education with the ultras.” And to put things into perspective: “We must not amplify the thing compared to what it represents from a statistical point of view, French stadiums are not cutthroats”.
