A damning report commissioned by the Prime Minister of France into the carnage at the Champions League final has found “systematic failings in the organisation” of the event.
And the inquiry - led by the French interministerial delegate for the Olympics and major events Michel Cadot - concluded that organisers were to blame for the chaos, NOT supporters.
Cadot called out the excuses by Paris police prefect Didier Lallement and France Interior Minister Gerard Darmanin, saying there was no evidence to support their claims 40,000 ticketless fans, committing a “mass fraud” were to blame.
And he produced evidence to suggest it was a breakdown in communication between authorities, and the failure to recognise “serious failings” in the kettling of fans and at malfunctioning entry gates, which caused the horrendous scenes.
The French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne accepted and immediately published the report today, as a full and final account of the events at the Stade de France, with NO APPEAL by the authorities responsible.
And that opens up not only the prospect of a full apology by the French government to both Liverpool and Real Madrid fans - who were subjected to dangerous crowd control techniques, and then tear gas and baton charges from police - but also the prospect of legal action against the authorities.
In the report, Cadot, a senior police officer in France, deplored “severe failings” in the action of the police and the ground controllers at the stadium.
He found that the organisation broke down because of “several flaws in the directing and management of the crowd”, including in the corralling of supporters at initial checkpoints on the perimeter of the stadium.
The report said the kettling of fans down from thousands into a virtual single file was dangerous, and “police failed to read the warning signs” of the potential for danger.
It also stated that there was a lack of communication between the checkpoints and command posts at the stadium, resulting in serious bottlenecks which threatened the safety of the crowd.
Cadot found that there was no sufficient communication with the command posts and the Paris transport networks, again resulting in serious bottlenecks, because the routes to the stadium were not properly signposted, leading to fans converging on one entry point.
Cadot also found NO evidence of 40,000 people trying to invade the stadium without tickets, and in fact, pointed out that even if this was the case, the authorities should have been prepared, and able to deal with such numbers.
“The claims communicated (by Lallement and Darmanin) are not corroborated by technical sensors which allow objective results,” the report read. Numbers from the Paris metro suggest there were no excess number of fans travelling to the 80,000 seat stadium.
The report also said: “The arrival in town of many supporters without a ticket does not systematically lead to disorder.
“At the last Europa League final, in Seville, there were no incidents, even though thousands of supporters of the two teams, - a number estimated at 130,000 for a stadium with a capacity of 57,600 seats - were not ticket holders."
The report also found - incredibly - that police asked for signs directing fans through different routes to the stadium to be DISMANTLED, leading to almost 45,000 fans from TWO metro stops to converge at the same place.
The damning report dismisses the claims of the French police and government that fans were to blame, and now several groups of supporters are preparing legal challenges relating to the breakdown of organisation at the stadium.
