When Fabio Grosso’s bloodied face was plastered across the front page of L’Équipe on 30 October – “Disgust and shame,” the headline read – there was already a prevailing sense that the spate of violent incidents in French football was plumbing new depths.
Lyon’s Italian coach was injured as the team bus was pelted on its arrival at the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille for a high-stakes Olympico showdown. To make matters worse, Nazi salutes and racist chanting were seen and heard from a small minority of the Lyon fans who were already inside the stadium. The match was postponed and played without away fans more than a month later.
The past few months have marked a resurgence of violence around French football. Earlier in October, a match between Clermont and Montpellier was also subject to a replay after a flare was thrown on to the pitch and exploded near the home team’s goalkeeper, Mory Diaw.
A few weeks later, a Lens fan was badly injured after a fight with several Le Havre fans. At the end of last season, a mass brawl broke out between Marseille and Lyon fans after their match in Lyon, while Bordeaux’s hopes of promotion from Ligue 2 were scuppered on the final day when a fan ran on to the pitch and assaulted the opposition goalscorer.
After the attack, which left him needing 13 stitches, Grosso pointed out that the incidents could have resulted in a tragedy. His comments were unfortunately prescient. The tipping point would come on 2 December, when a Nantes fan was fatally wounded in the buildup to his team’s home game against Nice.
In response, the sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, called for drastic measures. “We can’t go on like this,” she told the radio station France Inter. “We just can’t have police forces overstretched to this point, property being destroyed, buses stoned, injuries and now a death.”
The next weekend eight games across the country – including five in the top fight – were affected by bans on all travelling fans. These bans were set out in a decree by the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, with the order indicating there was a “risk of clashes between supporters”, within a context of “increasingly serious violence observed since the start of the football season”.
In practice, any match considered to be a potential security risk – the national police division tasked with fighting hooliganism ranks at-risk matches on a scale of 1 to 5 – has been targeted by the government’s response. The increase in blanket bans on away travel is part of a moratorium, which is in place until a series of meetings on Monday that will bring together the country’s fan groups, the relevant ministries, and the league authorities.
Ligue 1’s president, Vincent Labrune, has expressed his support for “radical measures”. On the radio station RMC in the aftermath of the incidents in Nantes, the former Marseille president explained that he sees the incidents as part of a “fundamental problem in our society”, which goes beyond football. Labrune nevertheless insisted it was up to the French football authorities to play their part in combating violence – even if, technically, the clubs and league are not responsible for incidents that take place outside stadiums.
It is in the interests of the league to ensure the rest of the season runs smoothly, considering the next package of broadcasting rights – for the five years starting from 2024‑25 – is up for tender. The much-publicised incidents will not have helped French football’s image, at home and abroad.
The decrees, which are often published a few days before matches, are issued by local police authorities or the interior ministry and target anyone that acts as a supporter of the away team. A range of reasons are given to justify these bans – from rivalries between specific groups of supporters (including those of teams not involved in the match in question), to the need to allocate police forces to other nearby events.
The widespread use of bans on travelling fans, which were a regular occurrence for the past few seasons, have been criticised as an affront to individual freedom of movement. The national supporters’ association (ANS) brought appeals over the ministerial decree to the council of state – the country’s highest administrative court – and had four of the bans overturned. In its decision, the court notably described the measures as “disproportionate”.
The issue took an international turn last Sunday when Darmanin announced, in an interview that Sevilla fans would be banned from Tuesday’s Champions League group stage match at Lens. The Spanish side were made aware of the decision less than 48 hours before kick-off. The decree, which barred their fans from the stadium and parts of Lens and nearby Arras, was suspended by the council of state after another successful challenge.
The Lens manager, Franck Haise, had been one of many left perplexed by the initial decision: “What are we going to do when it comes to the Olympics, if we can’t host 300 Sevilla fans?”
Sacha Houlié, a 35-year-old MP for the party of the president, Emmanuel Macron, is one of the few voices on the political stage in recent years to mount a defence of fans’ rights. In a parliamentary report co-written with the former minister for sport Marie-George Buffet in 2020, he recommended greater dialogue between fan groups and the authorities, as well as a shift away from catch-all bans on away supporters.
In an interview with the magazine So Foot this past week, Houlié pointed out there had been a decrease in the number of incidents inside stadiums in the past few years. He avoided directly criticising the ministers’ actions – “I imagine they have a lot of constraints when it comes to mobilising police forces, especially ahead of the Olympics” – but insists that systematic bans are not a long-term solution to the problem. For Houlié, dialogue between fans and the authorities is the key, rather than giving in to the “temptation” of travel bans. “There will always be away trips that you can’t ban, so you might as well get some practice [policing them] beforehand.”
Crucially, he laments that supporters’ rights are not taken seriously as a topic by many in France: “Supporters have long been regarded as second-class citizens, and that’s still the case today.
“People are not as concerned about football fans being deprived of their freedoms as they are about protesters or any other citizen.”
Another five of this weekend’s Ligue 1 games were hit by orders banning travelling supporters. The ANS had three of them – including a ban on PSG fans at Lille – overturned after another round of appeals.
The group has explained on X (formerly Twitter) it was reticent about going to court for the third time in the space of a week but that it is also concerned about the emergence of “repeated ministerial decrees despite court rulings” suspending them. Another four games on Wednesday have had similar bans imposed due to “serious risks” – despite Oudéa-Castéra’s initial call for a moratorium until Monday only.
Finding a balance between clamping down on isolated cases of violence and ensuring the vast majority of blameless fans are free to support their team away from home is evidently a difficult task. The hope is that travelling supporters will soon be able to attend games safely again – even in small numbers – and that their case against restrictive measures is not undermined by further incidents this season.
