French authorities have displayed real and fake Champions League final tickets in a press conference after the sports minister Amelie Oudea-Caster doubled down on a baseless claim that the distressing scenes before the match were caused by "30 to 40,000" Liverpool supporters who had turned up at Stade de France without tickets.
Gerald Darmanin, the French interior minister, said that he had regrets about the policing of the event but also attempted to shift the blame on to Liverpool fans and a "massive, industrial-scale and organised fraud with fake tickets".
There are subtle differences to the tickets displayed by the authorities. The most visible is a slight difference in typeface, while the QR code on the fake leads to a google search of Liverpool FC and the code on the real brief produces a code. That difference would only have been apparent when tickets needed to be scanned at the stadium’s turnstiles.
