French football tries to understand reasons for the wave of violence in stadiums

The game had been running for just three minutes and 54 seconds when Dimitri Payet ran unhurriedly to the corner flag at Groupama Stadium. The match between his team, Marseille, and host Lyon had barely started and had not even picked up pace. No goals. There had barely been time for an opportunity to finish off. Everyone, players and fans alike, was still settling down.

In the stands above the player, Wilfried Serriere, 32, a food delivery van driver, looked down and tossed a pint bottle of water at his feet onto the lawn. The bottle was full. Payet was setting the ball for a corner. His back was turned to the fan. In footage taken by stadium security cameras and later displayed in court, Serriere is seen picking up the bottle, lowering her hood and throwing it.

A moment later, Payet fell to the lawn, her hands over her face. The bottle had hit him right in the face.

Payet’s teammates rushed to his aid. Anthony Lopez, Lyon goalkeeper, gestured towards his team’s fans, asking for calm. Serriere would later tell a court that “I don’t know what went through my mind: euphoria, whatever.” He acknowledged that he had thrown the bottle that had hurt Payet, but was unable to explain why.

The rest of France has been asking the same question in the months since the opening of the football season. A wave of violence has swept through Ligue 1, the country’s highest football division, since fans returned to stadiums in August after a year-long absence caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Two games, both involving Marseille, had been suspended – and ultimately postponed – after Payet was hit by objects thrown from the stands. In Lyon, players were quickly removed from the field. In the previous incident, in Nice, there was a fierce confrontation on the field between Marseille players and hundreds of fans of the opposing team.

The clash also had consequences: a Nice fan was given a suspended 12-month prison sentence for kicking Payet, and a member of Marseille’s coaching staff was suspended for the remainder of the season for punching one of the people who invaded the pitch.

But those were just the two most serious incidents. Fans invaded the field at games held in Lens and Angers. There were pitched battles between rival groups of extremist fans in several cities before and after games. Objects were hurled onto the lawn at Montpelier and Metz, and at the Parc des Princes, the stadium of Paris Saint-Germain.

In total, nine Ligue 1 matches have been hampered this season by what the newspaper “Dauphiné Libéré” described as an “epidemic” of violence, out of control to the point that French authorities are seeing it as a threat to the sport’s survival. Vincent Labrune, president of the French league, defined it as “nothing less than a matter of survival for our sport”.

This may seem like an exaggeration, but it is a realistically based observation. There is a fear that the violence will have financial ramifications. Roxana Maracineanu, the French sports minister, declared that the country’s football cannot “collectively bear” a failure to provide content to media organizations that pay to broadcast games. But there is also concern that the situation could make France an unwelcoming place for players.

In Serriere’s sentencing, Axel Daurat, a lawyer representing Payet and Marseille, testified that the player had felt a “significant” psychological impact as a result of suffering two attacks in just three months. “The fear will be there every time he positions the ball to take a corner,” said Daurat.

But while the potential consequences are clear, there has been less progress in identifying the causes. Labrune hinted that the increasingly frequent disturbances should be read as a reflection of post-pandemic French society: “An anxious, preoccupied, fractured, bellicose and – it’s hard to say – a bit crazy society.”

And yet, this explanation does not stand up to any serious scrutiny. France is hardly the only country to go through moments of civic strife as it emerges, in fits and starts and with much uncertainty, into a new and uncomfortable reality. Most other major European leagues that are facing the same reality have seen nothing close to the surge in violence recorded by Ligue 1.

“It seems a bit like a sly psychology to say the situation has to do with the manifestation of social tensions in the stadiums,” said Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, an organization that brings together European fans. More likely, he said, the violence illustrates a structural and institutional problem.

“It’s as if the clubs have lost some of their specialist knowledge,” he said. “In the incident between Lens and Lille, there was no separation between home and visiting fans. I haven’t seen that in a game for 20 years, maybe more. stadiums. Maybe they haven’t focused on security as they should.”

Evain argued that this may have been due to the loss of security and experienced staff during the pandemic, and drew a parallel between the French experience and scenes seen at Wembley in July, when thousands of ticketless fans stormed the stadium for the match between England and Italy in the Euro Cup decision.

A sternly critical report this month documented how failed policing put stadium security guards in an impossible — and potentially lethal — situation that day. “You can’t ask a low-paid, poorly trained person in precarious working conditions to put their health at risk to prevent someone from encroaching on the countryside,” Evain said.

Nicolas Hourcade, a sociologist at the École Centrale de Lyon who researches fan movements, pointed out that the lack of specialized professionals may have been aggravated by the financial difficulties facing French teams. France is the only one of the big European leagues that chose not to conclude the 2019-2020 season, interrupted by the pandemic, and the country’s clubs continue to be shaken by the collapse of the championship’s television contract.

“It could be that the clubs haven’t invested enough in security,” said Hourcade, “which would explain why in some cases the measures seem insufficient.”

But while this offers one possible explanation for why French football has become such a fertile ground for violence, it doesn’t clarify where it stems from. Maracineanu, the sports minister, blamed the French radical fans, and urged their leaders to “control their people.” But things aren’t that simple.

At Serriere’s hearing, information emerged that he has been a Lyon fan for 15 years – although news outlets have pointed out that he appeared in court wearing a Bayern Munich shirt – but was not a member of an organized supporter. Thus, he was not a member of any riot police.

“There have been incidents involving radical fans,” said Pierre Barthélemy, a lawyer who has defended organized supporters and radical fans. He mentioned two specifically, including the invasion of the pitch at Lens, which he said was caused by the presence of “Belgian vandals” among Lille’s visiting fans, and an incident at a game in Montpelier that was being boycotted by the radical organized cheering.

“When the game was suspended in Nice, it was because the authorities allowed people to play things on the pitch for 40 or 50 minutes,” Barthélemy said. “These weren’t organized incidents. They were spontaneous, and for the most part they didn’t relate to the radical crowd.”

But that only makes them harder to police. France has some of the harshest punishments for collective riots in Europe, Evain said, which includes the possibility of closing grandstands or entire stadiums.

He fears the current outbreak will generate a “populist” response: calls for greater vigilance over fans in stadiums and the handling of any incident, even an individual action, as a collective wrongdoing. At least one club president has admitted off-screen that he would agree to play behind closed doors if the problems continued.

But perhaps most importantly, the scattered nature of incidents in France makes them more difficult to understand. “Violence caused by radical fans and incidents caused by other fans are unrelated,” said Hourcade, the sociologist.

Violence can result from organizational failure. Or perhaps lingering grievances from radical fans are resurging after a lull in the pandemic.

But what unites all these perceptions is the fact that a stadium has become a place where lines can be crossed and taboos broken, and where, at 3:54 in a game, when the whistle chirp has barely disappeared and the match has barely started, a fan can look at a bottle and, without even knowing why, throw it at a player, delivering a new blow to the image that French football presents to the world.