I don’t like arriving too early at games. What’s the point? You’re sitting in an empty stadium for hours waiting for everyone else to arrive. A colleague who likes to get there five or six hours before kick-off asked me: but what if something goes wrong? The answer is, it usually doesn’t.
But this was the Champions League final, and I didn’t want to miss the food I heard would be served in the media cafe between six and seven, so I arrived at the Stade de France-Saint Denis RER commuter rail station south-east of the stadium just before six o’clock, three hours before kick-off.
At this time there were already problems developing south-east of the stadium, on the route along which the Liverpool supporters were funnelled as they walked a little over a kilometre from the RER station to the ground.
The route is blocked by a motorway which is crossed through a pedestrian tunnel. The entrance to this tunnel became a bottleneck as people waited their turn to move down the steps. On the far side of the tunnel you pass under a motorway bridge, along a path partially obstructed by parked police vans, and towards a sloping concrete gangway that brings you up to the stadium’s outer concourse.
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At the entrance to this sloping walkway was another ticket check – not an actual turnstile, but a check designed to ensure only people with valid tickets could approach the turnstiles. Here a second more intractable bottleneck had developed. I waited for 15 or 20 minutes as the crowd scarcely moved. A Frenchman who seemed to be in charge was standing on a wall above the crowd shouting into a megaphone like a racing commentator, urging people to have their tickets ready as they approached.
There was impatience at this time, but it was the impatience of people who don’t understand why an apparently simple process should be taking so long, rather than the impatience of people who have paid hundreds or thousands of euros to go to a Champions League final it now appears they are about to miss.
A couple of hours later I would see a viral video purporting to show “Liverpool supporters climbing into Stade de France”. In fact this video showed people trying to scale the wall at this bottleneck location, having presumably been stuck waiting there for a long time. Over that wall was not the stadium itself, but rather the stadium’s outer perimeter. To get into the actual game from there you still had to pass through another steel fence guarded by riot police with pepper spray and gas.
As I passed through the ticket check, where personnel were using their phones to electronically verify tickets, I saw a Liverpool fan being physically pushed back and ordered to leave by big stewards who apparently did not find his ticket in order. He argued back and I heard the row go on as I continued towards the gate.
This sort of thing was further delaying a process that was already happening too slowly to handle the volume of people it was going to have to deal with. So – were some people trying to get into the ground without tickets? It looked like at least some were, yes. But this is routine at games of this size and the organisation is meant to be designed in such a way as to cope with it.
I went in through the media entrance at gate U, there was no queue, the process was effortless. The fans were directed to gates further along the stadium perimeter to the south and east where long frustrated queues had already developed. By 8.30, an hour before scheduled kick-off, with the teams out on the pitch warming up, and thousands of empty seats visible in the Liverpool end, it was plain that the delays affecting their supporters were serious – while the Madrid end was already packed, prompting social media comments along the lines of “See, it’s only one set of supporters who have problems <eyeroll emoji>”.
Those who were quick to blame the Liverpool supporters evidently did not understand the organisational realities. Madrid had the north end of the ground, and the Madrid fanzone was located just one kilometre north of the stadium, so many of their supporters would have arrived in the general Saint Denis area earlier in the day. The most convenient train station for them to arrive at was the Saint Denis metro to the north of the stadium rather than the RER stations to the south. On the wider northern approaches they did not encounter the sort of bottlenecks that were delaying the Liverpool crowd.
The Liverpool fanzone, by contrast, drew tens of thousands of supporters to Cours de Vincennes, in the east of Paris, 10 kilometres from the Stade de France and at least 45 minutes away by public transport. There was no reason for these supporters to head out to Saint Denis hours beforehand – unless they were anticipating something would go wrong.
At 8.45 there was a stadium announcement that kick-off had been delayed due to the late arrival of fans. This was an outright lie. People who turn up to a match two hours before kick-off don’t expect to be still stuck outside the ground two hours later. The basic problem was that the southern approaches were too constricted to accommodate the flow of people to the match. The crowd management plan essentially required a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and when the camel proved unable to get through in a timely fashion the police got stuck into it with pepper spray and tear gas.
The game eventually kicked off more than 35 minutes late with few empty seats still visible but hundreds of Liverpool fans, many of whom had waited patiently with valid tickets, still stuck outside and unable to get in. These people were driven away by the police. Those tempted to assume that the police must have had a good reason to unleash their clubs and chemicals should remember that for riot cops, beating people up is the most enjoyable part of the job. Uefa are lucky this organisational shambles did not turn out to have much worse consequences.
