'Trauma' of disabled Liverpool fans fuels calls to strip Stade de France of RWC 2023 and Olympics
World Rugby and IOC urged to take action after children teargassed, a woman suffered a ‘grotesque attack’ and another a dislocated shoulder.
World Rugby and the International Olympic Committee are facing calls to strip the Stade de France from hosting their showpiece events ahead of an appearance of Liverpool fans at the French Senate on Tuesday.
The “horrendous” scale of the treatment of Liverpool fans at the Champions League final against Real Madrid will be laid bare in front of parliamentarians by Ted Morris and Joe Blott, the respective chairs of the Liverpool Disabled Supporters Association and the Spirit of Shankly fan group.
Morris has been compiling a record of the “traumatic” experiences endured by disabled fans, which include: disabled children being teargassed; a wheelchair user being crowd-surfed to safety over a fence; a blind fan being separated from their carer; a disabled woman suffering a dislocated shoulder; and a “grotesque” attack on a disabled woman as she left the stadium.
“The authorities failed massively,” Morris said. “I’ve emailed Lord Coe and Sir Bill Beaumont as well because I am of the opinion the stadium is not suitable to hold those two massive events after what happened to us. It was just horrendous.”
The Stade de France is due to hold the Rugby World Cup semi-finals and final in 2023 and then the Olympic athletics events in 2024. Morris and Blott are due to appear at 4.30pm on Tuesday as part of an inquiry by France’s Law Commission and will be sure to refute various post-match claims by the French authorities. Interior minister Gerald Darmanin has claimed that sections of the Liverpool fans posed “public order problems” and that 30,000-40,000 extra Liverpool fans had turned up to the match without proper tickets.
“We will bring the issue of disability to the French Senate and call out the untruths,” Morris said. “Our disabled supporters suffered greatly in Paris. The French have tried to use a narrative and playbook that has haunted this football club. And they have done it without basis or substance.
“We had nine games in Europe last season – there was not one single arrest. We went there for a festival of sport. There are a lot of people affected by this and we can’t allow this narrative to gain any more traction. We will provide testimonies of some of the horrendous experiences of our disabled supporters – families and children as young as eight. We hope to get some answers. We need to go there and tell the truth about what happened.”
Morris said that it was “quite unheard of” for fan representatives to be invited to the French Senate and that they were “grateful” for the opportunity.
Darmanin did subsequently appear to recognise some errors were made by authorities but Liverpool fans would like him to retract his earlier statements fully. “I would like to express our regret with regard to the organisation of the final because some people were not able to see the whole of the match,” Darmanin said. “I deplore the errors which took place before.”
'The authorities failed massively. It was just horrendous'
There were numerous eyewitness accounts of major congestion problems on the approach to the stadium and patient fans being locked out for almost an hour. There were also multiple reports of how local gangs assaulted and robbed supporters making their way back to coaches and trains after the match.
Didier Lallement, the head of Paris police, has since admitted he may have falsely stated up to 40,000 Liverpool supporters tried to get into the stadium with fake tickets. “Perhaps I made a mistake with the figure I gave to the minister,” Lallement said.
The police chief also acknowledged that there were not 30,000-40,000 “at the gates of the stadium” but maintained that many thousands were in the vicinity.
“It is obviously a failure because people were pushed and attacked,” Lallement said. “It’s a failure because the image of the country was undermined.”
The Telegraph has contacted the operators of the Stade de France for comment. The stadium is owned by the French government and France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, has said that “the priority now is to identify very precisely what went wrong … in order to learn all the lessons so that such incidents do not happen again at our future major international sporting events”.
