France blames ticket fraud for Champions League final chaos

PARIS: French authorities defended police on Monday for indiscriminately firing tear gas and pepper spray at Liverpool supporters at the Champions League final, while blaming industrial levels of fraud that saw 30,000 to 40,000 people try to enter the Stade de France with fake tickets or none at all. UEFA ordered an independent report that it said would “examine decision making, responsibility and behaviors of all entities involved in the final” and be made public. After a meeting into Saturday’s chaos, the French ministers of the sport and the interior shifted responsibility onto the Liverpool fans while not providing details on how they were sure so many fake tickets were in circulation.

People with legitimate tickets bought through Liverpool and UEFA reported struggling to access the stadium. “There was massive fraud at an industrial level and an organization of fake tickets because of the pre-filtering by the Stade de France and the French Football Federation, 70 percent of the tickets were fake tickets coming into the Stade de France,” Interior minister Gérald Darmanin said. “Fifteen percent of fake tickets also were after the first filtering ...

more than 2,600 tickets were confirmed by UEFA as non-validated tickets even though they’d gone through the first filtering. The French sports ministry provided no evidence for its claims and it did not respond to a follow-up email after hosting a combative news conference. “A massive presence of these fake tickets of course was the issue why there were delays,” Darmanin said.