After appalling behaviour by French police and gangs of local thugs at the 2022 Champions League Final, should fans attending the Paris Olympics next year be afraid of what they might encounter?
Considering the massive global success of Netflix’s dystopian Korean drama Squid Game, it was inevitable that the streaming giant would commission a second season. What was less predictable was its announcement of a real-life version of the show called Squid Game: The Challenge, where 456 players would battle it out for a £3.8 million prize.
Despite reports from The Challenge’s Bedfordshire set claiming gruelling conditions – strongly denied by Netflix – the real-life version was always going to be a much easier ride than its fictional progenitor. Contestants wouldn’t have their lives on the line. No one would be gunned down in cold blood by snipers or stabbed by a fellow competitor. Whatever you might think about the amount of violence on the small screen, that level of real-life brutality in the name of entertainment is nowhere on the horizon. Love Island: Battle Royale isn’t happening anytime soon.
Or is it? In July 2024, the Summer Olympics will begin in Paris. The city of lights. The city of love. The capital of haute couture. It’s also the city that hosted the Champions League Final in May 2022, where Liverpool FC fans – including women, disabled supporters and children as young as six – were kettled, teargassed and pepper sprayed by baton-wielding police and gung-ho gendarmes. In addition, they were attacked and robbed by gangs of local youths outside the Stade De France, a stadium that will be staging several Olympic events. Anyone who watched the TV news reports of thuggish overpolicing would have been forgiven for thinking a squadron of guards from Squid Game had been drafted in for the event.
In an appalling case of buckpassing, the French interior minister Gérald Darmanin initially tried to justify the disturbing scenes of violence by blaming ticketless Liverpool fans. But a subsequent cross-party inquiry in France found that ‘English football fans were not the cause of these problems. Let’s say that clearly. They showed great control in chaotic surroundings.’
In October last year, the BBC’s Panorama documentary The Champions League Final: What Went Wrong? illustrated just how grateful the French authorities and European football’s governing body UEFA should be to those Liverpool fans. With the appalling events at Hillsborough in 1989 forever etched in their collective memory, supporters of the club averted a large-scale loss of life by behaving far more responsibly than the French stormtrooper-wannabes who were supposed to be protecting them. In the words of one fan who experienced the awful events that night: ‘Shame on you, Paris!’ While the treatment of the English team’s followers was more widely reported, Real Madrid fans were subjected to similar indignities.
An independent report this February condemned the authorities for trying to place the blame at the feet of fans, a tactic that included ‘reprehensible’ falsehoods about forged tickets. The policing methods were adjudged to be ‘defective’ and the report drew up a list of 21 recommendations designed to avoid a similar situation at future sporting events. Damningly, it was found the French police were woefully lacking when it came to dealing with ‘anti-social behaviour or violence perpetrated by locals’.
The question visitors to next summer’s games will want answered is, can the Parisian police change their behaviour and show the same levels of control exhibited by both sets of fans at the Champions League Final? The omens aren’t good. Very recently, Dunja Mijatovic, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, accused riot police in Paris of using ‘excessive force’ when dealing with public protests against pension reform. Lessons don’t seem to have been learned.
No one is suggesting the Summer 2024 Olympics will be like yet another Squid Game spin-off, with police giving full vent to their violent impulses in red hooded jumpsuits and black face masks. And a giant Red Light, Green Light robot doll isn’t going to be towering over spectators, casting her creepy, deadly gaze on anyone who dares to break the rules. That’s the world of fantasy. But the violence at the Champions League Final was very real and it must not be repeated.
At one point in Squid Game, the show’s main protagonist Seong Gi Hun says to his daughter: ‘I was bitten by a huge mosquito. Mosquitos are really mean these days.’ Let’s hope the French police aren’t even meaner next July.
