What really happened at the Champions League final

The Champions League final in Paris was a series of events that put people’s lives at risk according to sources that investigated the event. Because of the digital tickets and not well-trained stewards, there were discussions about what really happened in Paris. Government officials and experts blame the chaos on fake tickets among the participants. Moreover, the crisis was amplified by a transport strike and people who wanted to disturb the match and broke on the Stade de France. However, there are more questions for the government to answer: why were the valid tickets invalid, why did the stewards have to face unmanageable crowds, and about the engagement of politicians before troublemakers arrived at the stadium. Match officials have rowed back from an estimate of 30,000 fake tickets and mentioned that last month there were 2,500 detected. These tickets were very high by normal standards and played a key role in the confusion of those who bought tickets.

The organizers mentioned to a Senate inquiry that any problems with allegedly "un-fakeable" digital tickets happened because the fans did not switch on their Bluetooth, as they were instructed.The head of the fan association Football Supporters Europe, Ronan Evain, agrees that there was an issue scanning valid tickets in the stadium. He concluded that "At 6.30 pm on the Real Madrid side, there were already massive queues." Moreover, the stewards were supposed to activate digital tickets at the checkpoints. This led to a messy situation and a long waiting time to activate the tickets which made things worse and agitated the crowds. Besides the misunderstanding at the stadium, there was a rail strike on the day of the match which sent people to a smaller access point and caused a bottleneck.

Didier Pinteax, the FFF's head of security, said that last month they hired almost 1,700 security agents from private security companies to work as stewards for the match. BBC sources said that no stewards were willing to talk to the BBC reporters on the record except one man who said that there were riots everywhere and he was protecting a parking area and observed how the staff was threatened by a group of people that acted aggressively. Despite all the efforts to explain the causes of the chaos, many companies say that they had problems recruiting trained security personnel because of the Covid pandemic. Plus, guards rely on extra jobs at different events, so when all sports events and activities were put on hold during the lockdown, many looked for other jobs. So who is responsible for what happened at the Stade de France? It is a long process and a complex one especially because there’s also a loss in video surveillance footage from the train network and also from the stadium.