Scheduled for 6:45 p.m., the kick-off of the meeting between Nice and Cologne, poster of the first day of the Europa League conference, the smallest of the European football cups, was finally given at 7:40 p.m. after violent clashes in the stands between supporters.
These violent clashes left eleven injured, one of whom fell 5 meters in the stands and was hospitalized in a state of“absolute urgency”, we learned from the prefecture.
⚡ The atmosphere is totally degenerating in Nice! An hour before the match against Cologne, clashes broke out at the Allian… https://t.co/9FLOb1eX7i
The official store of OGC Nice vandalized
The day had however started in fervor. That of the supporters of the German club FC Cologne, who came en masse to support their team. Seen on the Promenade des Anglais and on Place Masséna, the red tide has however given way to a wave of violence.
Some individuals first vandalized the official store of the Nice club. Forced entry, tags, rubbish on the public highway, everything is there. The start of an escalation which then continued in the setting of the Allianz Rivera a few minutes before the theoretical start of the meeting. The visitor parking lot reserved for Cologne was forced and several people tried to do battle with the Nice supporters.
The shame on football and the fans who degrade the city. @cestrosi @Nice_Matin @VilledeNice @ogcnice https://t.co/Ge65f426HA
The stadium announcer initially announced a temporary postponement. “A crisis meeting is underway”he explained.
The seriously injured supporter is from Paris
The seriously injured supporter, who suffers “head and chest trauma” is not a German, but “a Parisian supporter”told AFP the chief of staff of the prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes.
“He is a Frenchman, a Parisian supporter who was in the German ranks”said Benoît Huber, reached by telephone, recalling that the supporters of the Auteuil stand at the Parc des Princes in Paris “have ties to the Cologne ultras”.
The supporter who fell 5 meters from the stands of the Allianz Arena, he added.
If it would seem that the Germans are the source of these scenes of chaos, Nice has been in the recent past the scene of clashes. During a Nice-Marseille, on August 22, 2021, a Riviera supporter had launched a violent kick towards the Marseille player Dimitri Payet, causing the final cessation of the meeting. He had been given a one-year suspended prison sentence and a five-year stadium ban.
Following similar incidents (throwing bottles) three months later on the lawn of Olympique Lyonnais during a match against Marseille, a certain number of measures had been decided at the request of the government, such as the ban on entering the enclosure of a stadium with bottles and other containers, or the systematization of anti-projection and anti-intrusion nets.