threatened to abandon the game
Riots and serious injuries destroy Cologne euphoria
09/08/2022, 8:55 p.m
It was supposed to be a football festival, instead the peaceful 1. FC Köln fans’ journey to Nice turns into a nightmare. Before kick-off in the Europa Conference League there are serious riots in the stadium, the kick-off is postponed. A person is seriously injured.
The hoped-for holiday on the Côte d’Azur turned into dark hours for 1. FC Köln – and that was well before kick-off: After violent riots before the planned start of the game at OGC Nice, which ended 1-1, there was one fan in critical condition, several supporters from both sides were injured. Contrary to what was initially assumed, the man who was particularly badly affected should not be German.
“We are stunned, we wanted to celebrate a peaceful football festival, everything was prepared,” said Cologne’s managing director Christian Keller on RTL +. He doesn’t know whether the word “chaotic” is enough, “I can only think of swear words. I don’t know what these people are doing here.”
The seriously injured fan had fallen from the second tier from a height of five meters during the riots, AFP reported. Only later did it become clear that it was not a supporter of the Bundesliga club. A spokesman for the AFP news agency said he was “actually a Frenchman, a Parisian fan” who was in the guest block.
Prefecture speaks of 18 injured
As the news agency also reported, a few hundred of the more than 8,000 Cologne fans who had traveled with them made their way to the grandstand of the home fans. According to the police prefecture, 32 people were injured. Over 650 police officers and 600 security guards were deployed.
According to Keller, however, the information situation was more opaque: “According to my level of information, which you have to be very careful with, hooligans from Nice penetrated our fan block first.” In addition, some “hooligans from Paris” were on the move in the Cologne camp. Keller targeted the Cologne fans involved. “You have to make sure that these people never, ever come back to the stadium, at least not to ours.”
The club and the fans had been looking forward to the start of the group stage of the Conference League for days, for FC it was the return to the European stage after five years. Around 8,000 fans had tickets for the encounter, around 12,000 had traveled with them and marched through the city loudly but peacefully at noon – but they didn’t just make friends.
Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi tweeted pictures of heaps of rubbish in the city center in the afternoon, denounced the “scandalous behavior” of the visiting fans and announced that he would send FC the bill for cleaning and any repairs.