At the 1998 World Cup in France
The shame of German football continues to have an effect
6/21/2023, 8:24 am
Daniel Nivel was 43 years old when he was a police officer at the 1998 World Cup. Before the German team’s game against the national team, hooligans almost beat the Frenchman to death, and he was in a coma for six weeks. A quarter of a century later, what he misses most is his freedom.
Daniel Nivel is blind in one eye, can neither smell nor taste and can hardly hear. The most difficult thing for the 68-year-old is that 25 years after the cowardly attack by German hooligans on him, he can no longer speak. “He really lacks the ability to express himself,” his wife Lorette told “Sport Bild” on the occasion of the anniversary and made it clear: “June 21, 1998 will never be forgotten. My husband’s freedom was taken away.”
That fateful Sunday at the World Cup in France went down in German football history as the “shame of Lens”. DFB President Bernd Neuendorf speaks of “one of the darkest chapters in German football”. in a new ZDF documentary about the attack, which is still stunned after a quarter of a century. The perpetrators “behaved like monsters,” it said later in the verdict.
A three-digit number of German rioters roamed the streets of the small town in northern France on the day where Germany met Yugoslavia in the preliminary round that evening. Nivel is blocking the narrow Rue Romuald Pruvost with two other French gendarmes when he and his colleagues are attacked by a small group of hooligans. Nivel’s two colleagues are able to flee.
Prison sentences for hooligans are cold consolation
But Nivel, then 43 years old, father of two children, is pushed to the ground by an unknown man and loses his helmet. Several men kick and beat the defenseless policeman, some with a wooden billboard and the end of his tear gas gun. Nivel remains lying in a pool of blood and only wakes up from the coma after six weeks. He has no memories of the robbery.
Germany and France are in shock after the brutal attack. Chancellor Helmut Kohl called the perpetrators a “disgrace to our country.” The then DFB President Egidius Braun is even considering withdrawing the German team from the World Cup. But Kohl and UEFA President Lennart Johansson “convinced me,” says Braun, “that this wasn’t the right way – the violent criminals would have prevailed over sport.”
The deed continues to this day. In 2000, the DFB founded the Daniel Nivel Foundation, which, among other things, takes care of violence prevention. Nivel comes to football games several times at the invitation of the DFB, including the 2006 World Cup in Germany and the 2016 European Championship in France. Before the Nations League game on October 16, 2018 in Paris, Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas awarded him the Federal Cross of Merit.
Six hooligans were sentenced to between three and a half and ten years in prison in several trials between 1999 and 2003. Cold consolation for the Nivel family. “They came out of prison,” said his wife Lorette, “yes, they got their lives back.” The house at number 74 on Rue Romuald Pruvost, in front of which Nivel’s life was almost taken, has long since been demolished. There is now a green space there.