A Tactical Shift Sweeps Soccer, Only It Comes From the Police
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Version 0 of 1. BARCELONA, Spain — Lluis Miquel Venteo Fernandez is a longtime Barcelona fan, so he had a specific opponent in mind for his beloved soccer team when the matchups were announced for this week’s Champions League quarterfinals. “I want Monaco,” he said. Monaco, from the top French league, is one of the weaker clubs remaining in the tournament. But quality on the field (or lack thereof) was not Venteo’s primary motivation. “Monaco would be perfect,” he said, “because they have no supporters.” While many soccer fans salivate over the midweek clashes of the best teams in Europe, those like Mr. Venteo, who oversees sports-related security in Barcelona, have a different rooting interest. Mr. Venteo wants games against teams like Monaco, which has a largely diffident, if not invisible, fan base. Mr. Venteo ended up with a difficult draw — both for him and for his team — as Barcelona was paired with Paris St.-Germain. With the Champions League in full swing throughout Europe this week, the focus on security will be even greater than usual after several ugly incidents that marred games in the earlier rounds of this tournament as well as in the second-tier Europa League. Michel Platini, the president of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has called for a continentwide police force focused specifically on sports. It would ostensibly help prevent conflicts like the one in February in Rome, where fans of Feyenoord, a Dutch club, battled the police and were said to have been responsible for damage to the Barcaccia, a boat-shaped fountain at the foot of the Spanish Steps. One local government official described the disorder as “the work of the uncivilized.” Also recently, in Paris, some Chelsea fans, visiting from London, refused to allow a black man to board their subway car and were seen on video chanting with pride about being racist. Sometimes clashes of cultures can be more violent. A Tottenham fan was stabbed before a Europa League game in Italy in 2012, and Borussia Dortmund fans were attacked by Galatasaray supporters in the streets of Istanbul before the teams’ Champions League match last fall. But through increased cooperation and preparedness, soccer has avoided large-scale policing calamities like the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster in Brussels, in which 39 people died after a wall collapsed during fighting between Liverpool and Juventus supporters at the European Cup final. That led UEFA to bar all English clubs from European competitions for years. “The evolution of the supporter business has changed,” Jean-François Martins, Paris’s deputy mayor for sports and tourism, said in an interview at his office. “Across Europe, hooligans, the way people think of them years ago, are gone. But that does not mean there are not still problems. And the way we have to approach these fans is different than it used to be.” Big matches involving clubs from different countries — and fans from different cultures — remain a potential source of violence, so security officials planning for a European match focus on two distinct prongs: the experience in and around the stadium, and the contact that visiting fans will have with locals (as well as monuments, statues and, occasionally, artifacts) in the city’s center. Preparation is critical. John O’Hare, who oversees soccer security in Manchester, England, said he communicated with his counterparts in other countries to identify fans who had, say, been arrested for violence in their home countries and might try to travel to an away match. While there is no universal master list of suspected troublemakers, Mr. O’Hare keeps detailed files, he said, and shares them with other officers when Manchester United or Manchester City is playing abroad. For matches in England, each game is assigned a rating — basically a label of how much potential trouble might exist. While a Category A match might entail no police presence, a Category C match, a description reserved for rivalry games and big European clashes, requires significantly increased resources. “That might mean about 250 officers all told,” Mr. O’Hare said. “But that doesn’t mean there are that many in riot gear. These days, we try to use a softer touch.” Many police forces, particularly in Western Europe, have tried to reduce tensions between fans and law enforcement by taking a proactive approach. In the weeks before a match, Mr. O’Hare said, he or another officer will talk to leaders of the top fan groups for the visiting team to work out plans for where the fans will congregate (and drink) before the game. While some cities — particularly in Eastern Europe, Mr. Martins said — have stuck to the older philosophy of using loads of officers carrying lots of weapons, a more peaceful strategy is growing in popularity. Instead of using “batons and barking dogs” to keep the peace, Mr. O’Hare said, the goal is to shepherd visiting fans to a particular area of the city and then help accompany the fans to the stadium. “This generally works well,” said Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, a member of a supporters’ group for Dortmund, a German club. “Sometimes there are problems with cultural things, like when we played Arsenal in the fall. In Germany, we go to the stadium several hours before the match, but in England they did not expect us to arrive so early. But these are small. The communication usually ends up making everyone happy.” The most dangerous factions of fans, security officials said, are generally the splinter groups or unaffiliated organizations that support a particular team. Many of these groups have political affiliations or ideologies, which can make their interactions more combustible. “It isn’t just size, either,” Mr. Venteo, the Barcelona officer, said of the potential for violence by visiting fans. “Sometimes a small group can be more dangerous than a big one. Five hundred fans from CSKA Moscow would be harder to deal with than 1,000 fans, if there were 1,000 fans, from Monte Carlo.” The French police use social media — including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — to track as many groups as possible. Meet-ups and confrontations with rival groups are often planned on the Internet. Over the past five years, much of this intelligence-gathering has been done by a special governmental unit that was created to deal with hooliganism in France. “If we have 45,000 people coming to a match, we can’t put a police officer behind each one,” Mr. Martins said. “We use everything we can — especially the Internet — to help find the stupid people who want to do stupid things.” Mr. Venteo will be on alert for any politically motivated battles, he said, when P.S.G. and Barcelona play the second leg, in Spain, on April 21. The last time the teams played, he said, a bizarre situation developed in which a group of right-wing P.S.G. supporters collaborated with a right-wing Barcelona group to fight a left-wing Barcelona group. “We heard about it on the Internet and were able to stop it,” he said. “Barely.” Once the prematch threats are handled, there is still the matter of keeping things orderly during the game. Unlike sporting events in the United States, soccer matches in Europe generally have segregated seating, with visiting fans lumped together and surrounded by officers. There are strict rules about coming and going — visiting fans must usually wait in their seats, for up to an hour after the game, so home fans can disperse — and conditions for things like bathrooms and refreshments vary greatly from stadium to stadium, often leaving visiting fans in a foul mood. “I don’t know why it has to be like this,” Mr. Gruszecki, the Dortmund fan, said. “It is not like we are monsters who want to eat home fans.” Still, racist chants and objects thrown from the stands are all too common around Europe. Fans, wherever they are from, are unpredictable. Mr. Venteo recalled, somewhat ruefully, the end of a Champions League semifinal between Barcelona and Chelsea in 2012. Standing with some British security officials, Mr. Venteo watched Lionel Messi prepare to take a penalty kick that, if scored, would put Barcelona in a position to advance. If he missed, Chelsea was in line to go through. “It was crazy,” Mr. Venteo said. “We are all so tense, and when Messi hit the crossbar, they were the ones who looked sad.” He laughed. “I understood,” he said. “Messi missed, and it meant they had to keep working.” |