France has had the eyes of large portions of the global sporting fan base on it over these last three days. A World Cup final, rugby’s, on Saturday, and then the announcement of the 2023 winner of football’s Ballon d’Or at a live-broadcast gala in Paris on Monday night.
With nine months to go until the Olympic Games begin in the capital, these sorts of events speak for the country’s capabilities as a confident host.
In between, though, the horrible night of the Olympiques, Lyon and Marseille, two of the three biggest football clubs in Ligue 1. Lyon were due to play the standout game of the domestic weekend on Sunday at Marseille, a high-stakes meeting that, in theory, was making a journey to normalisation.
Because of violent incidents involving followers of Lyon, notably around a cup tie in Paris two seasons ago, the club’s fans have had severe restrictions on their allocation of seats at away games. Those limits were eased for Sunday’s trip to Marseille, 600 Lyon supporters allowed into the Stade Velodrome, up from 200 in the equivalent fixture in 2022/23.
None saw any football. Several experienced stones and other missiles being thrown at their buses as they approached the stadium, an ambush similar to the one on the vehicle carrying the Lyon players and coaching staff to the Velodrome.
The team bus was turning a corner in its approach to the arena around 7pm, two hours before the scheduled kick-off when the assault took place. Witnesses describe both stones and steel petanque balls being hurled at the windows.
A pane of glass shattered next to where Lyon manager Fabio Grosso was sitting at the front of the bus. He sustained head injuries, including a cut to his eyelid that would later require stitches. When the bus reached the stadium, Grosso was lifted into a stretcher and complained of dizziness.
“We saw the blood coming from his head,” said Lyon owner John Textor, “because he had been hit by splinters [of glass]. He wasn’t being very lucid and couldn’t hold a conversation.” Grosso’s assistant, Raffaele Longo, also suffered wounds to an eye.
The episode left those on board the bus in shock, but according to Dejan Lovren, the experienced Lyon defender, fully convinced that there had been planning in the assault.
“These people came along with the firm intention of causing serious injury,” said Lovren. Marseille police had made a handful of arrests by the end of Sunday night.
Lovren was among the senior players who led discussions among the Lyon squad, once they had reached the safety of the dressing-room at the Velodrome, on whether they were prepared to play.
Initially, a decision was taken that they should. But by then the French league were preparing to call the match off, announcing its suspension 20 minutes before kick-off time. Lyon's staff departed the stadium several hours later, in a borrowed bus bound for the airport.
Because the incidents took place outside the stadium, Marseille will probably not be subject to any punishment even if it is shown conclusively Marseille fans were the perpetrators. But both clubs condemned the attacks, which follow an escalation in the number of violent incidents in or outside French arenas over the past three seasons.
Nice were docked points in 2021/22 when their match against Marseille was disrupted by clashes between away players and home fans after objects were thrown from the stands on to the pitch. A pitch invasion marred that season’s Lens-Lille derby, and there were incidents around fixtures at Montpellier, Marseille, Angers, in Paris and at Saint Etienne.
“We have seen just about everything you don’t want to see,” said France’s Minister for Sport, Amelie Oudea-Castera, listing not only the attacks on the buses but reports of racist chanting inside the Velodrome before the match had been postponed. “It’s upsetting and disgusting.”
Lyon issued a statement condemning the chants identified as coming from where their fans were sitting.
Marseille is set to host matches during the football tournament at the Paris Olympics. The venue endured difficulties of a different sort during the Rugby World Cup, where the inefficient flow of spectators into the Velodrome was highlighted among organisational problems during the tournament.
For France’s Ligue 1, this latest episode of disruption comes at a bad time commercially. The league are currently inviting bids for the international broadcast rights to its games, sensitive to the fact that their offering competes with live action from the hugely popular English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and the German Bundesliga, as well as the growing interest to international audiences – thanks to the influx of marquee stars – of Saudi Arabia’s Pro League.
On a weekend where a Manchester derby and a Barcelona-Real Madrid clasico were beamed to worldwide audiences, France football presented the bloodied image of Grosso where its contest of the Olympiques was supposed to be.
