The French sports minister has apologised to Liverpool fans with tickets who could not get into the Champions League final - but Amélie Oudéa-Castéra insisted British fans arrived too late and in a disorganised way.
And the French authorities have claimed there were between 30,000-40,000 fans at the Stade de France who either had false tickets or no tickets at all. Liverpool fans have claimed they were attacking indiscriminately with tear gas and pepper spray by the French police - and no action was taken to protect them leaving the stadium.
The French government called a crisis meeting with UEFA, the mayor of Paris and the French FA today. Oudéa-Castéra made the claims at a press conference held at the French Ministry of Sport.
She said: “The first element, the route cause of all that was the volume of false tickets or persons without any tickets. This is clearly something we have to understand. This is why we have asked UEFA to really dig into that. It is going to be complementary to the approach that we have launched on our side on the legal side to understand why such a big volume, what happened. This is the really the key cause of everything. Then we know that there were a number of adverse circumstances which made the situation even harsher.
"The late arrival at the stadium and around the stadium, difficulties in the transportation. Difficulties also to locate the British people who were a little bit everywhere around the stadium. I want to know where exactly they came from and how they arrived at the stadium. We are extremely sorry for all those people whose experience has been wasted all that evening. The people who have bought tickets and were unable to enter the match. This is why I have asked UEFA to work on the compensation system for 2,700 people - including British people - so that they can get compensation.”
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Oudéa-Castéra said that lessons had to be learned from ticketing and how large flows of people were handled with France staging the Rugby World Cup next year and the 2024 Olympics. But she added: "At nine o’clock in the evening, there were 97% of Spanish fans seated in the stadium. And there were only 50% of British people. And we know that the British stayed a long time in the fan zone in the Cours de Vincennes and the late arrivals created a big amount of British people entering the stadium.
There were difficulties in the way that we managed the flow. We don’t want to say we did everything well. Fair enough. But we say there were a number of circumstances that made it difficult. The strikes in transportation, the late arrivals. Also we did not know we were really not able to locate the people when they arrived at the Stade de France. There was not a very clear journey from the fan zone to the stadium. No organised buses. And on that front, it was very different to what Real Madrid organised for their supporters.”
