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You cannot gas football supporters for being somewhere they are forced to be.

That seems like a nonsense statement. Nonsense in the way these things absolutely don’t happen in 2025. And yet they do, they very much do.

Having watched Aston Villa fans being attacked in Paris this week outside the Moulin Rouge, and having seen much of the French media do their best can-can to avoid blaming the actual PSG “ultra” culprits, it’s no surprise there’s been no French outrage about the treatment of Manchester United supporters at the Groupama Stadium.

Local Lyon newspaper Le Progres, oh le irony, crows today about how it was a record attendance and snarks towards the quiet away fans.

Those away fans had been sent on a tour of all the worst parts of Lyon in an effort to watch their team. Having been given the honour of paying for actual tickets to an event, supporters were unsurprised to find out that wasn’t the only hurdle they had to jump to gain admission.

Due to them being football fans, and having the temerity to be fans of an English club at that, they had to pick up a wristband at Eurexpo ahead of the match. Sport Witness has it on good authority that fans simply had to scan their tickets to be given a wrist band. No big ID chase, no overall cause other than disruption and misery.

Anything with the word ‘expo’ in it sounds like a drag away from the action and likely to be located in some desolate concrete outskirt.

Well, yes, although let’s not be too unfair to the commune of Chassieu, which is absolutely not in central Lyon.

So surely, the place where these wristbands were dished out would be beside the Groupama Stadium, which is also way out of town? Non, that would spoil the fun… remember this is supposed to be a challenge and not an enjoyable experience.

Around the time fans will have been finishing their late Lyon lunches and getting ready for their Chassieu detour, the city’s Metro system came to a shuddering halt.

Lines A, B, C and D went XYZ and therefore everything became much more difficult. Manchester United and groups around the club who advise fans in such situations went into action and tried to explain the method of bus-bus-queue-humiliation-bus-bus which was left to reach the stadium with the wristband required.

Some brave soldiers unfortunately failed to make it through and were left in the Lyon trenches (the local Irish bar).

Common sense would dictate that as soon as Lyon’s Metro system decided to have some downtime, it would immediately be decided the wristband prank would be called off and fans could travel directly to the stadium.

LOL. Don’t be absurd.

Just like many before them, Manchester United fans were seen as somewhat fair game by everyone associated.

There *was* hooliganism once and, therefore, despite it being decades ago, you will pay.

For the casual reader, it’s important to explain the absolute shitshow in French football in recent years.

No, not PSG taking over everything via Middle East funding, but, well, their own French style of hooliganism. Away fans are banned at a whole number of Ligue 1 matches, largely because they’ll try to batter each other and trash where they are.

In this respect they are like UK football minus about 35 years. It is nice to feel more civilised about something.

That feeling doesn’t carry you, though. We all surely remember Liverpool fans being treated like abattoir-destined cattle ahead of their Champions League final in Paris. The local authorities failed massively when they decided the away fans – the English as they saw them – were the problem.

Such an embarrassment on a national scale may make authorities rethink ahead of Premier League teams arriving. Well, apparently it did, and the end result of such thought was that English football fans needed to suffer more.

You would struggle to find a less risky match – on supporter basis – than Lyon versus Manchester United when it comes to away fans. And yet, the local authorities decided they’d make visiting fans go through what can be best described as an assault course.

Having been to Lyon’s stadium on a holiday travel day and – genuinely – tried to make it as exciting as possible for the kids, I can tell you it’s a post commercial hell-hole which no €18 loaded hotdog can soothe.

It is a stadium for events, and if it can’t handle such an event then what is it really?! Locals hate it, visitors do so with more rigour having been drawn in by the lure of one of France’s biggest clubs.

Think Old Trafford at a random M65 outlet location which had half of the shops designed on 1990s hopes and the other half having deceased. I’ve done it twice just to make sure it wasn’t me.

There is a wind which blows through that place like impending doom. Hope that ends up in L’Equipe, tired of reading various French writers go on excited literary journeys to essentially say the UK is shit. We can do that too.

Anyway!

The fans who actually managed to get there, after some reasonably gave up, were the met with what can only be described as thugs with power. We get it in the UK, stewards being arses, but this is a whole new cultural experience.

People being kept behind and gassed en masse. Access to toilets denied. Some kept in until after midnight.

Sure it may be your child’s first away and life should be enjoyable, but we are the law. They would not do this to local ultras because they’d be physically challenged and overwhelmed. Instead, it is easier to pick on foreigners – give yourself an ancient hooligan reason to do so – and go off and hurt people because you have a cowardice hang up.

When Lyon come to Manchester for the return leg, when PSG come to Birmingham, if their fans were to be treated half as harshly, it would make front pages. English front pages, we’d be disgusted at ourselves.

Maybe Lyon fans can be sent to Cheadle Hulme to obtain a stamp on their hand, without which they’re unable to enter the borough of Trafford.

There’s a whole number of ritual humiliations and suffering which could be dreamed up. However, as much as football authorities in the UK get wrong, the plan will instead be to assure safety and make the experience work well.

UEFA clearly don’t care, so the only potential change here is France having some shame about how they treat visiting football fans.

That, genuinely, feels like a lost cause.

 

 

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