Champions League – UEFA dismantles the figures of Gérald Darmanin after the fiasco of the Stade de France

“We know that we had around 2,600 tickets brought to the turnstiles that were fake“, said Martin Kallen, managing director of UEFA Events, the European body’s subsidiary in charge of commercial event operations. “But many counterfeit tickets never reached the turnstiles (…) How many? we don’t know, we couldn’t really check. It is not believed that this was the figure mentioned after the first days in France, more or less 30,000 to 40,000“, he asserted, while evoking “several thousand tickets that were fake“.

Supporters will be heard

Heard Tuesday morning before the senators, Martin Kallen returned to the role in this UEFA final, which in particular keeps control of the ticket office. For the Swiss leader, paper tickets, which are more easily falsifiable, were less appropriate than certified electronic tickets. But “it wasn’t just the paper tickets that created the chaos in front of the doors“, he argued. “The causes are multiple: transport strike, bad reactions from stewards, law enforcement, there were delinquents (in the perimeter, editor’s note), an extremely large flow in front of the stadium without tickets or with counterfeit tickets“, he developed, before making some recommendations for the future.

Two or three months for the investigation

For example “work as much as possible with e-tickets“, “have more work on the perimeters“security around the stadium, or”have better communication with the actors in place to be informed about the situation inside and outside the stadium“. He made it clear that UEFA was going to take “some measures“which she would communicate later, pending the independent investigation she commissioned at the end of May, which has begun its work”this week” and which should deliver its conclusions in September.

“We thought the investigation would take at least two or three months. As it starts now, you could say somewhere in September“, he advanced in front of the senatorial delegation which works on the incidents of the Stade de France. UEFA entrusted this internal investigation to the former Portuguese Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Tiago Brandao Rodrigues.