Marseille supporters, joined by friends from AEK Athens, were filmed going hotel to hotel in the city looking for Olympiacos fans before today's Europa League game. The people who got punished for that are the Olympiacos fans.
That's the whole mess in one sentence. One set of supporters organized a search party through the hotels of a foreign city. The other set bought tickets, some of them already on the road, and ended up with a refund and a locked-away section. The anti-hooliganism unit rated this fixture 5 out of 5 for danger. Nobody needed a rating to work out which side was dangerous.
The official story is a maze. The Prefecture of Bouches-du-Rhône banned the away support on Tuesday, citing public order. French authorities then stood down, and UEFA welcomed the reversal on Wednesday. After another security meeting, Olympiacos itself told its own ticket holders they would not be let in and began cancelling tickets. The government technically backed off, the club was left holding the grenade, and the end result was identical: around 3,500 Greek fans who did nothing but buy tickets are watching from home.
Marseille is responsible for this, and it isn't complicated: the club, the city's hard core support, and the authorities who keep treating the symptom instead of the disease.
This has happened again and again for years, and pretending otherwise insults anyone who's been paying attention. In 2018 Marseille ultras attacked security staff before a Europa League tie, with one guard stabbed in the neck. In January 2021 hundreds broke into the training ground and a Ligue 1 game was postponed. Dimitri Payet was hit by a bottle at Nice that August, and Nice were docked a point. He was hit again that November, at Lyon, and the match was abandoned. In October 2023 fans in Marseille pelted the Lyon team bus with rocks and fireworks and left coach Fabio Grosso bloodied. Lyon's own statement put it plainly: "this type of situation occurs every year in Marseille." This season, PSG's ultras went to court over a ban on travelling there. The pattern runs for years across multiple opponents, and the response has been to keep shutting away ends while the home club carries on.
The AEK link makes the hotel hunt even uglier. The friendship between Marseille and AEK fans is real and decades old, dating back to 1989, celebrated with a full tifo when the clubs met in the 2023-24 Europa League. AEK and Olympiacos are bitter Athens rivals. Marseille's ultras lent their city to someone else's grudge, going room by room to find rival Greeks. Call that what it is: thuggery with a travel itinerary.
People in Marseille argue the city shouldn't wear this, that the ones causing it are a poisonous minority who ruin things for everyone else. That's probably true of the ordinary fan. It's also beside the point. The minority keep operating inside this club, year after year, and the club and the authorities keep letting the away supporters absorb the consequences. UEFA should punish them and the club that shelters them. The 3,500 Greek fans who were in another country when the videos were shot didn't do anything.
There's a practical idiocy to it too. You take angry away fans, deny them the stadium, and scatter them into the streets of a city where locals are already out hunting for them. Stadiums exist partly to contain this. Cancelling the tickets just relocates the risk to a place with no segregation and no stewards. If anything goes wrong around this fixture, it won't be because the Greeks were in the ground.
The real fix keeps getting dodged. UEFA has levers: games behind closed doors, neutral venues, points, expulsion. Use them on the club that cannot host a European night without a security crisis. Marseille went into tonight bottom of the 36-team league phase after a 1-4 loss at Beşiktaş on matchday one, so the footballing stakes were modest anyway. The off-field stakes were a man getting stabbed in the neck last time this crowd decided a visiting team's fans were the enemy.
Punishing the guests while leaving the host untouched tells Marseille's ultras their intimidation works.
