« A crocodile going to war / Said goodbye to his grandchildren / Dragging his feet / His feet in the dust / He was going to fight the elephants / Ah, the crocrocro, the crocrocro, the crocodiiiiiiiiiiles »
The conflict continues between the presidency of Nîmes Olympique (11e of National in 2023-2024), led by the sulphurous Rani Assaf, and his supporters. The club’s management, at war with its own fans for a long time, has issued stadium commercial bans (ICS) to around thirty of them, according to The Nîmes gazette. These supporters are therefore prohibited from going to the Antonins stadium, at least until June 2025. They are said to have set off a few smoke bombs and sang songs hostile to the management, during the last two Nîmes home matches this season.
The stadium commercial ban, which has existed since 2016, refers to the right for a club not to allow a supporter access to an enclosure. It is different from an administrative or judicial stadium ban, pronounced respectively by the prefecture and the court. A club, here Nîmes, therefore has the right to replace a public authority. In 2020, a parliamentary fact-finding mission alerted “insufficient supervision of commercial bans”.
This is not the first time that the management of Nîmes has issued this type of ban: in February 2023, around thirty ICS had been issued towards supporters, mainly from the Gladiators group.
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