FC Nantes risks being sanctioned very severely for the incidents in the match against Le Havre, lost 2-0, last Sunday. The meeting had to be interrupted twice : when toilet paper was thrown at the goals of Nantes goalkeeper Alban Lafont and, above all, when supporters who came down from the Loire stand tried to invade the pitch. The disciplinary committee of the Professional Football League therefore summoned the clubthis Tuesday, to explain.
Total or partial closed session?
In the club’s Parisian and Nantes offices, we do not have many illusions about the outcome of this instruction: “I don’t see how we could escape the closure of the stadium for the reception of Rennes“predicts a resigned employee. “Frankly, I don’t believe it”whispers another employee who is thinking more of a partial closed session.
But that does not mean that the club will appear before the members of the disciplinary committee as an expiatory victim. In an attempt to prove its good faith and appeal to the leniency of professional football authorities, FC Nantes promises to use images from video surveillance cameras to try to identify the hooded people who came down from the Loire standbefore forcing the protective barriers and coming up against the security guards and the police cordon put in place to prevent them from entering the Beaujoire lawn.
No more link between the management of FC Nantes and the ultras of the Loire Brigade
However, even if the club shows good will, there is little chance that these investigations will be successful. Firstly because it is very difficult to identify, by definition, hooded people. FC Nantes has been struggling for years on this issue and the Professional Football League knows that. And then, unlike the majority of clubs, in Nantes the link is definitively broken between the club and the Brigade Loire. The ultra group also reiterated this in a press release published in the middle of summer.
The Loire Brigade dissolved?
But what really isn’t likely to help the Canaries’ affairs is the growing pressure from the government and the Minister of the Interior. The Vendéen Bruno Retailleau is very seriously studying the launch of a dissolution of the ultras group. He wants to make an example of it. And the entourage of the Minister of Sports added that, immediately, we must concentrate on the 70 to 80 individuals who tried to enter the pitch and prioritize exemplary individual sanctions to avoid further excesses during future matches in Nantes and throughout France.
Senegal
