French fans have always been fiery but the severity and frequency of their clashes this year have been genuinely scary
By Eric Devin for Get French
Football News
Fan unrest is not new in French football. In the last decade alone, Bastia supporters have thrown wooden rods at PSG players, Anthony Lopes has been hit by a firecracker while playing for Lyon and an effigy of Mathieu Valbuena has been hanged at the Vélodrome. There have been other incidents too, but they have been infrequent and usually the product of some special enmity between two clubs, or a player and a club.
This season, however, these clashes have taken on a more urgent character, as striking in their severity as they are in their frequency. The rest of Europe is not immune to ugly incidents, as we saw at Wembley this week when Hungary fans fought with
police, and earlier in the season when young Sparta Prague supporters booed the Rangers player Glen Kamara. But the number of incidents in Ligue 1 is alarming.