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29th Mar 2024

Hooligans should not be able to travel freely, Frattini says

The EU has joined the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) in its call for tougher measures against violence in sports, suggesting that in extreme cases of violence, perpetrators should be banned from travelling to matches in other member states.

There is a need to "better coordinate the rules which exist nationally on European bans to free movement, because of course you should not be able to exploit free movement of people to export violence to [other countries'] sport stadiums", EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini said during a press conference in Brussels on Thursday (29 November).

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  • The UEFA president qualifies violence as "a cancer, the true cancer of football". (Photo: European Parliament)

"We need to better communicate and in extreme cases I think it has to be possible to have limits on people's movements – a European ban on known hooligans".

The commissioner also pleaded for mutual recognition among member states of decisions taken on sport hooligans, as well as for closer police cooperation and synchronised training of police officers.

"I can even imagine there could be multinational teams of people to fight violence when there are sporting events on a European or international level taking place in Europe", Mr Frattini said.

The plans and suggestions on how to reduce violence in sports came after a two-day high-level conference on "a European Union Strategy against violence in sport" held in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday.

They have been worked on by experts and will be evaluated at a meeting of EU leaders in December, said Portuguese interior minister Rui Pereira, whose country holds the EU presidency until the end of this year.

Platini 'very very happy'

Football is one of the sports where the most violence has occurred lately.

In November 2006, racist and anti-Semitic fighting took place after a defeat of France's Paris-St-Germain by Israel's Hapoel Tel Aviv and resulted in the death of a 25-year-old fan.

This year, it is the Italian football scene which has been particularly violent. Some two weeks ago, the assassination of a Lazio fan by a policeman resulted in clashes between football fans and the police, while police officer Filippo Raciti was killed during crowd violence between supporters of Sicilian team Catania and the police in February.

These events prompted UEFA President Michel Platini earlier this month to qualify violence as "a cancer, the true cancer of football".

On Thursday, Mr Platini – a former football star of the French national team and the Italian club Juventus from the 1980s – said he was "very very happy" that his idea of a "European police force for sport", meaning more police cooperation to tackle sport violence, had taken off.

"There is a lot of work to be done before the end of the game", but the signals coming from the commission are very positive, Mr Platini said at the press conference.

Expenditures on security in football stadiums has reached €35 million – the sum that will be spent to make sure next year's European football championship goes smoothly.

That money could rather be spent on new balls, buildings, sport fields, Mr Platini said.

The first project for joint training of security forces is slated to take place before the Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland.

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