By David Gold
November 11 – Away fans have been banned from attending games between the Ligue 1 leaders, Paris St-Germain, and fierce rivals Olympique Marseille this season, the French Interior Ministry has confirmed.
A similar ban was in place last season following on from the death of a 38-year-old PSG fan prior to the game against their southern rivals in February 2010.
His death was the result of infighting between PSG fans, with a group of supporters from the Audeil end of the ground believed to have attacked the individual, who was with a section of support from the Boulogne stand at the club’s Parc des Princes stadium.
There has been a rivalry between the groups since the 1990s when some supporters from the Boulogne ‘Kop,’ which sprang up in the 1970s, began to dominate the Audeil stand, and the battle for domination of their stadium has continued ever since, sometimes turning violent.
The violence in 2010 led to the Parisians, who were taken over by a Qatari consortium earlier this year, banning their own fans from away matches at the time.
In a statement, the interior ministry said that they had “decided not to allow Paris fans to travel to Marseille’s Stade Velodrome on November 27 and Marseille fans to travel to Paris for the return leg on April 7 or 8, 2012.
“This decision is justified by the real risks of unrest, by the dramatic incidents that surrounded the late 2009 and early 2010 matches.”
In 2009 rival groups from both sets of fans clashed on the streets of Marseille before a game between the sides.
As the two best supported teams in France and from the country’s two biggest cities, encounters between the pair are referred to in France as ‘Le Classique’.
The game exposes the divide between the political centre of the country and its provinces, as well as that between north and south. It has become increasingly fraught since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Marseille fleetingly became the dominant team in the country under the Presidency of the controversial Bernard Tapie.
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