Why Paris Police Prepared for the Champions' League Violence, But Couldn't Stop It.
PSG won the Champions League in Budapest. Paris paid for it. How a riot the state now plans for months in advance became a fixed cost the city carries for a club it does not own.
Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League in Budapest. Paris paid for it.
By the time Laurent Nuñez, the Interior Minister, faced the cameras on the morning of 31 May, the national bill was 890 people arrested, 480 of them in the Paris area, and 57 police and gendarmes injured. One man was dead, killed in a motocross accident on the edge of the celebrations.
The Paris prosecutor logged roughly half the charges as being for assault on police. Splinter groups had, in the prefecture’s own word, “systematically” torched cars, looted shops and lit fires across the city. A bakery and a restaurant near the Parc des Princes were left structurally damaged. A crowd tried to storm a police station in the 8th arrondissement. The ring road encircling the city was briefly blockaded before tactical units cleared it.
It was, almost to the letter, a rerun. A year earlier, PSG’s first Champions League title had produced a worse night: two dead, around 192 injured, more than 500 arrested and 264 vehicles burned. The 2026 arrest count was up 32% on that. Two summers, two trophies, two near-identical nights of disorder in the same streets.
The reason this should not be reported as a shock is that nobody involved treated it as one. The violence was prepared for, in detail, on both sides of the barricade.
How Paris prepared
To understand why Paris ringed itself with police this year, you have to go back to the night a year earlier and to the warnings the city had already been given even before that.
