Let them watch rugby! France digs deeper hole in row with Liverpool football

John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.

France has a new queen of the fatuously and arrogantly missed point.

On Wednesday, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the French sports minister, re-scripted Queen Marie-Antoinette for the 21^st century.

Queen Marie-Antoinette, speaking circa 1789, probably apocryphally, said: “The poor people have no bread? Why don’t they eat cake?” Oudéa-Castéra, speaking to the French national assembly on Wednesday said, in effect: “Liverpool football fans are angry with us? Why don’t they come to Paris and watch some rugby.”

Oudéa-Castéra was aiming to assuage supporters of Liverpool FC and address their demands that she and the rest of the French government should apologize for events at the Champions League final last summer when thousands of fans were crushed, tear-gassed and beaten by French police outside the Stade de France, north of Paris.

At the time, she and other French officials placed the blame on Liverpool fans for — allegedly — trying to enter the stadium with fake tickets. The report of a six-month-long official investigation, confirming the earlier findings of the French Senate, has placed the blame on the European football governing body, UEFA, and the French police.

At a French parliamentary hearing Wednesday on the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, Oudéa-Castéra said that she had spoken to the chairman of Liverpool FC and offered to invite an unspecified number of Liverpool fans “to one of the matches of England during the Rugby World Cup” in France this fall.

Where to begin? The only thing more insulting would have been to offer Liverpool fans compensation in the form of tickets to a Manchester United game.

As French sports minister, Oudéa-Castéra is not expected to be an expert on the complex sporting and social geology of Britain. She ought to know something about the sociology of sport.

To anyone born and bred (like me) in northwest England, her comments are heroically fatuous.

Football fans and rugby fans are rarely the same people. In France too, they belong to different geographical and social tribes.

In northwest England, the boundaries are even more distinct. Football is the sport of the working classes. The second working-class sport is Rugby League. (Note to Mme Oudéa-Castéra: this is a different code of rugby featuring 13 rather than 15 players, which is mostly popular in northern England and on the east coast of Australia.)

In Wales and in France, Rugby Union is a working-class sport. In England, and especially in northwest England, it is the sport of the Barbour-wearing…