Fan ID reached the Council of Europe

The International Association of Professional Footballers (FIFPro) intends to urge the Council of Europe to do more vigorously to combat cruelty and violence at football matches, the scale of which has “radically increased” in recent years. To solve the problem, the union proposes a number of measures, including “personalized tickets,” that is, in fact, the widespread introduction of the Fan ID system, which is already used in Russia and has caused sharp criticism from fans.

International Professional Footballers’ Association published a list of “preliminary trends” related to player safety issues. The structure has already submitted them to the Council of Europe with the aim of adjusting, and most importantly, strengthening control over the implementation of the provisions of the so-called Saint-Denis Convention on a common approach to safety, security and service during football matches (.pdf), adopted in 2016. This document provides for preventive measures and sanctions for acts of violence and hooligan behavior during competitions, such as bans for stadiums and countries to host them and travel restrictions for violators.

FIFPro believes that the provisions of the convention need to be adjusted, and most importantly, their implementation needs to be monitored more carefully. The reason, as formulated by the president of the European branch of the union, David Terrier, was the fact that “since the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen a radical increase in cruelty and violence against players in their workplaces – on the field, in the stadium, in the dressing room, on the bus on the way to the match , on the training ground and even online.” Mr. Terrier did not give specific examples, but in fact there are quite a lot of them.

This year, news of football players being insulted from the stands or receiving threats via email remains quite commonplace.

There are also very high-profile cases. In May, racist chants from Valencia fans brought to a nervous breakdown in the famous Real Madrid forward Vinicius. And FIFPro illustrated its statement with a photo of a very recent emergency. Last weekend, the Greek championship match, in which Olympiacos hosted Panathinaikos, was stopped early in the second half due to firecrackers thrown from the stands. Due to the explosion, visiting defender Juancar suffered a concussion and suffered partial hearing loss.

FIFPro’s Preliminary Trends are essentially proposals based on the results of a survey of national unions. 95% of them consider violence and abuse to be a serious problem, and almost the same number are confident that they have a significant impact on the performance of football players.

The most predictable on this list is the initiative to more actively use modern technologies to track and suppress dangerous behavior of fans.

But it is curious that, stating the need to use scanners at the entrance to the stadium, as well as “facial recognition” technology, the union points to the feasibility of “personalized tickets.” At this point he actually refers to the specific experience of Russia – implemented in full scale in the Russian Premier League last season, the Fan ID system registered each football ticket holder. It caused an explosion of discontent among domestic fans and resulted in a dramatic decrease in attendance at matches. In this championship, even having improved slightly compared to the previous one, she still amounts to about 11 thousand people on average at the game, which is one and a half times less than the pre-pandemic figure.

Alexey Dospehov