UEFA fines clubs over crowd trouble

UEFA has fined the clubs that had crowd trou­ble dur­ing the final qual­i­fy­ing round for the Cham­pi­ons League. Belgium’s Ander­lecht were hard­est hit as UEFA fined them 20,000 Swiss francs after fans threw mis­siles and attempted to invade the pitch dur­ing their second-leg defeat against Turk­ish side Fener­bahce in Brus­sels on Aug. 29. Fener­bahce, who went through 3–0 over the two legs, were fined 8,000 Swiss francs for their sup­port­ers set­ting off fireworks.

Red Star Bel­grade were fined 10,000 Swiss francs by the com­mit­tee after their sup­port­ers threw mis­siles dur­ing their qual­i­fier against Rangers, which ended in a 1–0 over­all vic­tory for the Glas­gow side.

Also, Lazio was fined 12,000 Swiss francs and Dinamo Bucharest were fined 9,000 Swiss francs respec­tively for inci­dents of fans set­ting off fire­works dur­ing their third-round meet­ing. UEFA’s dis­ci­pli­nary com­mit­tee made no men­tion of racist behav­iour at either match despite media reports of chant­ing by Ander­lecht, Fener­bahce and Lazio fans.

The fines seem quite light con­sid­er­ing the offences and I wish UEFA would get a bit tougher with these inci­dents. What’s wor­ry­ing is that no inves­ti­ga­tion into the racist chant­ing seems to have been done. The num­ber of inci­dents has been increas­ing over the last few years and UEFA and FIFA need to step up efforts to push it out of the game. It will be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens if there are more events like these in the upcom­ing match­days. The visit of Man­ches­ter United to Roma is par­tic­u­larly wor­ry­ing con­sid­er­ing the events of last year when sev­eral United sup­port­ers were hos­pi­tal­ized after a baton charge by riot police inside the ground.