After Paris: The new era of stadium terrorism as football becomes a “legitimate target”

Paddy Agnew looks into the effect the Paris attacks are having on football and on safety in stadiums.

Has IS declared war on football? In the anti-western eyes of IS, have football matches, places where men, women and children of all class and creed come together, now become so-called “legitimate targets”?

In the wake of a week marked not only by the Stade de France attack but also by the cancellation of the Germany v Holland and Belgium v Spain friendlies, those questions inevitably ask themselves.

If you come from Northern Ireland and are of a certain age, then you grew up with violence all around you. I was 16 years old when “the troubles” kicked off in October 1968 with a famous civil rights march in Derry which ended with the RUC (the largely Protestant Northern Irish police force of the day) beating up unarmed protesters including a number of nationalist (Catholic) politicians.

That march and other similar ones over the next year were the prelude to a 30-year-long violent conflict between Ulster unionists/loyalists, who were mainly Protestant, and Irish nationalist/republicans, who were mainly Catholics.

By the time a shaky peace broke out in Northern Ireland with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, an estimated 3,500 people had been killed.

During that conflict, one became accustomed to various forms of military language to describe what was happening. For example, the Provos (Provisional Irish Republican Army) regularly referred to the victims of their terrorist campaign as a “legitimate target”, usually in reference to British soldiers, RUC officers and even politicians, seen to be part of the “British war machine”.

In all my years of watching the troubles and indeed of watching conflict worldwide, I never believed that football matches would become a “legitimate target”. Yet, following the attack at the Stade de France last Friday night, that would appear to be the case, at least as far as IS is concerned.

You could object that, ever since the PLO killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, only a head-in-the-sand naif could pretend that major international sports events were not terrorist targets.

Yet, despite Munich, many of us (naively) continued to believe that no terrorist force would ever dare risk the opprobrium and widespread condemnation that would be generated by a violent attack on the world’s most popular game. Too many people worldwide love football too much, we reasoned.

Events seemed to prove us right. I have been to six European Championship and three World Cup final tournaments in the last 27 years where, if there was a “security” concern, it was usually linked to hooligan behaviour by a small minority of East European or English fans.

Of course, as my colleague Simon Kuper pointed out in his ESPN column this week, maybe I was not paying enough attention.

Kuper, who was at the Stade de France on Friday night, recalls the book, “Terror On The Pitch”, written by Adam Robinson (pen name of an obscure Middle East-based journalist). This work details a bizarre, seemingly ridiculous plot, allegedly hatched by Osama Bin Laden, to stage an attack on the England v Tunisia game in Marseille during the France ‘98 World Cup finals.

The “plot” envisages untold slaughter of players and fans at the game as well as attacks on the US Embassy in Paris, on the USA team hotel and on a nuclear power station. It all sounds ridiculously far-fetched but, then, so too did 9/11 until it happened.

What is sure is that, as the Munich '72 killings proved, causing mayhem at a major sports event earns you an instant, worldwide audience. Had the suicide bombers not been stopped at the Stade de France checkpoints outside the ground on Friday night, they would have provoked horrendous carnage and perhaps a subsequent stampede, all of it covered on live TV.

As it was, when the first suicide bomber tried to get into the stadium, 15 minutes after kick-off, he was stopped by a security official who noticed his suicide vest. At that point, the man ran off and self-detonated, as did two other suicide bombers outside a different stadium entrance and at a fast-food outlet near the stadium.

Given the heavy death toll at the Bataclan concert theatre, media attention has inevitably paid less attention to the implications of the attack on the Stade de France.

Yet, it now seems probable that major football matches, multicultural western places where Muslims and non-Muslims mix happily to watch multi-ethnic teams, are high on the IS hate list.

In the wake of last Friday night, it seems fairly obvious that security arrangements for next summer’s Euro 2016 finals will be heavy and tight. However, as Kuper put it this week: “Some of us will be sitting in the stadium wondering if anything is about to happen”.