Hundred Dinamo Zagreb fans held before PSG match

PARIS (AFP) –

Dinamo Zagreb‘s players take part in a training session on November 5 at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, on the eve of the UEFA Champions League Group A football match against PSG. Police said they have arrested around 80 Dinamo Zagreb football fans in a hotel in the French capital just hours before the match.

Police said they had detained about 100 rowdy Dinamo Zagreb football fans in the French capital before the team’s game against Paris Saint Germain on Tuesday in a move backed by the Croatian authorities.

French police made about 80 arrests on Tuesday at a Parisian hotel. On Monday night, supporters from the two teams clashed in street fights at the popular night haunt of Place de la Bastille, on the eve of their Champions League game.

The brawl ended with 27 people arrested, of whom six were French, and left one Croat supporter seriously injured, said police, who restored calm shortly before midnight (2300 GMT).

“This is something that badly harms the image of our club, but also the image of Zagreb and the Croatian sports as a whole,” Dinamo spokeswoman Morana Djurevic told AFP.

Although they boycott home matches in the Champions League becasue of a row with Dinamo’s management, a gang called the Bad Blue Boys travels abroad to deliberately provoke trouble, hoping the club will be sanctioned.

“The club is helpless and there is nothing we can do. We don’t take fans at any game played outside Zagreb or abroad,” Djurevic said.

The detainees will be held for a maximum of 24 hours for ignoring the travel ban imposed Sunday by Interior Minister Manuel Valls on Dinamo fans coming to France for the match.

The Croatian Football Federation backed the arrests.

“We support any action that leads to the prevention of violence or punishing of those who committed violent acts” at sports events, the federation’s spokesman Neven Cvijanovic told AFP.

Valls said Sunday he imposed the travel ban because he considered there was a real chance of “serious incidents occurring should fans from both sides come across each other”.

He said he was informed by Croatian authorities that 150 to 200 violent supporters from the Bad Blue Boys would be travelling without tickets for the match.

As a result, Valls had decided to forbid “from November 5 to midday November 7, the travel either individually or as a group, by road, rail or air of all Dinamo supporters to French border points and the Ile-de-France region (the Paris area)”.

Some 80 PSG fans were stopped on the Slovenian border with Croatia and refused entry last month on their way to the two sides’ match there.