What began as a celebration of the Paris Saint-Germain win against Italian football club Inter Milan in the 2025 Champions League final quickly degraded into violent riots across France on Saturday night.
The authorities were forced to deploy riot police and use tear gas as 559 people were arrested and two killed on the streets. Cars were set on fire and stores vandalised and looted by youth described in many reports as of largely immigrant background.
The national police service have said that a 17-year-old boy was stabbed to death during a PSG street party in the city of Dax, while the interior minister’s office has confirmed that a man was killed in Paris when his scooter was hit by a car amid the celebrations. A police officer has been placed in an artificial coma after being accidentally hit by fireworks in northwest France.
In Grenoble, a car ploughed into pedestrians celebrating the PSG victory, which left four members of the same family injured, while a woman is currently fighting for her life.
During a press conference on Sunday, June 1st, Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez said that clashes with police began as soon as the football game started, by people who were “clearly there to attack police, commit looting and damage.”
France’s president Emmanuel Macron said “The events are unacceptable; they have deprived our compatriots of happiness. Two people are dead. The nation is in mourning,” adding
We will punish. We will be relentless. That’s not football.
French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau described the rioters as “barbarians,” stating that “barbarity is when everything becomes a pretext for violence.”
The chaos in Paris was also marked by antisemitic vandalism, including the defacement of two synagogues, and the attack on a local Holocaust memorial. Yuli Edelstein, chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, condemned the riots as “not just a slap in the face to France, but a glaring warning sign of a future of chaos and lack of control.”
