Four Chelsea football fans will go on trial in Paris on Tuesday charged with racist violence after a black commuter was pushed off a Métro carriage by a group of football supporters chanting: “We’re racist, we’re racist, and that’s the way we like it.”
The incident in February 2015 before a match between Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain was filmed by a British man, Paul Nolan, and the footage published by the Guardian sparked an outcry over racism in sport.
The video showed a Paris commuter, Souleymane Sylla, repeatedly trying to squeeze on to a busy train, only to be forcefully shoved out of the door and back on to the platform at the Richelieu–Drouot station. He was repeatedly and violently pushed off the carriage amid racist chants. Station CCTV footage also recorded the scene.
A French police investigation was launched in February 2015 with the cooperation from the Metropolitan police.
The French criminal trial before a panel of judges is expected to last one day before the judges retire to consider their verdict, which will be handed down at a later date. The four Chelsea fans on trial, who will be named at the start of the hearing, face a possible penalty of up to five years in prison and a €75,000 (£64,000) fine.
It is not clear whether the defendants will attend court for the trial, but they could be tried in their absence even if they do not turn up.
The men face charges of racist violence with several aggravating circumstances – that the racial abuse happened in a group, that racist chants were sung and that it happened on public transport.
In July 2015, Stratford magistrates court in the UK issued banning orders against four Chelsea fans accused over the incident, excluding them from attending matches.
Richard Barklie, 50, from Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, Joshua Parsons, 20, from Dorking, Surrey, and William Simpson, 26, from Ashford, Surrey, were each banned from football matches for five years – the maximum period allowed. Jordan Munday, 20, from Sidcup, south-east London, was banned for three years. All four had denied racist behaviour.
Gareth Branston, the district judge at Stratford, described their behaviour as “abhorrent, nasty, offensive, arrogant and utterly unacceptable”. He said it was a racist incident that tarnished English football. Such behaviour must be stamped out and the orders should act as a deterrent to others, he said. Branston said football hooliganism and violence was a “scourge which has badly damaged this country’s reputation abroad”. He added: “Football has had, and still does have, a problem with racism,” he said.
Sylla’s French lawyer, Jim Michel-Gabriel, said of the Paris trial: “We’re happy that this case has at last come to court. It was not necessarily an easy case to bring to trial – it could have been hard to find the accused. But Mr Sylla will be in court to at last see justice being done.”
Sylla, who was so traumatised by the incident that he stopped work and did not take the Métro for six months afterwards, told journalists: “I’ve been waiting for this trial for almost two years. I hope it will allow me to turn the page.”
On the night of the Chelsea v Paris Saint-Germain match, Sylla, who was born in Paris to parents of Mauritanian origin, had worked a 10-hour day in his sales job in central Paris and was keen to return to his three children, aged six, four and three, at their home just outside the city.
“I had had a very long day of work and it had gone well, so at around 7.30pm I went to get the Métro after the rush-hour had calmed,” he told the Guardian at the time. “I tried to board the train and suddenly there were two people who pushed me off. I didn’t understand. I thought, this isn’t normal. Normally that would just never happen. They were shouting and making racist comments, which I don’t accept and I didn’t understand why.
“It seemed that they were Chelsea supporters. I didn’t even know Chelsea were playing that day. I tried to get on the train, I was pushed, and then they pushed me a second time. I still didn’t understand why they had pushed me. Then one of them, a young man, made a hand gesture … to show that it’s white skin here, black skin has no right to get on.”
He said: “Frankly, I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I was a French citizen who had left his office and wanted to get home, and foreigners were stopping me getting on a train to get home. This is 2015 … This talk of black skin or white skin, that’s something I don’t like. And I didn’t know why [it was happening].”
He tried twice to get on to the train but said what happened was very frightening. “I didn’t force it because there were a lot of them, around 30 or 40 people. I wasn’t going to fight them. I had my wife and children waiting for me at home. I’m a father, I have to set a good example.”
He said he realised they were Chelsea fans quite quickly. “They didn’t speak French, they spoke English. They were mentioning Chelsea. After some words, they said the word ‘racist’.”
He said he couldn’t believe the supporters were “stopping me going home, stopping me from getting on a train because I’m black. That’s inadmissible. They said they were proud of being racist. I don’t care, black or white, the important thing for me was to get home. I had bought my Métro ticket …”
Sylla said his life was “shaken up” after the incident, he needed medication and had had to stop work for a time.
Nolan, the British resident in Paris who filmed the incident, said at the time: “I was just completely appalled by it and so that’s why I tried to catch some of it on my phone.”
He added that others on the platform looked on in disbelief. “There definitely was a culture shock. I heard a couple of French guys saying: ‘I can’t believe this. It’s insane.’”
