On the evening of August 8, armed Croatian hooligans, after crossing the whole of Greece without the Greek Police doing the slightest thing to stop them, arrived in New Philadelphia with Panathinaikos fans, and the tragic result of their raid was the death of a 29-year-old AEK fan Michalis Katsouri.
A knife cut the thread of Michalis’ life and added another huge wound to the tyrannised body of Greek football, which for a few days (weeks) seemed shocked by the loss of a young man…
“Never again should a fan lose his life of why he just happened to love a team,” was heard in those days.
At the same time, on August 16, after the meeting Greek Prime Minister Kyriako Mitsotakis had with UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin and the representatives of the Big-4 of Greek football (Olympiacos, Panathinaikos, AEK and PAOK), he made a series of announcements to deal with the fan violence.
The most important ones concerned the closure of all fan clubs throughout Greece, with each team now having, as the law stipulates, a fan association, while the control of fans entering the gates, especially the organised ones, will be done exclusively by the Greek police.
However, as evidenced by the results so far, the specific announcements have remained simple as the Ministry of Citizen Protection and the leadership of the police have yet to succeed! Just as they had failed to stop the hooligans of Dinamo Zagreb…
On September 25th, when Panathinaikos hosted AEK in Leoforos, organised Panathinaikos fans unfurled a huge banner dedicated to the imprisoned fans of Dinamo Zagreb.
It was a banner that was not taken lightly by the police who were in charge of controlling the spectators (and almost blew up the match as AEK went to the dressing room). Of course, they were unable to detect the dozens of smoke bombs and firecrackers that were set off by the Panathinaikos fans.
In Greek football stadiums, everyone can do whatever they want, as in almost every match (even in European matches), there are countless images with the faces of the visiting team’s players being marked with lasers.
Of course, the same thing happened yesterday before kick-off. We saw quite a few smoke flares being lit to get to the 51st minute, where a fool threw the firecracker, which went under the noses of the police and caused all this mischief…
Unfortunately for more than once again, the leadership of the Ministry of Citizen Protection proved to be inferior to the circumstances…
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