Mexican soccer authorities on Tuesday ordered Queretaro to play their home games in an empty stadium for a year after fans went on a bloody rampage in a brawl that injured at least 26 people and made global headlines.
The punishments meted out by Mexico’s top-flight men’s soccer league and the country’s soccer federation will also ban Queretaro spectators, including the rowdy fan clubs known as ‘barras’, from attending away games for three years, league president Mikel Arriola told reporters.
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Authorities said three people remain in a critical condition after Saturday’s melee during a game pitting Queretaro against visitors Atlas, the reigning Liga MX champions.
Cell phone videos that went viral and sparked outrage in Mexico and beyond showed people being brutally beaten.
Arriola and Yon de Luisa, head of Mexico’s soccer federation, announced the measures at a joint news conference.
“We don’t want criminals in disguise,” said Arriola, referring to organized groups of fans blamed for the violence. Such groups will need credentials to attend future games, he added.
The top four members of Queretaro’s management team (Gabriel Solares, Adolfo Ríos, Greg Taylor and Manuel Velarde) were also banned from any future roles with other teams, while the club was fined 1.5m pesos ($70,150). The club will be returned to previous owners Grupo Caliente, which owns fellow Liga MX club Tijuana.
Grupo Caliente will be tasked with selling Queretaro by the end of this year, and if unable to do so, it will go under the ownership of Liga MX.
Saturday’s match was suspended in the 62nd minute after multiple fights broke out in the stands. Security personnel opened the gates to the field so that fans, including women and children, could escape the clashes.
Only three or four of the injured men remained hospitalized. They may have been the three who were seen unconscious or badly beaten on the ground, being repeatedly kicked and pummeled in videos posted on social media.
After several minutes, some of the fights moved to the field, where some people were armed with chairs and metal bars.
One fan could be seen pulling a knife to cut the nets of one goal. Others destroyed one side’s bench and some fought in the tunnel to the field.
Enrique Alfaro, the governor of Jalisco state, whose capital is Guadalajara, was asked Monday about local press reports that the brawl may have involved local criminal gangs fighting visitors who purportedly belonged to the Jalisco drug cartel.
“What it seems to me is that what we saw was not a normal dispute between fans,” Alfaro said. “What happened there was something that looked different.”
Alfaro, however, refused to comment on whether drug gangs were involved.
