By JEROME PUGMIRE AP Sports Writer
BORDEAUX, France (AP) — An early goal was enough for France to beat Argentina 1-0 and reach the men’s soccer semifinals at the Paris Olympics on Friday, in a match where the Argentines were booed throughout by a hostile home crowd.
Fighting broke out between the players after the final whistle.
Striker Jean-Philippe Mateta headed home in the fifth minute for coach Thierry Henry’s team, which will face Egypt in the last four.
France won its only Olympic title in 1984, the year it also won the European Championship.
Argentina was given a hard time by the Bordeaux crowd.
The first few Argentina players came out to booing around 8:10 p.m., almost an hour before kickoff. The stadium music system then drowned out much of the jeering.
Argentina’s national anthem was also met with a chorus of jeers and whistles, and home fans booed Argentina’s players after the kickoff when they touched the ball.
A racism scandal has heightened tensions, following a video of Argentina players singing an offensive song about French players of African heritage as they celebrated their Copa America victory last month.
Earlier Friday, Argentina’s handball team was jeered as it entered the South Paris Arena arena, but the booing subsided quickly at the venue.
Last week, Argentina’s men’s rugby sevens players were raucously and constantly booed by a Stade de France crowd of 69,000 during a quarterfinal against the home team.
Despite the off-field tensions leading into this soccer quarterfinal, security measures were not increased and the local police prefecture said security forces stuck to the initial plan.
Over 400 police and gendarmerie officers were deployed on for the match, in addition to 100 military personnel, and security forces used drones to help make the event safe.
The atmosphere outside the stadium was anything but tense, however. Fans of both nations mingled with each other without any signs of hostility, some with Argentina flags or jerseys with soccer superstar Lionel Messi’s name on the back.
The match itself was a rematch French fans have been waiting for since Argentina’s dramatic penalty shootout win in the 2022 World Cup final. But because it’s primarily an Under-23 tournament, superstars like Messi and Kylian Mbappé were not playing.
France fans made up most of the 42,000 crowd. Bordeaux is a six-time French champion that has now been relegated two divisions to the fourth-tier amateur league by France’s soccer finance watchdog, DNCG, after filing for bankruptcy.
France great Zinedine Zidane burst onto the scene with Bordeaux, known as “Les Girondins” by soccer fans around France, earning his first international cap in 1994.
He also starred in the club’s run to 1996 UEFA Cup final alongside Bixente Lizarazu and Christophe Dugarry, who both went onto win the World Cup with Zidane in 1998 and the European Championship in 2000.