France-Israel Soccer Match is Overshadowed by Amsterdam Attack

It was the type of political attention reserved for only the biggest of sporting occasions.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the prime minister and other political grandees sat in the stands on Thursday to watch the national team play soccer.

But the French side was not chasing a big prize before a packed house. Instead, it was playing a run-of-the-mill match, without its star player Kylian Mbappé, against a mediocre opponent — the type of game that usually attracts scant attention, as demonstrated by the vast empty spaces in the stands at the national stadium just outside Paris.

The reason for the V.I.P. turnout was the opponent, Israel’s national team, and what was happening on the Stade de France field was very much overshadowed by what was happening away from it. The violence a week earlier in Amsterdam surrounding a soccer match between a Dutch team and a different Israeli squad guaranteed that Thursday’s game would be far more a political event than a sporting one.

As Dutch authorities investigate what they call antisemitic attacks on Israeli fans, as well as incendiary behavior by both sides, French authorities have vowed to prevent such scenes from being repeated here.

The result has been a massive security operation befitting a G20 summit. The security forces that blanketed the vicinity of the stadium in Saint-Denis, at key sites across Paris and throughout the transit system, resembled the operation for the spectacularly successful Olympic Games held here this summer.

The city’s police chief said there would be 4,000 officers deployed for the game, with 2,500 stationed around the stadium itself and the others spread across the city. Another 1,600 private security guards and stewards were on duty at the game, where fans as well as journalists went through several security checks even before entering the stadium.