CRISTIANO
RONALDO
By scoring his 760th
career goal, the
Juventus forward
overtookJosef Bican
as the most prolific
goalscorer in the
history of football.TOM KING
The Newport
County
goalkeeper
scored from 96
metres against
Cheltenham
Town, setting a
new record for
the longest goal
of all time.ALCOYANO
The Spanish third-
tier side dumped
Real Madrid out of
the Copa del Rey,
winning 2-1 after
extra-time in spite
of going down
to ten men.BARCELONA
The Spanish giants
are reportedly
“on the verge of
bankruptcy”, with
debts totalling over
€1.1 billion, and
players going
unpaid at the
endof2020.ALEXANDRE
JANKEWITZ
The Southampton
midfielder was sent
offjust70seconds
into his first Premier
League start in the
Saints’ second 9-
league defeat in
two seasons.SEBASTIEN
HALLER
Ajax allegedly forgot
to include their all-
time record signing
in their Europa
League squad for
the knockout stages
of the competition.GLOBAL FOOTBALL INTELLIGENCE
Amateur v Professional dispute was a
source of great bitterness. However, it
served an unwitting purpose in spurring
Rimet’s ambition to create an
international championship.
His timing was perfect as the
expansion of a pan-European railway
network fed an appetite for increasing
internationalisation. At this point, Rimet
risked being upstaged by the ambition
of Hugo Meisl. The Austrian drove the
creation of the Central European
International Cup for national teams
and the Mitropa Cup for clubs. FIFA
refused to formally approve the
competitions but happily collected
the match-staging fees.
Rimet’s creation of the World Cup
was thus multi-faceted. It was a
response to the impatience of the
professional game, to the amateur
insistence of the International Olympic
Committee, to the refusal of the
St. Louis Olympics organisers to
consider staging football at all, to the
need to keep the sceptical South
Americans on board, to trump Meisl’s
ambition and to assert FIFA’s command.
By the time Uruguay had been
selected to host and underwrite the
costs of the1930 World Cup, FIFA also
had an economic imperative following
the1929 financial crash.
InJune1930 Rimet boarded the
Conte Verde at Villefranche-sur-Mer
and sailed to Montevideo with the new
World Cup trophy.
In fact Meisl’s International Cup drew
bigger crowds and headlines than most
of the World Cup ties on the far-distant
banks of the River Plate. But Rimet
returned home with a tidy profit for
FIFA, his reputation enhanced, his
presidency secure and his World Cup
established as football’s ultimate prize.
The1930s brought further
complexities as its tide of violent
nationalism swept across international
sport: Hitler’s1936 Berlin Olympics,
Mussolini’s stage-managed1934 World
Cup, the absence of Franco’s civil
war-torn Spain from the1938 finals
and the gap in the draw left by
Germany’s Austrian Anschluss.
Much of the1930s, within FIFA, was
taken up in assuaging the increasingly
truculent South Americans. They railed
against a Eurocentric denial of effective
representation and sent only a handful
of weakened teams to the1934 and
1938 World Cups, while repeatedly
threatening to abandon FIFA altogether.
Keeping FIFA alive during World War II
was beyond Rimet in France. He had to
rely on an erratic postal service and the
loyalty of Ivo Schricker, FIFA’s German
general secretary, who had been
appointed when FIFA moved from
Paris to Zurich in1932.
Shricker spent much of the war
resisting German attempts to gain
control of FIFA. Once peace had been
restored, Rimet reclaimed control,
negotiated the return of the British
home nations and revived the World
Cup in Brazil in1950. Acknowledgement
came in1946, with Rimet’s name
officially attached to the World Cup
trophy itself.
By then Rimet was 72 and too weary
to meet the demands of a changing
world, in which the former colonies
of Africa and Asia would pursue
independence and change the map of
both the globe and international sport.
Rimet delegated the pursuit of
solutions by expanding the FIFA exco
to an energetic panel comprising Italy’s
Ottorino Barassi – who would go on to
play a key role in founding UEFA – and
future FIFA presidents Ernst Thommen
of Switzerland and England’s Stanley
Rous. Sensibly then, rather than cling
stubbornly to power, Rimet retired in- He died two years later.
Hindsight presents Rimet as a man
of his time, of a colonial, Eurocentric
era. He has had fierce critics, notably
from loyalists to De Coubertin’s Olympic
cause. He has been accused of writing
up FIFA’s early history to suit himself,
of playing down Uruguay’s role in
launching the World Cup, of acquiescing
to the inter-war dictators, of resisting
the creation of the confederations and
of standing back in the early1950s
when the modern shape of FIFA was
defined, for better or worse.
His death also brought an abrupt halt
to a campaign to secure for him a Nobel
Peace Prize. But Nobel winners come
and go and, mostly, are soon forgotten.
No one can ever say that aboutJules
Rimet and his World Cup.