Keir Radnedge Jules Rimet 100 years on
March 1, 2021 is a significant anniversary for football in every corner of the globe, as it marks 100 years since French lawyer Jules Rimet formally began his record 33-year reign as FIFA president.
Rimet was 47 when he took office, two years after becoming president of the French Football Federation. By the time he retired in 1954, FIFA’s membership had risen from 12 to 85; it now stands at 211. Beyond expansion of the game’s popularity, Rimet’s historic legacy is launching the World Cup, whose status in popular culture transcends all of sport. He was not only FIFA’s longest-serving president, but also by far the greatest.
Up to a point he was at one with fellow Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, the creator of the modern Olympics. Both men recognised the evolution in England of “muscular Christianity” – the power of sport to generate not only physical but also moral and societal well-being.
Application was the point at which the two men’s visions diverged.
Firstly, De Coubertin had a head start. He was ten years older than Rimet, better connected and had been a pioneer of the all-embracing Union of French Athletic Sports Societies. His Olympic revival bore fruit in Athens in 1896, eight years before even the founding of FIFA.
Secondly, the older man – formally Charles Pierre de Fredy, Baron de
Rimet was not only FIFA’s longest-serving president, but also by far the greatest
Coubertin – came from aristocracy. He considered exemplary leadership in sport the natural duty of the officer classes. In practice, a strict amateur ethos: sport for its own sake, not financial gain.
Rimet, on the other hand, believed that sport should be open to all and in every manner. As he said: “If the man who labours in a Peugeot factory all week can earn something extra to support his family then he should have the right to do so.” He believed that international sport could unite the world, but to do so, it had to be professional.
His remarkable journey began on October 24, 1873, in the village of Theuley-les-Lavoncourt, eastern France. At the age of 11, he moved to Paris.
Rimet was a star pupil and a devout Roman Catholic whose social and religious background coloured his outlook on the world. While studying to enter law he helped create the Red Star club to open sporting opportunity to anyone and everyone. Rimet himself was no star player. He practised gymnastics, athletics and fencing but incorporated football into the Red Star network because of its increasing popularity.
This brought him to a crossroads. De Coubertin’s USFSA supported the development of rugby but not association football because the English were perceived as having poisoned it with professionalism.
In 1907 the USFSA quit FIFA over its open-minded approach to the paid game. Rimet subsequently quit the USFSA to set up a French football league to bring France back into FIFA.
This raised his profile before the onset of World War I, where his service brought him recognition of a vastly different sort with three awards of the Croix de Guerre (War Cross).
Rimet was the obvious choice as president of the French Football Federation on the resumption of sporting activity in 1919. A year later he helped organise football at the Antwerp Olympics. At the time, FIFA needed a new president following the death of Englishman Daniel Woolfall in 1918. In the absence of anyone else, Rimet was elected.
The first decade tested all his leadership and diplomacy. The initial challenge was the withdrawal of the four British home nations in 1920, in opposition to membership applications from wartime enemies Germany, Austria and Hungary. Ultimately a fragile peace was achieved, but it did not last. Four years later, the British quartet quit in a huff over the issue of broken-time payments, which allowed Olympic competitors to be paid in order to make up for lost earnings while attending the Games. The British objected to this as poisoning the Olympics’ amateur ethos.
The schism engendered by the
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 1932 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 the 1930 World Cup, FIFA also had an economic imperative following the 1929 financial crash.
In June 1930 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.
The 1930s brought further complexities as its tide of violent nationalism swept across international sport: Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics, Mussolini’s stage-managed 1934 World Cup, the absence of Franco’s civil war-torn Spain from the 1938 finals and the gap in the draw left by Germany’s Austrian Anschluss.
Much of the 1930s, 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 the 1934 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 in 1932.
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 in 1950. Acknowledgement came in 1946, 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 1954. 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 early 1950s 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 about Jules Rimet and his World Cup.