Jules Rimet

• 1. Introduction

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  Jules Rimet crossed the Atlantic in 1930 carrying a trophy in his bag. No guards, no ceremony; just a French football administrator on a steamship called the SS Conte Verde, headed for Uruguay, with the physical object that would become the most coveted prize in sport tucked among his belongings. The question his journey raises is not simply how the World Cup came to be. It is how a grocer's son from the commune of Theuley, shaped by a papal encyclical and the wreckage of two world wars, persuaded a fractious world to play football together. And what happened to that trophy he carried so carefully across the sea.

• 2. A Grocer's Son from Haute-Saone

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  Rimet was born on the 14th of October 1873 in Theuley, a commune in the department of Haute-Saone in eastern France. His father sold groceries. When Jules was eleven years old, the family moved to Paris, and the city shaped everything that followed. He trained as a lawyer, but the direction of his ambitions was set by something he read at seventeen. Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical called Rerum novarum, a document concerned with the dignity of work and the conditions of ordinary people. For a young Catholic like Rimet, it landed with unusual force. When he founded a sports club called Red Star in 1897, he built it on the principle that membership would not discriminate on the basis of class. One of the sports played at Red Star was football, which was still finding its footing in France. The club that began as Red Star Club Francais still exists today.

• 3. Building FIFA From Twelve Nations

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  Rimet was present at the founding of FIFA in 1904, more than a decade before he held any senior position within it. The organisation's earliest ambitions included a global professional tournament, but the reality in those years was more modest: FIFA's first major involvement in international football was running an amateur competition at the 1908 Summer Olympics. The First World War halted whatever larger plans existed. Rimet served in the French Army as an officer and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre. When the war ended, he moved quickly. He became President of the French Football Federation in 1919, then President of FIFA on the 1st of March 1921. At that point FIFA had twelve member nations. By the time he left office in 1954, the membership had grown to 85, even though the English, Welsh, and Scottish Football Associations dropped out during the early years of his tenure. No one has held the FIFA presidency for longer; his 33 years in the post remain the record.

• 4. The Fight to Hold a World Cup

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  Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, did not want a FIFA world tournament. The amateur football associations were equally resistant. Rimet spent years pushing against both. The breakthrough came in 1928, when FIFA committed to holding a World Cup. Uruguay was chosen as the host, partly because professional football was stronger in South America, and partly because the Uruguayan Football Association offered to cover all travel costs for visiting teams. Even so, the European response was thin. Players would be away from their domestic leagues for three months, and most European nations declined. Only four accepted invitations: France, Belgium, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Rimet's personal influence was the reason even those four came. The 1934 World Cup followed in Italy under Benito Mussolini's Fascist government, and Rimet later faced criticism for not challenging the way the tournament was used to promote the regime.

• 5. The Trophy and Its Troubled History

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  The original World Cup trophy was named the Jules Rimet Trophy in his honour. Its history after his death is stranger than almost anything in sport. Just before the 1966 World Cup in England, the trophy was stolen. It was recovered by a dog named Pickles. Brazil won the 1970 World Cup in Mexico for the third time, which under the rules then in place earned them permanent ownership of the trophy. In 1983, it was stolen again in Rio de Janeiro. The current belief is that the thieves melted it down, though no conclusive proof of this has ever emerged. The Brazilian Football Confederation commissioned a replica. Rumours about where the original ended up, and whether it still exists in some form, have never fully gone away. In Theuley, the village where Rimet was born, a statue of him stands in the middle of a penalty box, complete with goal.

• 6. Recognition and Legacy

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  Rimet died in Suresnes, France on the 16th of October 1956, two days after his 83rd birthday. That same year, his contribution to international sport earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2004, FIFA posthumously made him a member of the FIFA Order of Merit; his grandson Yves Rimet accepted on his behalf. He is formally credited with inventing the World Cup. In 2014, the French actor Gerard Depardieu, who has received an Academy Award nomination, portrayed Rimet in the biographical drama United Passions. The tournament Rimet carried across the ocean in a bag now draws the largest television audience of any sporting event on earth, a scale he could not have imagined when only four European nations were willing to make the voyage to Uruguay.