Reims, Kopa, Fontaine

Les Bleus: The History of French Football

Course 1 · Chapter 4 · Reims, Kopa and Fontaine

After the war French football found its first great club side and, with it, its first great national team. Stade de Reims reached the first European Cup final in 1956, Raymond Kopa became the first French winner of the Ballon d'Or, and Just Fontaine scored 13 goals at the 1958 World Cup, a record that still stands. This chapter follows that decade and the political context around it, including the Algerian War. Names, dates and scores are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

Stade de Reims

The club

Reims, the capital of the Champagne region, was a provincial city that had been badly damaged in the First World War. Its club, Stade de Reims, won the French championship in 1949, 1953, 1955, 1958, 1960 and 1962 (check), and was backed by local business, including the champagne industry (check).

The coach

Albert Batteux, a former Reims player, coached the club from 1950 to 1963 and the national team in the same years (check). His teams played fast, short-passing attacking football that was nicknamed "champagne football", a pun on the region's drink (check).

The players

Reims combined local players with stars such as Raymond Kopa, the defender Robert Jonquet and the forward Just Fontaine, who joined in 1956 (check). Many of them were also the core of the national side, so club and country shared a style.

The European Cup The European Cup, a knockout competition for league champions, was proposed by the French sports daily L'Équipe and started in 1955 to 1956 (check). Reims was among the 16 founding clubs, and reached the first final, in Paris in June 1956, where they lost 4-3 to Real Madrid after leading 2-0 and 3-2 (check). They reached the final again in 1959, in Stuttgart, and lost 2-0 to the same opponent (check). Real Madrid went on to win the first five finals.

Two Stars

Player (check each)Story
Raymond KopaBorn Raymond Kopaszewski in 1931 in northern France to a Polish immigrant family, he worked in the mines as a teenager. He played for Angers and Reims, then for Real Madrid from 1956 to 1959, winning three European Cups, before returning to Reims. In 1958 he was the first Frenchman to win the Ballon d'Or.
Just FontaineBorn in 1933 in Marrakech, Morocco, to a French father and Spanish mother, he played for Nice and then Reims. A prolific striker, he was an unexpected first choice in 1958 because of injuries. A broken leg ended his career in 1962.

The stories of both men, a miner's son of Polish descent and a striker born in Morocco, are examples of the mixed background of French football long before 1998 (Chapter 7).

The 1958 World Cup

Match (check each)Result
Group: ParaguayFrance 7-3 Paraguay, Fontaine scoring three.
Group: YugoslaviaFrance 2-3 Yugoslavia.
Group: ScotlandFrance 2-1 Scotland.
Quarter-final: Northern IrelandFrance 4-0 Northern Ireland.
Semi-final: BrazilFrance 2-5 Brazil, with a young Pelé scoring a hat-trick.
Third place: West GermanyFrance 6-3 West Germany, Fontaine scoring four.

Fontaine finished with 13 goals in six matches, still the most in a single World Cup (check). France finished third, its best World Cup result until the win of 1998 (Chapter 7, check). Kopa was named the best player of the tournament and played in a deeper role behind the forwards.

Football and the Algerian War

  • The context. The war in Algeria, a French territory, began in 1954 and was at its height in 1958, the year of the World Cup and of the return of Charles de Gaulle to power (check). It split French opinion.
  • The FLN team. In April 1958 a number of Algerian-born players in France, including Rachid Mekhloufi of Saint-Étienne, who had been picked for the French squad, left their clubs in secret to form a team for the National Liberation Front (FLN) (check). The team played matches abroad for several years.
  • The cost. The players lost clubs and years of their careers, and some returned to French clubs after independence in 1962, Mekhloufi to Saint-Étienne (check). It is one of the clearest early cases of football being tied to the politics of empire.
  • How it is remembered. The episode is the subject of books and films, which should be read with care for their sources (check).
A British comparison The Edinburgh club Hibernian took part in the first European Cup after the chairman accepted the invitation despite doubts from the English authorities, and they reached the semi-final in 1955 to 1956, where they lost to Reims (check). Scotland also met France at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, in a 2-1 defeat in which Fontaine and Kopa scored (check). The English champions Chelsea were told not to enter the competition, and Manchester United were the first English entrants in 1956 to 1957 (check). The whole competition was an example of French and continental ideas reaching Britain.
Check the details Scores, dates and records from the 1950s are often repeated with small errors. Check the 1958 results, the European Cup finals and the details of the FLN team against FIFA, UEFA and a reliable history. The stories of the players' personal lives are often told in a polished form.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Test the label "champagne football". What does it claim, what evidence would support or undermine it, and who made it popular?

→ Solution
Exercise 2

Choose Kopa, Fontaine or Mekhloufi and write a short profile that separates the documented facts from the stories that surround them.

→ Solution
Exercise 3

Explain why a record such as Fontaine's 13 goals needs a careful statement, and write one careful sentence about it.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

  • Reims: champions six times between 1949 and 1962; European Cup finalists 1956 and 1959 (check)
  • People: Albert Batteux, Raymond Kopa, Just Fontaine, Robert Jonquet, Rachid Mekhloufi
  • 1958: third place in Sweden; Fontaine 13 goals; Kopa the Ballon d'Or
  • Context: the Algerian War and the FLN team