World Cup 1930: The France captain turned Nazi collaborator
This article appeared in issue 340 of Sport magazine. and here .
As he stood and faced the firing squad in 1944, Alexandre Villaplane might have looked back on the afternoon when he captained France in the first ever World Cup match.
On July 13 1930, the 24-year-old led out his country for a 4-1 win against Mexico, in front of 4,444 fans at Penarol’s Estadio Pocitos in Montevideo. The course of his life is scarcely credible. Born in Algeria, Villaplane moved to France with his parents as a youngster, and by the age of 17 he was playing for FC Sete on the south coast.
He was a fine player, by all accounts: a strong yet cultured centre-half, good both in the air and with his feet. His skills made him attractive, and even in the days before professionalism, Villaplane moved clubs with almost modern frequency - able to command good wages in the fictitious positions created for him, as was common practice in the ‘shamateur’ era.
He was called up to the national team in 1926, becoming the first player of North African origin to represent France. A key member of the team, he was capped 26 times, including a spell of 20 consecutive games that included all World Cup group fixtures in 1930. He said leading his country out against the Mexicans was “the happiest day of my life”.
Away from football, though, his life was already starting to unravel. In 1929 he had been the star signing for Racing Club Paris, a curiously prescient attempt to build a super-club in the capital. Almost immediately Villaplane fell in with the wrong crowd, flaunting wages that he shouldn’t technically have been getting as an amateur, and burning through cash faster than Mario Balotelli at John Lewis. He spent money on cabaret, in casinos and restaurants - and, most damaging of all, at racecourses, where he fell into the criminal underworld.
The French Football Federation did not take kindly to their captain’s indiscretions - he never played for his country again after the World Cup, marking the end of his international career at the age of 24. Two years later, he was embroiled in a match-fixing scandal while playing for Antibes. Three years after that, following shambolic, disinterested spells at OGC Nice and Hispano-Bastidienne in Bordeaux, he was imprisoned for fixing horse races.
His football career was over.
He took to his next life with zeal. When the Second World War broke out, the former centre-half revealed himself as a “a born crook” according to his prosecutor at a subsequent trial, who also noted: “He would attempt and succeed in staging the most abject of blackmails - the blackmail of hope.”
In one of his spells in prison, for handling stolen goods, Villaplane met Henri Lafonte, who would go on to become a notorious Nazi collaborator and leader of the French Gestapo. Through this connection, Villaplane was eventually put in charge of the Brigade Nord-Africaine [BNA], a group of mercenaries tasked with stamping out resistance in the south.
They did this violently, under Villaplane’s captaincy. He would extract cash from desperate Jews and members of the resistance by offering them salvation, and then send them to the death camps anyway. “They’re going to kill you - but I’ll save you, risking my life,” went his speech. “I’ve saved fifty-four. You’ll be the fifty-fifth. That’ll be 400,000 Francs.” Those who couldn’t pay were left to the BNA.
Villaplane ordered rape, murder and the burning alive of prisoners. As the war drew to an end and Nazi rule crumbled, his deeds caught up with him. No one cared who he had been before the war, as he was captured, tried and sentenced.
On December 26 1944, at a fort on the outskirts of Paris, France’s first World Cup captain was executed as a traitor.
The 1930 World Cup in brief
Most of Europe balked at the steamship journey to Uruguay, so nine of the 13 entrants were from the Americas. Both semi finals finished 6-1, Argentina and the hosts demolishing the USA and Yugoslavia respectively. A crowd of 93,000 watched Uruguay recover from a 2-1 half-time deficit in the final to win 4-2 against their Rio Plate neighbours.
Tuesday 4 March marks 100 days until the start of the World Cup where Brazil take on Croatia in Sao Paulo live on talkSPORT where you can ALL 64 GAMES, so make sure you listen on the day for a host of exciting guests and great football debate.