Pierre Cazal

Pierre Cazal (1948 – 7 October 2024) was a French literature professor and football historian who was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary connoisseurs of the history of the French national team.

Throughout his career, he wrote four books about the history of the Bleus, the first of whom, published in 1992, covering the team's first 497 matches, and he later became the editor of the Chroniques bleues website, where he published weekly articles about the Bleus in the early 2020s, including the series Les premiers Bleus, a project about the Pre-WWI French internationals, in which he uncovered many previously unknown facts, corrected numerous long-time misconceptions, and debunked several mistakes that had persisted through time. He was a graduate of the French Academy of Letters.

Career The 1992 and 1998 dictionaries A retired literature professor, Cazal channeled his encyclopedic memory and insatiable curiosity into the history of the French national team. Unlike other countries, who possessed very comprehensive works of their national teams, France was lagging far behind statistically; for instance, a simple consultation of the official English reports of the 1908 Olympic Games was enough to correct all the errors of France's line-ups.

In the end, this work resulted in the publication of a book in 1992, l’Intégrale de l’équipe de France de football ("The Complete Collection of the French Football Team"), which not only covered the first 497 matches of the Blues, but also included the dictionary of its players, both in terms of first names and dates of birth or death.

At the time, the Internet as we know it today did not yet exist, so this research had to be carried out by consulting newspaper archives in libraries, making dozens of phone calls, and writing to correspondents abroad. Another such example is that of François Barat, erroneously named Jean-Marie Barat, which he was only able to find thanks to a clue from an old testimony that was given to him by the ex-president of the AS Bon Conseil.

Cazal eventually acknowledged his good faith mistakes in the 1992 and 1998 dictionaries during his series Les premiers Bleus ("the first Bleus"), a project that consisted of biographical articles about the forgotten Pre-WWI French internationals, which were written by him and then published in the Chroniques bleues website from January 2023 until his death in October 2024. He also worked with the Franco-Uruguayan historian Pierre Arrighi on two books about Jules Rimet and the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, both published in Spanish.

Death Cazal died in the Moselle commune of Château-Salins, on 7 October 2024, at the age of 75. Following his death, Colombari highlighted his kindness and self-sacrifice, as well as his "less visible work of advice, corrections, clarifications which irrigates a large part of the editorial content of the site and the database which feeds it".