Raoul Caudron

Raoul Jacques Caudron (8 July 1882 – 25 February 1938) was a French footballer and manager who is best known for being in charge of the French national team in the first FIFA World Cup in 1930.

Sporting career Early career Born in the 17th arrondissement of Paris on 8 July 1882, Caudron played as a goalkeeper for the second team of Standard AC in October 1896, aged 14. Still before 1900, he also played as a goalkeeper for US Sotteville and FC Rouen.

In February 1930, Caudron accompanied the French national team on a trip by train to Porto for a friendly match against Portugal; in one of the stops, the players managed to buy a goat to serve as their mascot, but when the ticket collector demanded payment for the place occupied by the goat, it was Caudron, as the manager in charge of accounts, who had to pay for it, but he remained inflexible despite the players' pleas, because for him "a penny is a penny", and thus the separation from the goat took place at the next stop.

1930 World Cup In the summer of 1930, Caudron was a member of the French delegation that went to the 1930 FIFA World Cup in Uruguay, which also included 16 players, the president of the FFF Jules Rimet, a masseur Raphaël Panosetti, and referee Georges Balvay, but the coach Gaston Barreau was absent. Barreau had always been against French participation in the World Cup because he considered his team so weak that "it could only make a fool of itself in Uruguay, so he decided to stay in his homeland with the pretext that he had been held up by his position at the Paris Conservatory of Music due to his employers refusing to grant him a two months' leave. After the World Cup, Caudron coached France in three unofficial matches against Nacional Montevideo, Santos FC, and Brazil, winning the former and losing the latter two. Caudron then wrote a letter about their trip to Brazil, in which he praised its stadiums ("the soil is excellent and grassy") and its women ("the bathers returned from the beach in their bathing suits").

The French press praised the performance of its national team, which was not humiliating like Barreau had predicted. Thus, years later, in 1954, he stated in the press that he was responsible for forming the teams that lined up in the World Cup, and recounts all three matches in detail as if he had been there, without ever mentioning Caudron's name, who had already died in 1938.

Caudron died in La Garenne-Colombes on 25 February 1938, at the age of 55.