Captain of the national team of France in the 1930 World Cup was Alex Villaplan, of Algerian descent.
He played as a midfielder and represented the “Blues” at the Olympic Games of 1928 and in the World Cup in ’30, where he wore the captain’s armband—a moment that was considered at the time to be the highlight of his career.
In 1933 , the Lille team was stripped of the title of the French, the first professional championship in the country’s history, due to involvement in match-fixing in the finals against Antibes, where Villaplan was playing at the time. Although there were strong suspicions against him, he was not punished. Since then, he gradually lost interest in soccer and began frequenting horse races. He made one last attempt to return to the field with Bastidien in the second division, but ended the season in… prison, sentenced to six months in prison for his involvement in a horse-racing fixing scandal.
With the outbreak of World War II, Villaplan became involved in the black marketin Paris and in extortion against the local Jewish community. In 1940, he was sentenced to two months in prison for possession of stolen goods. Through his criminal past, he came into contact with the so-called “French Gestapo,” the Carlingue, an organization formed by the Reich to combat the French Resistance. The organization was led by Henri Lafon and Pierre Bonni and consisted of criminals who collaborated with the Nazi authorities. Villaplan specialized in extorting gold dealers. In 1943, he was arrested by the SS for the theft of precious stones and imprisoned at the Compiègne camp, but Lafon managed to secure his release. Shortly thereafter, he participated in the arrest of the Resistance fighter Geneviève de Gaulle, the niece of General Charles de Gaulle, along with dozens of members of the Défense de la France network.
In 1944 he took command of one of the five divisions of the North African Brigade, a criminal organization of immigrants from North Africa who collaborated with the Nazis against the French Resistance. Due to the brutality of his men, he earned the nickname “SS Mohammed” and was awarded the rank and uniform of SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant). On June 11, 1944, one day after the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, his unit executed 52 people in Musidan, with eyewitness accounts implicating him directly in the shootings, while they also participated in other looting and executions. Villaplan was arrested in Paris on August 24, 1944, during the liberation. On December 12, he was sentenced to death for high treason and war crimes. He was executed on December 27, 1944 at 10:15 a.m., along with Bonni, Lafon and five other condemned men, at the fortress of Montreuil. According to an eyewitness account, shortly before the execution, Lafon said to him: “You won’t be able to stop this penalty kick ,” even though Villaplan wasn’t a goalkeeper…
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