Captain of the national team of France<\/b> in the 1930 World Cup <\/b>was Alex Villaplan, of Algerian descent. <\/b><\/p>\n
He played as a midfielder and represented the \u201cBlues\u201d at the Olympic Games of 1928<\/b> and in the World Cup<\/b> in \u201930, where he wore the captain\u2019s armband\u2014a moment that was considered at the time to be the highlight <\/b>of his career.<\/p>\n
In 1933 <\/b>, the Lille team was stripped of the title of the French, the first professional championship in the country\u2019s history, due to involvement <\/b>in match-fixing in the finals against Antibes<\/b>, where Villaplan was playing at the time. Although there were strong suspicions <\/b>against him, he was not punished<\/b>. Since then, he gradually lost interest in soccer <\/b>and began frequenting horse races<\/b>. He made one last attempt to return to the field with Bastidien <\/b>in the second division, but ended the season in\u2026 prison<\/b>, sentenced to six months<\/b> in prison for his involvement in a horse-racing<\/b> fixing scandal.<\/p>\n
With the outbreak of World War II<\/b>, Villaplan became involved in the black market<\/b>in Paris and in extortion against the local Jewish community<\/b>. In 1940, he was sentenced to two months in prison <\/b>for possession of stolen goods<\/b>. Through his criminal past, he came into contact with the so-called \u201cFrench Gestapo,\u201d the Carlingue<\/b>, an organization formed by the Reich to combat the French Resistance. The organization was led by Henri Lafon and Pierre Bonni <\/b>and consisted of criminals who collaborated with the Nazi authorities. <\/b>Villaplan specialized in extorting <\/b>gold dealers<\/b>. In 1943, he was arrested by the SS for the theft <\/b>of precious stones and imprisoned at the Compi\u00e8gne camp<\/b>, but Lafon managed to secure his release. Shortly thereafter, he participated in the arrest of the Resistance fighter Genevi\u00e8ve de Gaulle,<\/b> the niece of General Charles de Gaulle, along with dozens of members of the D\u00e9fense de la France network.<\/b><\/p>\n
In 1944 <\/b>he took command of one of the five divisions of the North African Brigade, a criminal organization of immigrants <\/b>from North Africa who collaborated with the Nazis <\/b>against the French Resistance. Due to the brutality of his men, he earned the nickname \u201cSS Mohammed\u201d <\/b> and was awarded the rank and uniform of SS-Untersturmf\u00fchrer<\/b> (second lieutenant). On June 11, 1944, one day after the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane<\/b>, his unit executed 52 people <\/b>in Musidan, with eyewitness accounts implicating him directly in the shootings, while they also participated in other looting and executions. Villaplan was arrested <\/b>in Paris on August 24, 1944<\/b>, during the liberation. On December 12, he was sentenced to death <\/b>for high treason<\/b> and war crimes. He was executed on December 27, 1944 <\/b> at 10:15 a.m., along with Bonni, Lafon <\/b>and five other condemned men, at the fortress of Montreuil<\/b>. According to an eyewitness account, shortly before the execution, Lafon said to him: \u201cYou won\u2019t be able to stop this penalty kick <\/b>,\u201d even though Villaplan wasn\u2019t a goalkeeper<\/b>\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\ud83c\udfc6 You can read more stories like this in a 640-page, large-format investigation in the book \u201c<\/b>Confidential World Cup<\/b>“<\/b>, published by Historical Quest<\/b>.\u00a0<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The captain of the French national team at the 1930 World Cup was Alex Villaplan, who was of Algerian descent. He played as a midfielder and represented the \u201cLes Bleus\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.tomanifesto.gr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}