French soccer legend Just Fontaine passes away

French soccer legend Just Fontaine, who scored a record 13 World Cup goals in 1958, has died at the age of 89.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
01 March 2023 Wednesday 10:27
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French soccer legend Just Fontaine passes away

French soccer legend Just Fontaine, who scored a record 13 World Cup goals in 1958, has died at the age of 89. His family have reported the sad loss of one of the most legendary players in French history, scoring 30 goals in 21 games for France between 1953 and 1960.

Thirteen goals in a single World Cup finals: Just Fontaine will forever be associated with this legendary and almost unbeatable record, the culmination of a career essentially marked by his time at Reims.

The 1958 World Cup in Sweden is the masterpiece of "Justo" and will be for a long time the absolute reference of French football before the arrival of the Platini, Zidane and Mbappé generations.

Last representative of the attacking trident that he formed with Raymond Kopa and Roger Piantoni, who died in 2017 and 2018, Fontaine, together with the other two stars of Reims, had led Les Bleus to the semifinals where a certain Pelé, 17, had made shatter his dream with a hat-trick.

Future tournament winners Brazil won 5-2, but France consoled themselves with third place, led by a graceful Fontaine who put up a fabulous four-game scorer against Germany (6-3). Les Bleus star in their first feat on the international scene and the native of Marrakech, on August 18, 1933, entered history.

If the French team have since managed to do much better by establishing themselves at the top of the world in 1998 and again in 2018, Fontaine's feat today seems totally unrealistic and inaccessible.

And yet, the gunner was not destined to compete in that World Cup, preceded in the blue hierarchy by Thadée Cisowski. But the latter was injured at the last moment. "It was only at the airport before leaving for Sweden that Paul Nicolas (France coach, editor's note) and Albert Batteux (one of the coaches, editor's note), who really didn't like me, told me they would." would do, that I would play center forward," Fontaine told AFP in 2013.

In addition to his 13 goals and the French team's first international medal achieved in Sweden, Fontaine has also built a select list of clubs with four French championship titles (one with Nice, three with Reims), two French Cups and one European. Lost Champion Clubs Cup Final with Reims in 1959 (2-0) against the great Real Madrid of Di Stéfano, Puskas and friend Kopa.

"There is a lot of talk about my record but I would have changed it for five or six more years, because soccer was my passion. I was at the top, I earned a lot of money at the time. Current sums, I earned five times the minimum wage, now it would be more like a hundred times,” he explained in 2013.

Retired from the field, Fontaine becomes a manager, but his time on the bench will be quite short. His name is etched in the annals for a much less glorious performance than his 13 World Cup goals: he made just two appearances for France in 1967, before being sent off after two friendly defeats.

His experience at PSG (1973-1976) was more fruitful with promotion to the 1st division in 1974 and he completed his life as a coach in his Moroccan homeland, offering a third place in the CAN-1980 to the Atlas Lions.

Retired in peace, the former striker had kept an eye on the football news, claiming to watch every game on television, though he was handicapped by illness for the last few years of his life. In 2011, he was invited by then-coach Laurent Blanc to Clairefontaine, as a glorious ex-player, to preach the good word to Les Bleus, a year after the Knysna fiasco.

Fontaine received a Golden Boot in honor of his record during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, in a ceremony in which he was "proud" to receive the award from Ronaldo Nazario and Michel Platini.