Raymond Kopa

Raymond Kopa (* 13 October 1931 as Raymond Kopaszewski in Nœux-les-Mines, Pas-de-Calais department; † 3 March 2017 in Angers) was a French footballer of Polish descent. He is one of the best French footballers of all time, along with Michel Platini and Zinédine Zidane, and also one of the top players of the 20th century worldwide. During his career, he was mostly deployed as a centre-forward, later predominantly on the half-right, and repeatedly as a right-winger in between.

Only 1.68m tall, Kopa's most outstanding attributes were his speed and agility, his finesse with the ball, his ability to score goals and his precision in passing, but he always put his individual class at the service of the team. Raymond Kopa took part in the World Cup finals in Switzerland (1954) and Sweden (1958), won the European Champion Clubs' Cup three times between 1957 and 1959 with Real Madrid, and reached the first final of the competition in 1956 with Stade Reims. With these two clubs he also won two Coupe Latine titles and six national championships. His personal awards included best player at the World Cup in Sweden, European Footballer of the Year (1958) and French Player of the Season and Sportsman of the Year on three occasions.

Even at a young age, the media referred to him as the "Napoléon of football". In November 1970, he became the first footballer to be inducted into the Legion of Honour, and in April 2007 President Chirac promoted him from knight to officer.

His biography is also an example of the opportunities and problems of social advancement that the sport of football offered - not only in France - to members of the "doubly disadvantaged second and third generations of immigrants", especially in the first two post-war decades, if they were prepared to integrate into the society of their destination country. Kopa described this path in 1972 with the words:

Childhood and youth

The street footballer

Raymond Kopa came from a family of pure miners: his paternal grandparents arrived in 1919 with four children, including Kopa's then 13-year-old father Franz, from Poland in the northern French coalfield between Lens and Béthune. Like the bulk of the 6,000 or so other postwar Polish immigrants there, the Kopaszewskis preserved their language and Catholic faith, while younger family members increasingly adopted the way of life of their French neighbors. The male relatives of his mother, Hélène, who was also born in Poland, had also worked underground for at least three generations. He described his home as simple, but not poor, and his school years with the words that he was "not gifted for mathematics or history, nor for the rest", especially since only Polish was spoken in the parental home. On the other hand, he spent a lot of time playing football from an early age - in the mornings in the school playground, in the afternoons in the garden of his parents' house, and on Sundays during the half-time break on the sports field when, as a five-year-old, he attended a match of the local amateur club after the Kopaszewskis' family reunion at his grandparents' house in neighboring Mazingarbe.

At eight, he formed his first street football team, mostly with older Polish but also some French and Italian neighbourhood kids. This équipe du Chemin-Perdu - at No. 5 on the street of Aufgegebener Weg, a long row of simple brick buildings blackened by coal dust, similar to the coal-mining colonies of the Ruhr, stood his parents' house - quickly made a name for itself even against older teams. The dribble-strong Raymond contributed so much that the local club US Nœux-les-Mines asked him to join in 1941. At the age of eleven he was already playing in their youth team (cadets), at 14 in the juniors and at only 16 in the men's team. Kopa himself says: "I always played with older players". About the effects of the German occupation between 1940 and 1944 - the heavily industrialized north of France was directly subject to the military administration in Brussels as a zone interdite ("forbidden zone") - on the everyday life of the family, he only reports that he owed his first leather ball to German soldiers, albeit involuntarily from their side: the boys stibitzed the valuable piece during a match between two soldier teams, which Kopa later commented with a wink as "almost an act of resistance".

"Squire" from Fourteen

After leaving school in 1945, he searched in vain for an apprenticeship as an electrician - he wanted to escape the "inhuman shift work 600 metres underground" he witnessed every day with his father and older brother Henri, but "when I gave my full name, the job interview ended". For the next two and a half years he worked underground in the local mine, where initially he had to push the fully loaded hoes from the adit to the winding shaft. In an industrial accident in October 1947, the thumb and index finger of his left hand were shattered and partially amputated; for this he received an accident pension of €30 a month until his death. Thanks to the intercession of the US Nœux chairman, who worked as an engineer in the same mine, Kopa was thereafter assigned only to the early shift and was able to participate more regularly in team training. By now, his footballing skills had gained recognition beyond the club and led to regular consideration for the Northern France junior regional side. With this team, which included two other future internationals in Jean Vincent and René Dereuddre, he reached the semi-finals of the French Cadets' Championship in the spring of 1948, but lost 6-3 despite two Kopa goals against Lorraine - whose ranks also included Roger Piantoni, who was later to become Kopa's strike partner.

From November 1947, Constant Tison, the coach of the league team, used him regularly in matches in the second highest amateur division. Tison was convinced of Kopa's abilities, which included not only his feel for the ball, his ability to score goals, his stamina and his overview of the game, but also his above-average enthusiasm for training, his team spirit, his fighting spirit and his will to win: "He came straight from work, coal dust in his eyebrows, and as soon as he'd had a bite to eat or at least a short rest, he was jumping over a little wall and standing on the sports field in sandals. Kopa himself explains his unconditional devotion by saying that at the time he would have done anything to "escape my preordained life as a "blackface"". Only his heading game remained deficient, even though he practiced it regularly. According to Tison, he was "a small, bright but reserved lad who listened a lot and talked a little": all the more convincing on the pitch, scoring the only goal of the match in his first match at US Tourcoing and even scoring five goals against Nœux's toughest promotion rivals US Boulogne in an 8-1 victory.

After all, in the spring of 1948 his growing notoriety had led to him being transferred to a post in the mine where he had to knock loose chunks of rock and coal stuck in the lorries - "not exactly what I dreamed of, but on the surface at last". It was also during this time that he first earned something from his footballing skills: a spectator offered a bonus of 1,000 old francs to the scorer of the next goal during a spot match. When his teammates, with whom he wanted to share the amount won, refused, he gave the money to his mother in the evening. And in the summer of 1948, after US Nœux had been promoted to the highest regional amateur league, the club thanked him for his achievements with a bicycle, on which he still rode to training as a professional.

Kopaszewski becomes Kopa

Beginning of his nationwide fame

In May 1949, Raymond Kopaszewski finished second in the final round of the national 'Young Footballer's Competition' at the Colombes Olympic Stadium - a single miss costing the usually assured penalty kick taker this title, for which 71 young players had competed after previous qualifying rounds at regional level. Over the course of two days, they had to demonstrate their skills in all areas of the game (attacking and defensive behaviour, passing, crossing and scoring, interplay and assertiveness, execution of resting balls and much more) in front of a panel of association and club coaches. To qualify for Colombes, Kopa had had to compete at departmental and regional level (in Béthune and Lille respectively). That he took part at all was only thanks to Tison's persistence, who woke him up early in the morning and brought him to Béthune. The day after the final, however, the juror Gabriel Hanot, full-time editor-in-chief of l'Équipe and member of the selection committee of the French national team, wrote:

In fact, it wasn't injury that prevented Kopas from playing, but rather the fact that he only had Polish citizenship at the time - at that time, French citizenship was normally only available on reaching the age of majority, i.e. 21. Immediately after the competition in Colombes, two professional clubs made more intensive efforts to sign Raymond Kopaszewski: Stade Reims, just national champions for the first time, and second division side SCO Angers. Kopa himself would have liked to stay in his home region because of the proximity to his family, but to his regret none of the "big northern clubs" - neither OSC Lille nor RC Lens, not even US Valenciennes or CO Roubaix-Tourcoing - registered their interest. Lille's president Louis Henno, after seeing Kopa during a game with the northern side, judged him "too petite" - a bitter misjudgement for OSC. And the talent scouts at Lens literally overlooked him, despite regularly targeting the Polish communities of northern France for players. While the US Nœux board would have liked to keep him for another year or two, Constant Tison was in favour of his further development at a higher-profile club. After initial hesitation, the talented striker, his father Franz and Angers coach Camille Cottin signed Kopa's first player contract as a "semi-professional" in Tison's apartment, which provided for a gross monthly salary of FF 9,000 - a lot of money for a 17-year-old in the late 1940s.

First professional contract with SCO Angers

Although children from his street team had occasionally shortened his name to "Kopa", the first measure taken by his new club was to use it officially. Starting out in a wildly unfamiliar environment was difficult for the novice - even though Cottin cared deeply for the newcomers - but he compensated for his homesickness primarily by increasing his efforts on the training pitch. He could only visit his family during the week-long winter break. As late as the first half of 1949/50, SCO Angers made Kopa a full professional, and what was left of his correspondingly higher pay - 21,000 francs a month, about what an ordinary clerk in the private sector brought home - he put into a savings account. Apart from the cost of his full board, he spent little, often going fishing or playing table tennis, board games and cards in the clubhouse, so that after a year he had about 70,000 francs - his "first piggy bank" - in it. He made his Division 2 debut in the season opener at AS Monaco, scoring his first two goals in the following home game, which Angers won 4-0 against Marseille's 2nd team. Overall, however, Kopa's first professional year was not very successful in sporting terms: in the championship, SCO finished 15th out of 18 contenders, and in the cup he was eliminated early on against a lower-class opponent. In addition, Kopa injured himself more seriously for the first time at the end of October 1949, when an opponent gave him a long flesh wound on the chin while fighting for the ball with the cleats of his shoes. In the following years it was mostly his ankles that suffered from the numerous attacks of opposing defenders and both had to be operated on after malleolar fractures.

When Cottin's young players were given a break from the game in January 1950, they sent the centre-forward to the club chairman as their spokesman to complain. Although the latter initially lashed out at the 18-year-old for his insubordination, calling him a "little rebel", Kopa eventually managed to get all four youngsters allowed to play in the jersey of neighbouring SO Cholet in a friendly guest appearance, thus making up for the loss of bonuses. The SCO had also suffered a heavy defeat without the youngsters, so they were back in Angers' first eleven the following week.

Homesick during the 1950 summer break, Kopa seriously considered reamateurising and returning to Nœux-les-Mines. At the same time, a shy relationship developed with the sister of his strike partner Claude Bourrigault, whom he had known since the 1949 youth competition. It wasn't until three years later, when Raymond Kopa had long since stopped playing at Angers, that he married Christiane; the couple lived together until Kopa's death.

His second year (1950/51) was also a mixed bag: SCO finished 14th in the championship, but the 'playing centre-forward' - in his two years at Angers he had scored 15 goals in 60 competitive games and provided many more assists - increasingly attracted the interest of sports journalists and, as a consequence, some first division clubs, including Girondins Bordeaux, Toulouse FC and home team RC Lens. It was not only for this reason that Raymond Kopa, in retrospect, judged the two years at Angers to have been beneficial to his development.

Kopa came to the attention of Reims coach Albert Batteux during a friendly against Stade Reims in April 1951, then approached him personally and persuaded his president to negotiate a transfer with financially strapped SCO Angers. Reims initially loaned Kopa out for a game against the Spanish national team at the end of April - the trip and performance with that top-flight side at the Estadio Chamartín had impressed the 19-year-old. After the 2-1 defeat, Batteux merely said "Good, kid" to the visiting player, who was unsure of his performance. Three months later, the red and white kit of the Rémois was Kopa's new professional attire after their president Henri Germain transferred 1.8 million francs transfer fee to Angers. It was only after this that the terms of the contract were negotiated with the purchased player - who at the time literally belonged to their first professional club until their 35th birthday (see also below) - and Kopa again proved a successful negotiator on his own behalf: his starting salary in Champagne was FF40,000 per month plus success bonuses. The fact that Germain also agreed to a one-off payment ('hand money') of FF 500,000 demanded by Kopa was, however, entirely thanks to the intercession of Batteux, who is said to have convinced his president with the words 'He is a future international'.