Raoul Caudron

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 1928, Caudron became the delegate of the FFF's Federal Bureau, which held plenary sessions to ratify the decisions made by the selection committee of the French national team. Even though the delegate did not have the right to vote, he was known for taking his position very seriously, taking "notes of his impressions on the behavior and morale of the footballers he monitored in a small notebook". In February 1929, he was one of the three delegates representing the federation that attended a match between France B and Luxembourg. 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…

In February 1936, his 14-year-old son Jacques was one of the 66 readers of the French newspaper L'Auto who participated in the so-called "Invisible Athletes Game", a "Sherlock Holmes-type" football charade organized by L'Auto; the winners were Caudron and Pierre Besset, who did not even had 30 years between them, and their award was a ticket to a England-Austria match in May in Vienna. Caudron died in La Garenne-Colombes on 25 February 1938, at the age of 55.