Football: Just Fontaine, France’s World Cup record breaker, dies at 89

PARIS – Just Fontaine, the legendary France striker who died on Wednesday at the age of 89, will forever be remembered for scoring 13 goals at the 1958 World Cup, a remarkable feat that seems unlikely ever to be matched.

Till now, only three players – Miroslav Klose (16), Ronaldo (15) and Gerd Muller (14) – have scored more World Cup goals than Fontaine, even though the Reims player appeared at just one tournament and played only six matches.

Lionel Messi matched his tally with Argentina’s recent run to glory in Qatar, but it took him five World Cups to get there.

Fontaine’s four-goal haul in the 6-3 third-place play-off win over West Germany in 1958 ensured he had scored in every game.

Muller with 10 in 1970 and Hungary’s Sandor Kocsis with 11 in 1954 are the only others to have reached double figures at a single Finals.

Born in Marrakech in 1933 to a French father and Spanish mother at the time of the French Protectorate in Morocco, Fontaine went to school in Casablanca, and began his football career there.

In 1953, he moved to France, joining Nice. His three years there were spent combining football with military service, but he still won the French Cup in his first season and clinched a league title in 1956.

He then moved to Reims, the great French side of the 1950s who had just been beaten by Real Madrid in the first European Cup final.

Fontaine won three league titles at Reims and another French Cup, and appeared in the 1959 European Cup final, where they again lost to Real.

He scored 10 goals in that campaign, but 1958 was his crowning glory – in his second season with Reims, they won a league and Cup double and he was the league’s top scorer with 34 goals.

However, his career ended in 1962 aged just 28. He had hardly played for two years after suffering a double leg fracture. In all, he won 21 caps for France, scoring 30 goals.

“We talk a lot about my record but I would definitely have swopped it for another five or six years, because football was my passion,” he said previously.

Fontaine went into coaching and in 1967 took charge of France. However, he lasted just two games.

A spell with Paris Saint-Germain was more successful, as he took the side from the capital into the top flight in 1974.

His career in football ended back where it began, in Morocco, as he led the national team to third place at the 1980 Africa Cup of Nations. He then retired to Toulouse, in the south-west of France. AFP