Henri Jooris (23 April 1879 – 29 March 1940) was a French businessman, industrialist, and sports manager. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of football in the Nord in the first half of the 20th century.
Throughout his life, he combined economic commitments with several sporting functions in the management of sports clubs, federations, and leagues, serving as the president of both Olympique Lillois (1919–32) and the Northern Football Association League (LNFA, 1919–24), the vice-president of the French Football Federation (1919–24), and was also a benefactor member of ten sports companies. Under his presidency, the LNFA became one of the leading leagues in France, with more than 20,000 members and nearly 600 clubs, including OL, which became one of the great clubs in France during his presidency, winning the LNFA four times, along with the inaugural edition of the French professional championship in 1932–33, which he had first proposed on a letter addressed to Jules Rimet in 1929. The home stadium of Olympique Lillois, which hosted a quarter-final in the 1938 World Cup, was named after him.
As a businessman, he was nicknamed the "first baker of France", being one of the great bosses of the North of France between the two world wars. He was noted for his permanent interventionism and outrageous authoritarianism, two character traits that explain as much his successes as his relative failures.
Early life Henri Jooris was born in Lille on 23 April 1879, as the son of a grocery store owner on rue d'Esquermes in Lille.
Sporting career First titles with Olympique Lillois In 1910, the 31-year-old Jooris, then a young and authoritarian industrialist, full of ambition, began challenging the then president of Olympique Lillois, André Billy, whose ideas frequently opposed those of Jooris, so much so, that the two leaders had a falling out and nearly fought a duel. On 19 February 1911, Billy and Jooris witnessed OL win the first title of its history, the USFSA Northern Championship, following a 3–0 victory over RC Roubaix, thus finally putting an end to the invincibility of Roubaix and US Tourquennoise, but despite the club's success, Billy lost the loyalty of OL's board of directors to Jooris, who was named the club's vice-presidency in 1911, which caused the former to resign and create a rival team in 1912, Club Lillois, taking half the team with him. Jooris thus replaced him as "de facto" leader of the club before becoming its official president in May 1919, after its merger with Billy's Club Lillois.
In order to accomplish his ambition of making Olympique Lillois the "citadel of regional football", Jooris began recruiting talented players from outside the USFSA, such as Alphonse Six, Belgian champion with Brugeois, and the Frenchman Jean Ducret, from Étoile des Deux Lacs (a Parisian club affiliated with the FGSPF), as well as professional English coaches, such as Charlie Williams in 1911, a former coach of Denmark, and Maurice Bunyan. Furthermore, he organized matches across Europe to increase the confrontations against foreign teams (Slavia Prague, Tunbridge Wells, Ghent, among others), and partly financed and carried out the modernization of the old Victor Boucquey stadium on the banks of the Deûle, which now has a capacity of 5,000 seats. These actions undertaken by Jooris paid off as it allowed OL to win a further two USFSA Northern Championships in 1913 and 1914, which was followed by a triumph at the 1914 USFSA Football Championship on 5 April, beating Olympique Cettois 3–0 in the final in Paris, in front of nearly 1,000 Lille supporters who arrived by special trains.
This victory allowed the club to compete in the last edition of the Trophée de France, an inter-federation national competition organized by the CFI; OL won the semifinals with a 4–1 victory over FEC Levallois, champions of the Ligue de Football Association (LFA), and then won the final on 26 April with another 4–1 victory over VGA Médoc, winners of the FCAF, thus claiming a trophy that had been donated by Pierre de Coubertin himself. The final was delayed 15 minutes because OL's leaders threaten to forfeit if Albert Clark, who two weeks prior had played for Plumstead, takes part in the match, but in the end, Jooris, while having reservations, accepted the fight. With an average of 400 spectators per match, the unconditional support of the club's fanbase, the presence in its ranks of eight international players, and the accumulation of titles made OL the leading club of northern football on the eve of the First World War.
Managerial career In 1912, Jooris took up Billy's idea of the Paris-Nord matches by creating the Lions des Flandres, a scratch team representing Northern France, in order to organize inter-regional meetings against the Paris football team, which would serve as a springboard for possible selection to the French national team. This selection was made up of the best players from the biggest clubs in the Nord, especially the three flagship clubs of the Lille metropolis: RC Roubaix, US Tourquennoise, and Olympique Lillois. On 4 January 1914, the Lions claimed a famous 3–0 win over Paris, with two of the goals being scored by OL players, Albert Eloy and Alphonse Six, and four months later, in May 1914, a team made up of Northerners asserted their superiority over the Normans (5–0) in the so-called Coupe Henri Jooris.
Jooris was the secretary of the Lions des Flandres between 1912 and 1914, and as such, he was the one in charge of setting up schedules and organizing trips, including one to Bilbao in May 1914, and he also had a big say on the composition of the team, together with the coach Fernand Desrousseaux, which resulted in the selection of several players from OL. This allowed many of them to subsequently reach the national team, so during this period, OL had as many as eight international players in its ranks (Degouve, Ducret, Gravelines, Montagne, Six (Belgium), Eloy, Chandelier, Voyeux); on one occasion, in a friendly match against Switzerland on 9 March 1913, France fielded four OL players at the same time. This happened because several Parisian players had withdrawn from the match at the last minute (there was no contractual obligation at the time), with Jooris then helping the selection committee to patch up the team by convincing the OL players to travel to Geneva in exchange for a bonus, which turned out to be two bottles of champagne. His influence in the national team did not stop there, since OL's home stadium, whose improvement was partly financed by Jooris, hosted France's international match against Belgium on 25 January 1914.
Thanks to the triumphs of both Lions des Flandres and OL in the early 1910s, it can reasonably be said that northern football was the best in France during that period, but then the First World War broke out, in which Northern France was occupied for 4 years, thus interrupting the activities of the team and causing the death of many of its players, including Alphonse Six in 1916. In December 1915, Jooris, then a subsistence officer in Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf, created OL's bulletin because he wanted to occupy his leisure time while doing useful work. An officer during the First World War, he became the founding president of the Sports Committee of the Invaded Regions.
President of LNFA In the aftermath of the War, northern football had to be reconstructed, and thus, on 19 August 1919, the Northern Football Association League (LNFA) was founded by twenty clubs, and Jooris, who was now also the vice-president of the FFF, relied on the reputation of the pre-war OL and his skills proven during his term on the sports committee of the Invaded Regions to be logically elected as the first president of the LNFA. In 1920, Jooris obtained from the FFF a sum of 3,000 francs "intended to help the widows and descendants of northern footballers who had died for France". At the same time, he prepared war damage files intended to restore destroyed sports facilities as quickly as possible because, as he himself declared, "if we give money to agriculture, why not to sport?".
From 1920 onwards, the ordinary activity of the LNFA was to hold commission meetings every week to set the harmonization of calendars and regulations, the redefinition of the architecture of competitions, and the management of disputes. Similar to the championships of honor created in the other regional football leagues, Jooris created the (DH Nord), composed of the best teams in the region, including OL, who was champion of the North four times (1921, 1922, 1929, and 1931) and vice-champion four times (1920, 1923, 1924, and 1928). Legend has it that on the evenings of OL's football victories, the Bellevue café on the Grand-Place, in which Jooris had some business, would hoist a flag in the club's colours, red and white. During this period, Jooris hired another English coach, Charles Griffiths. Despite becoming a heavyweight in the Nord, OL struggled to confirm this reputation in the Coupe de France, because in its first five participations in the national cup, the club only reached the quarter-finals twice.
Under his presidency, the LNFA became the second-largest League in France, with 279 clubs and 6,818 licensees in 1922. Comfortably re-elected in 1922, Jooris was forced to resign from this position two years later, which changed a trajectory that had been upward until then.
Brown amateurism At a time when supporters of amateurism (Frantz Reichel, Charles Simon) were opposed by leaders of large regional clubs (OL, OM, Sète) who knew that the advent of professionalism was inevitable, the FFF actively fought against "brown amateurism", which was the illegal payment of an officially amateur athlete, and the OL had been suspected of that for several years; for instance, the press reported on a payment paid to coach Charlie Williams in 1911. By endorsing these practices within his own club while his elected functions within the LNFA obliged him to denounce them, Jooris found himself in an untenable situation. For instance, on 28 December 1921, the LNFA's office chaired by Jooris annulled the result of a match between US Bruay and Stade Béthunois because the latter had fielded an English professional player, thus defending the interests of amateur clubs while at the same time he was running a club where the practices that he was denouncing were commonplace.
Inevitably, in 1924, this scandal finally struck OL and its president, when a dispute between Jooris and the OL treasurer prompted the latter to reveal to the press that nearly 8,000 francs from the club's budget were allocated to paying the first team. The revelation of these facts forced the FFF to suspended Jooris from all official functions until 1927, which forced him to resign from the presidency of the LNFA; however, he announced that he was doing so on the grounds of professional constraints and a possible entry into politics.
Comeback Quarantined in the mid-1920s, Jooris would nevertheless play an active role in this "great turning point in French football" that was the advent of professionalism. Weakened within his own club, he had to regain the trust of the leaders of small amateur clubs while continuing to develop elite football within the LNFA, being runner-up of the DH Nord in 1928 and then winning it in 1929. He was therefore re-elected president of the Northern League in 1929.
Later that year, Jooris asked the socialist municipality for a contribution to finance the renovation of the stands of an already dilapidated stadium, but he was met with a flat refusal from the mayor of Lille, who stated that OL "generated no revenue".
Professionalism