Antoine Bonifaci

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Antoine Bonifaci (born September 4, 1931 in Bezons , Val-d'Oise ) is a former French football player .

Club career

At a very young age, Antoine Bonifaci and his Corsican parents moved from Île-de-France to Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean , where they opened a restaurant. He mostly played soccer on the street, as he reminded himself:

“At that time ... the clubs did not yet have any training centers. We had to get by on our own. We acquired the match experience in games with other street teams. ... Anyone who owned a soccer ball would take it to bed in the evening so that it would not be stolen. "

From the 1948/49 season Bonifaci wore the colors of the first division OGC Nice . There the not particularly fast, but almost perfect outside runner was used for the first time at 17 in the first team. In May 1949 he finished the finals of the national "competition of young footballers" in the Olympic Stadium of Colombes in ninth place, although the football-interested public perceived another talent much more in Raymond Kopaszewski . In his second professional season (1949/50) Bonifaci developed into a regular player. A year later he won the championship title with Nice ; also at the age of 19 he became a national team player (see below) . In 1952 he defended the championship with Nice, also won the national cup (in the final 5: 3 against Girondins Bordeaux ) and thus also the doublé . In this eleven, Antoine Bonifaci was one of the outstanding forces alongside players like Abdelaziz Ben Tifour , Luis Carniglia , Désiré Carré , Victor Nurenberg , striker Jean Courteaux and Bonifaci's cousin Georges Césari . He was also in the 1952 final for the Coupe Latine , in which the OGC lost 0-1 to FC Barcelona . In the 1952/53 season Bonifaci remained without a title for the first time, although the team under coach Mario Zatelli had been strengthened by Antoine Cuissard , his outside runner colleague from the national team.

In 1953, Antoine Bonifaci moved to the Serie A club Inter Milan for a transfer fee of allegedly 20 million  old Francs . The French Football Association tried to prevent this transfer by all means because it did not want to lose one of its best players in the year before the World Cup finals , and L'Équipe wrote: "The Italian clubs are leading football to its ruin." The so courted player finally went to Italy anyway . In the squad of the 1954 championship team from Inter, however, the name Bonifaci is not listed; this was only the case in the following season. In 1955 he moved to AGC Bologna for two years . In 1957, Turin FC paid the equivalent of 29 million francs to secure Bonifaci's services, of which the player is said to have received 10 million himself. In 1959 Turin relegated to the second division , from which they returned after just one year as champions in the football upper house. The Frenchman, however, left FC and played a season at Lanerossi Vicenza that was not particularly successful for himself or for the club .

In 1961 Bonifaci returned to the French Division 1, where he played for two more years at Stade Français Paris . But although he also played in this team alongside numerous successful teammates such as André Lerond , Stako , Raymond Bellot , Norbert Eschmann , Philippe Gondet , Georges Carnus or Charly Loubet , Stade Français only landed in midfield and only made it into the cup once to the round of 16. Antoine Bonifaci was used less and less, ended his professional career in the summer of 1963 and returned to the south of France .

Little can be ascertained so far about his life and activities in the following decades; he is said to have worked as a trainer at times. In 1995 he was also given a special honor by the city on whose streets he kicked in the 1930s and 1940s: the football stadium in Villefranche-sur-Mer has since been called Stade Antoine-Bonifaci .

Stations

  • Olympique Gymnaste Club de Nice (1948–1953)
  • FC Internazionale di Milano (1953 / 1954–1955)
  • Associazione Giocare Calcio Bologna (1955–1957)
  • Torino Football Club 1906 (1957-1960, 1959/60 in Serie B)
  • Lanerossi Vicenza (1960/61)
  • Stade Français Paris (1961–1963)

In the national team

After 1949 already Junior European Champion B team had played become and 1950 even for France - among others away wins in Turkey and Greece -, Antoine Bonifaci broke out between May 1951 and May 1953 in twelve international matches in the French A-Eleven to Use, promptly became a regular there too - out of 15 games in this period he was missing only three times - and scored two goals (one each in his first and last game in this circle, against Northern Ireland and Wales ). These included games against Italy (1: 4 in June 1951) and against national teams from German-speaking countries: against Switzerland (2: 1 in October 1951), Austria (2: 2 in November 1951, 2: 1 eleven months later) and Germany (3-1 in October 1952).

With his move to Italy, a promising national team career ended prematurely because the French association - like most other Western European football associations - no longer considered "legionnaires" playing abroad.

Palmarès

  • French champion: 1951, 1952
  • French cup winner: 1952
  • Italian Series B Champion: 1960
  • Coupe Latine finalist: 1952
  • 12 international matches (2 goals) for France
  • 133 games and 20 goals in French Division 1 , 109/19 for Nice and 24/1 for Stade Français
  • 157 games and 3 goals in the Italian Serie A

literature

  • Denis Chaumier: Les Bleus. Tous les joueurs de l'équipe de France de 1904 à nos jours. Larousse, o. O. 2004 ISBN 2-03-505420-6
  • L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: Coupe de France. La folle épopée. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2007 ISBN 978-2-915-53562-4
  • Jean-Philippe Rethacker / Jacques Thibert: La fabuleuse histoire du football. Minerva, Genève 1996, 2003 2 ISBN 978-2-8307-0661-1
  • Alfred Wahl / Pierre Lanfranchi: Les footballeurs professionnels des années trente à nos jours. Hachette, Paris 1995 ISBN 978-2-0123-5098-4

Remarks

  1. "À l'époque, personne ne s'occupait de nous. The centers de formation n'existaient pas. On se débrouillait tout seul. The matches consist of des jeux de récréation entre quartiers. On n'avait pas de ballon, et celui qui en avait un dormait avec pour ne pas qu'on lui vole. "  - Rétro Sport, No. 2, September 1995, pp. 10-11.
  2. Chaumier, p. 50
  3. More information on the 1949 competition in the French-language Wikipedia article .
  4. Rethacker / Thibert, p. 816; http://www.pari-et-gagne.com/joueur/antoine_bonifaci.html
  5. a b Wahl / Lanfranchi, p. 146
  6. Rethacker / Thibert, p. 224f.
  7. On archive link ( Memento of the original from October 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. You can find a photo of the sports field under Culture, Sports & Loisirs in the Le Sport / Les équipements sportifs submenu . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.villefranche-sur-mer.fr
  8. ^ Rethacker / Thibert, p. 205
  9. Chaumier, p. 49
  10. L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: La belle histoire. L'équipe de France de football. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2004 ISBN 2-951-96053-0 , p. 313/314
  11. after Stéphane Boisson / Raoul Vian: Il était une fois le Championnat de France de Football. Tous les joueurs de la première division de 1948/49 à 2003/04. Neofoot, Saint-Thibault o. J.

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