Journées du Poilu Sportif

The Journées du Poilu Sportif (Hairy Sportsman Days) was a sports events held across France organized by the French sports weekly magazine Sporting. The goal of this initiative was to collect money and to send balls and boxing gloves to French soldiers. The biggest sports event was a football tournament in the Paris area with seven different teams representing four countries; Belgium won the tournament.

Background
After having ceased in the fall of 1914 due to the outbreak of the First World War, sporting competitions and spectacles gradually resumed from 1915 and especially in 1916, first justified by the need to train the next generation of sports and military personnel and to celebrate the fraternity uniting the allies, and later justified for charitable causes, even becoming the laboratory for certain successful competitions between the wars.

In France, from the first months of the conflict, the four federations administering football in France set up "war" competitions, which given the mobilization of Frenchmen to the war, were competitions contested by players aged under twenty. The Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA), the main and oldest French multi-sport sports federation, organized a National Cup and an Allied Cup; the Association Football League created the La Renommée challenge; the French Gymnastics and Sports Federation (FGSPF) also had its National Cup; and the small Amateur Cycling Federation of France (FCAF) held its Challenge des Espoirs. The latter, in which 127 school or club teams representing the entire non-invaded national territory participated, the weekly newspaper Sporting promoted it in March 1916, stating that it was "both sporting and patriotic. The young people who will compete for the Cup are our footballers and our soldiers of tomorrow. They must be the object of all our concern".

During the war, the French daily newspaper devoted to sport L'Auto was concerned with the sporting future of the French soldiers, so from November 1914 onwards, it began publicizing the requests for balls and boxing gloves sent to the front by sportsmen in its section "Please balls for the soldiers". As of 9 January 1915, L'Auto had been able to "send to soldier players" a total of 112 balloons for approximately 500 requests. Later that year, L'Auto created another charitable work called marraines de guerre ("war godmothers"), which was aimed to meet other sporting needs, such as boxing gloves, jerseys, and shorts, but also checkers, film cameras, readings, and even godmothers. In any case, L'Auto had launched a type of work that went beyond the limits of the sports press, and following its example, Sporting decided on 26 January 1916 to promote its Journée du Poilu Sportif at the end of April 1916 to collect money and to send balls and boxing gloves to French soldiers.

Many people criticized these endeavors because they failed to see the utility of sending footballs to soldiers at a time when the French army was threatened by mutinies, but to justify these campaigns, the journalist Georges Rozet explained it best in an article dating to May 1917: "Leather wears out quickly on these improvised grounds behind the line of fire.[…] No leather crisis can be objected to. You, the elegant auxiliary, strapped and booted; you, the unknown godmother whose stems never rise high enough, you owe a propitiatory gift to the fighter who, to keep himself in shape, only asks for a ball. If there is a “national leather”, it is this one.

Participants
The tournament was contested by 7 teams, Union (USFSA), Ligue (LFA), FCAF, FGSPF, Entente Britannique, Entente Belge, and Entente Suisse.

Overview
With the help of sports federations, football matches and athletics competitions were organized on Saturday 23 April and Sunday 24 April.

Semi-final
Note:At first, the French team decided to let the British team play the final, but the British made the opposite proposal; after talks and approval from the British military HQ in Paris, Union entered the final.

Legacy
In total, they achieved 7,406 francs and 45 centimes, plus 14 footballs, 21 rugby balls and 98 pairs of boxing gloves, with the editors of Sporting declaring themselves "fully satisfied with [their] work, and with its excellent results from all points of view".