Thomas Balvay Thomas Balvay Thomas Balvay (2 February 1888 – 15 July 1945) was a football referee in the 1920s and 1930s and one of four European referees who participated in the first FIFA World Cup in 1930 in Uruguay. He was the only match official from France at the tournament. He had been an international referee since 1922 and twice refereed the Coupe de France (in 1926 and 1928). He travelled to Uruguay on the SS "Conte Verde", which also took Jules Rimet and the French, Belgian, Romanian and Brazilian teams to the first World Cup; picking up the teams en
Theft of the Jules Rimet Trophy in the upper-class Rio neighborhood of Humaitá shortly after the theft, fled to France and was arrested in 1998 at a bus station in São Paulo for drug trafficking (coincidentally, he had also served jail time in France for the same offence). He was freed from jail in 2005, having never served the penalty for receiving stolen goods that he would incur for the trophy. The mastermind, Sérgio Peralta, was freed from jail in 1998. He died of a heart attack in 2003. The trophy has never been recovered. Instead, a replica of the Jules Rimet Trophy was presented to