Henri Delaunay French Football Federation in 1919, he remained as secretary-general. As a member of FIFA, he sat on its board as deputy from 1924 until 1928. Along with Jules Rimet, he was an early architect of the FIFA World Cup. He was also a very early proponent of the European Champions Cup, as early as the 1920s. Together with Jules Rimet, he was largely responsible for the creation of the European Football Championship, the trophy of which is named after him, having first proposed it in 1927. The first tournament took place in 1960. He was General Secretary of UEFA from
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