Rodolphe William Seeldrayers (16 December 1876 – 7 October 1955) was a Belgian football administrator who was the fourth President of FIFA, serving from 1954 to 1955. He was actively involved in the official associations of Belgium sports.
Early life
Born in 1876 in Düsseldorf, Germany, Seeldrayers studied law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), where he began his sporting activities. At 19 he was one of the founders of the Union royale belge des Sociétés de football association (URBSFA), or Royal Belgian Union of the Football Association Societies, for which he was the treasurer for four years and a member of the Executive Counsel for 25 years. He was later elected as a member of honour. In 1914, the Union used his talents as an orator and named him a delegate to FIFA, of which he was made vice-president in 1927.
In 1899 Seeldrayers began a career as a sports journalist with the magazine "La vie sportive" (Sporting Life), writing a column under the pen name Spectator. Ten years later, he founded the National Committee for Physical Education which merged with the Belgian Olympic Committee. He became head of the committee beginning in 1946, succeeding Prince Albert de Ligne.
The Olympics and FIFA
In 1920, he was technical secretary of the Olympic Games at Antwerp, and a member of the appeals jury for football at the Olympics several times. He was most notable in this role at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, when during the Peru vs. Austria game spectators invaded the pitch which provoked an appeals jury consultation. The Austrian Football Association sent a complaint to the appeals committee which decided, after deliberation, to re-play the match "behind closed doors". Peru disagreed and their entire Olympic squad left the Games complaining of the "crafty Berlin decision". He also received the official Czechoslovak complaint following the abandoned 1920 Olympic Final, which had been refereed by John Lewis.
An inveterate founder of clubs and associations, the following organizations are to Seeldrayers' credit: the Waterloo Golf-Club (1923), the Ixelles Football Club (which would be part of the merger with the Racing Club of Brussels), and the Anglo-Belgian Cricket Sporting Club. Selldrayers seemed to be well received in English circles: up-to-date and to the point in matters of sport, he spoke the English language. At the same time, he continued his journalistic activities and began a new collaboration with the publication Sports Echo (L'Écho des Sports). He ended this aspect of his career in 1935 while still continuing to publish articles and making his opinions known in the columns of the Bulletins of the International Olympic Committee.
World War II slowed but did not stop his activities. As a member of the Belgian Olympic Committee during the Occupation, he stood up for the independence of Belgian sport. At the end of the war, he was one of the members of the International Olympic Committee for the first post-war Games, in 1946.
A great mutual respect existed between Seeldrayers and the then president of FIFA, universally respected Frenchman Jules Rimet. This translated on the part of the Belgian, into a motion introduced on 25 July 1946, at a FIFA congress, to change the name of the World Cup to the "Jules Rimet Cup".
For many years, the question of amateurism posed a problem. With the economic development of sports, the phenomenon of professionalism began to bring into question the fundamentals of the conception of the Olympic Games, as P. de Coubertin wanted them to be. Debates raged and a Commission on Amateurism was created, supported by the International Olympic Committee, which Seeldrayers took part in. In the end, the commission submitted its final report in 1947, at the session in Stockholm. It included a definition of amateurism and required future participants in the Olympic Games to sign a declaration affirming they were true amateurs, and proposed the creation of a permanent commission. This was composed of three members of the International Olympic Committee, and a delegate of each international federation.
At the beginning of 1955, Jules Rimet resigned from FIFA and passed his authority to his vice-president, R. W. Seeldrayers. This handing down of power, as well as the matches of the World Cup of 1954, were shown on television for the first time. Under his presidency, the Federation counted 85 members and celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.