Passed by Lens then FC Nantes, 11 times selected with the Blues during the 1960s, Robert Budzynski died on Monday July 17 at the age of 83. A former defender, he became sports director of the Canaries, a club to which he remained faithful for 35 years. He was swept away by an illness that had considerably damaged his health lately.
Born in Pas-de-Calais and trained in Lens, “Bud” lived the rest of his life in the service of FC Nantes. Central defender, he led the two campaigns of the first titles of champion of France of the “Canaries”, in 1965 and 1966, with the team coached by José Arribas, the initiator of the “Nantes game”.
His playing career was abruptly cut short by a tibia-fibula fracture at age 28, from which he never fully recovered. He was then the club’s sporting director for a long time, a position that was very new in French clubs in the early 1970s, which he helped to define.
Budzynski was one of the builders of the teams of “Coco” Suaudeau, champions in 1980 and 1983, then especially of the legendary FC Nantes in 1995 with Patrice Loko, Christian Karembeu, Nicolas Ouédec and Raynald Pedros, champion by losing only one match . As a sports director, he notably unearthed Vahid Halilhodzic in the former Yugoslavia, Jorge Burruchaga at Independiente or the Chadian Japhet Ndoram in Cameroon, at Tonnerre de Yaoundé.
At the training center, he participated in the hatching of Marcel Desailly or Didier Deschamps, current coach of the Blues, and the champion generation in 1995. Bud played eleven times for the France team, including the three matches of the World Cup 1966, where he notably led with Robert Herbin and Jacky Simon the rebellion of the players against the coach Henri Guérin and his assistants asking to play in zone, as in Nantes, and not with individual marking, without preventing the defeat against England ( 2-0) and elimination in the first round.
