His good-natured silhouette had not appeared at La Meinau for quite a while, he who, long after his departure from the presidency in the spring of 1997, had often taken pleasure in coming to see the club play which he had guided for three years in the middle of the 1990s. In the entourage of “his” Racing, everyone knew that his health was failing. Roland Weller died on Monday morning at the age of 84 in the nursing home where he had taken refuge for some time.
The former president of Sporting Schiltigheim, of which he had taken charge in the 1980s and made a club that counts in the Alsatian amateur world, will have marked his time at the RCS – not yet become RCSA – by his management which is both firm and good kid. He did not hesitate to thank two coaches, the iconic Gilbert Gress whose contract he refused to extend when he arrived in 1994, then Daniel Jeandupeux in March 1995, a few weeks before the club disputed and lost the final of the Coupe de France at the Parc des Princes against PSG (0-1).
The title in the 1997 League Cup and the great European moments
But his rigorous management, as a good father, tinged with an almost “peasant” common sense that he fully assumed, had quickly earned him the esteem of employees and a sports group to which he was close. During his three years of presidency, the Meinau club lived two European campaigns that have gone down in history, with memorable confrontations against AC Milan, Glasgow Rangers, Liverpool or Inter Milan, even if he did not was more in charge when the Blues faced the Scots, the Reds and the Interists.
But this second continental epic of the Bas-Rhin club was born from its coronation in the Coupe de la Ligue in the spring of 1997 against Bordeaux (0-0, 6-5 on penalties), just before the boss of the Alsacienne restaurant did not cede his presidential chair to the former tennis player Patrick Proisy and the American multinational IMG/McCormack to whom the socialist municipality of the time, led by the mayor Catherine Trautmann, had decided to sell the club.
This golden period made him one of the favorite leaders of the supporters who devoted him an eternal recognition or almost and did not fail to remind him of it each time they saw him at Meinau. Roland Weller will also go down in the history of Alsatian football as the man who was able to lead the Greens of Sporting Schiltigheim to the quarter-finals of the Coupe de France against Rennes on March 15, 2003, in a packed Meinau (1-2) .
