José CAEIRO

José Caeiro was a Spanish-born striker, and he started his football career with Ferrol in the middle of the 1940s. In the early part of his playing days, he would play for a number of Spanish clubs, notably for Real Sociedad, with whom he would win the Second Division championship in 1949, for Valencia, and also Alicante. In 1953, he was signed by Stade Rennais, where he would soon earn his spurs, racking up the goals. Both extremely supple, and dangerous in the air (most of his goals came that way), so much so that he would end up scoring no fewer than 62 goals in 73 games in the Second Division in his first two seasons in Red and Black, finishing the club's top-scorer twice. A formidable and clinical striker, his main deficit was his play when he had the ball at his feet, but he formed a tremendous strike duo with Grumellon in the 1955/1956 season, which saw Rennes win the Second Division title, and achieve promotion back to the top flight. The following season, however, he was less successful in front of goal, and his experience in the French First Division would turn out to be the point in his career when everything started to go downhill. He would make precious few appearances in the 1956/1957 season. Unsurprisingly, he would end up leaving Rennes at the end of that season, but still had an excellent record of 83 goals in 124 matches, which made him the 4th-best marksman in the history of Stade Rennais Football Club. He would end his playing career in France with AS Brest, before returning home to his first club, Ferrol, where he had a brief spell in football management. Between 1969 and 1981, he went on to manage several Spanish clubs, and he would sadly lose his life doing his job as a manager, at the tender age of 55 years old; suffering a heart-attack on his way to a game with his last club, Arosa SC.