Giorgos Kalafatis


Giorgos Kalafatis was a Greek football pioneer, player, coach, track and field athlete and the founder of Panathinaikos football club.

Sports career

Being a big athletic talent, he distinguished himself in track and field sports. But football was his big passion. He played for Ethnikos G.S. Athens and when his later club Panellinios decided to discontinue its football team, Kalafatis together with 40 other athletes broke away and established in February 1908 the first team of Panathinaikos, named Podosfairikos Omilos Athinon at the time. Kalafatis appointed the Englishman John Cyril Campbell as coach for the new team. It was the first time that a foreigner was appointed as the coach of a Greek team.
Apart from Giorgos Kalafatis, other establishing members of POA were: his brother Alexandros, who was the first president, Emmanouel Chrysis, Dimitris Doukakis, Periklis Mpoumpoulis, Granitsas, Mantzakos, Papageorgiou, Gaetas, Demertzis, Stavropoulos, Paschos, Misakian, Reppas, Sapounias and Garoufalias.
In 1919, he was a member of the Greek national team that participated in the Inter-Allied Games in Paris. In Paris, Kalafatis collected information also about basketball and volleyball and after his return to Athens, started his efforts on creating new teams with Panathinaikos. He was also a player/manager for Greece in the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp.
Kalafatis played football until the early 1920s. After he retired, he remained in Panathinaikos as an official.

Personal life

He was born in Exarcheia, Athens, which was a few hundred meters away from Apostolos Nikolaidis Stadium. The family of Kalafatis was from Dilinata, a village in the island of Cephalonia. While being an athlete, he graduated also from the Health Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He pursued a career in the Hellenic Navy, taking part in the Balkan Wars and in World War I and reaching up to the rank of rear admiral.
He died on 19 February 1964.