Giorgos Kalafatis

Sports career

Kalafatis distinguished himself in track and field sports but his great passion was football. He played for Ethnikos G.S. Athens and later for Panellinios. He appointed Englishman John Cyril Campbell as coach, the first foreign coach of a Greek team. Other founding members included his brother Alexandros (first president), Emmanouel Chrysis, Dimitris Doukakis, Periklis Mpoumpoulis, Vasileios Granitsas, Mantzakos, Papageorgiou, Gaetas, Demertzis, Stavropoulos, Paschos, Misakian, Reppas, Sapounias, and Garoufalias.

In 1919 he was a member of the Greece national team for the Inter-Allied Games in Paris, where he gathered information about basketball and volleyball, then unknown in Greece, and began creating new teams with Panathinaikos. He was a player/manager for Greece at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp. His older brother Alexandros had been selected for the unofficial Greece national team at the 1906 Summer Olympics in Athens. Kalafatis played football until the early 1920s and remained with Panathinaikos as an official after retiring.