[1][6][a] In order to accomplish his ambition of making Olympique Lillois the "citadel of regional football", Jooris began recruiting talented players from outside the USFSA, such as Alphonse Six, Belgian champion with Brugeois, and the Frenchman Jean Ducret, from Étoile des Deux Lacs (a Parisian club affiliated with the FGSPF), as well as professional English coaches, such as Charlie Williams in 1911, a former coach of Denmark, and Maurice Bunyan.

Furthermore, he organized matches across Europe to increase the confrontations against foreign teams (Slavia Prague, Tunbridge Wells, Ghent, among others), and partly financed and carried out the modernization of the old Victor Boucquey stadium on the banks of the Deûle, which now has a capacity of 5,000 seats.

[8] The final was delayed 15 minutes because OL's leaders threaten to forfeit if Albert Clark, who two weeks prior had played for Plumstead, takes part in the match, but in the end, Jooris, while having reservations, accepted the fight.

[1] On 4 January 1914, the Lions claimed a famous 3–0 win over Paris, with two of the goals being scored by OL players, Albert Eloy and Alphonse Six,[10] and four months later, in May 1914, a team made up of Northerners asserted their superiority over the Normans (5–0) in the so-called Coupe Henri Jooris.

[11] Jooris was the secretary of the Lions des Flandres between 1912 and 1914, and as such, he was the one in charge of setting up schedules and organizing trips, including one to Bilbao in May 1914, and he also had a big say on the composition of the team, together with the coach Fernand Desrousseaux, which resulted in the selection of several players from OL.

[14] His influence in the national team did not stop there, since OL's home stadium, whose improvement was partly financed by Jooris, hosted France's international match against Belgium on 25 January 1914.

[1] From 1920 onwards, the ordinary activity of the LNFA was to hold commission meetings every week to set the harmonization of calendars and regulations, the redefinition of the architecture of competitions, and the management of disputes.

[3] Legend has it that on the evenings of OL's football victories, the Bellevue café on the Grand-Place, in which Jooris had some business, would hoist a flag in the club's colours, red and white.

Despite becoming a heavyweight in the Nord, OL struggled to confirm this reputation in the Coupe de France, because in its first five participations in the national cup, the club only reached the quarter-finals twice.

[1] Later that year, Jooris asked the socialist municipality for a contribution to finance the renovation of the stands of an already dilapidated stadium, but he was met with a flat refusal from the mayor of Lille, who stated that OL "generated no revenue".

[15] When professionalism in French football was finally established in early 1932, Jooris welcomed this outcome, but deplored the fact that an intermediate solution could not be found, stating that he "would have liked us to proceed in stages".

[1][15] However, OL quickly ran into financial difficulties, and the fears of Jooris were later confirmed when during the 1933–34 season, the club's deficit fluctuated around the 150,000 francs, not only because of the cost of the new stands, but also due to the number of transfers that Ligue 1 made necessary.

[1][6] Jooris was sometimes criticized for this excess;[6] for instance, in February 1935, after he declined to become an honorary member of the Iris Club de Croix, the French press described him as "the man who does not know exactly how many sports or other societies he is the President of".

[18] For some, football appears to be the perfect authoritarian sport because as early as 1901, the newspaper Tous les sports proclaimed: "The republic works very nice in politics, but on the football field, there is only one form of government that is capable of leading a team to victory: it is Caesarism, in other words, absolute power in the hands of the leader", and Jooris quickly realized that this was also the best form of government outside the pitches, hence why he was politically involved in the extreme right, joining and supporting the Jeunesses Patriotes, which in the 1930s, were inspired by the authoritarian methods and practices of fascist regimes.