In Jan 2019, footballer Emiliano Sala died in a plane crash. Five years on, the legal battles continue (2024)

“The plane crash changed our lives, it’s the worst thing that could have happened to us. Our whole family is terribly affected, we miss him each day like the first day.”

This was the heartbreaking statement from Mercedes Taffarel, Emiliano Sala’s mother, that was read out at the 2022 inquest into her son’s death.

The Argentinian striker died aged 28 on January 21, 2019 when the single-engine Piper PA-46 Malibu aircraft he was travelling in from France crashed into the English Channel. Sala was on his way to Wales to join up with this new Cardiff City team-mates, two days after the club had made him their record £15million (now $19.1m) signing from French side Nantes. Pilot David Ibbotson, 59, also died that evening.

A journey that should have been filled with optimism and hope, for a footballer embarking on his dream move to a Premier League club, brought only unimaginable grief.

Sala’s younger brother, Dario, told The Athletic in August 2019: “Sometimes…it just feels like a nightmare that is going to end, you know? When I wake up in the morning or the middle of the night, for a split second I feel like everything is normal. Then I remember.

“It is impossibly hard for mum. How can there be any plan for this? How can there be anything worse than losing your son?”

The striker’s father, Horacio, died from a heart attack just three months after his son’s death.

Yet, although the game mourned the passing of one of its own, five and a half years later, the legal battles still rumble on, shining a light into the darker side of football and the sometimes murky world of transfers, middle men and disputes over money.

Cardiff City have lodged a negligence claim in the French courts against Nantes, claiming losses of €120.2million (£102m; $130m) after they were relegated from the Premier League in May 2019.

They are asking for €52.9million for the loss of earnings and result of their relegation, plus €67.3million for the loss in value to the club as a result of demotion to the Championship. That sum was calculated using information from Analytics FC, a data-driven sports consultancy, and two financial experts — one English, one French.

Cardiff, who went down by two points in the 2018-19 season, believe Sala’s goals would have kept them in the top flight. Nantes have until September 23 to respond.

Cardiff chairman Mehmet Dalman told The Athletic: “At the end of the day, two men have died due to somebody’s fault. It’s not our fault, we acted in good faith, we purchased a player who we believed could help us stay in the Premier League and we didn’t get his services because of someone else’s negligence. So that’s the position we’re taking.”

The Welsh club have also filed a contempt of court claim — when someone risks unfairly influencing a court case — against former football agent Willie McKay, who commissioned the flight, together with McKay’s wife Janis, and son Mark, also an agent. Willie McKay has called the claim a “disgrace”.

But how did it come to this?

After signing his contract at Cardiff and posing for pictures with the team shirt, Sala returned to Nantes to say goodbye to his old team-mates. The weather was poor on January 21 but Sala needed to get back to Wales for his first training session at Cardiff the next morning.

Intermediary Willie McKay arranged for a private plane via flight organiser David Henderson, the go-to pilot McKay had used for 14 years. The inquest heard McKay’s son, footballer Jack McKay who played for Cardiff at the time, had asked his father to arrange the flight. McKay Snr said he wanted to help Sala as he felt Cardiff had “abandoned” him, leaving him to make his own travel plans. Cardiff reject that claim and insist they offered him a commercial flight via a stop-off but he opted for the quicker option.

Henderson was not available so McKay hired Ibbotson, an amateur pilot who did not have a licence to carry paying passengers and was not legally allowed to fly in the dark. Henderson was jailed for 18 months in November 2021 after being found guilty of recklessly endangering the safety of an aircraft.

McKay said he made no inquiries about the pilot or the condition of the plane. McKay, who represented players such as Joey Barton, Charles N’Zogbia and Pascal Chimbonda, was not Sala’s agent but his son Mark’s firm were representing Nantes in the transfer.

In a haunting final WhatsApp audio message, Sala told friends, “I’m on a plane that looks as though it’s going to fall apart.” Ibbotson also told a friend the 35-year-old aircraft was “dodgy” and said “I’ll be wearing my life jacket” according to footage obtained by the BBC in 2022. He also said he’d heard a “bang” on the first journey to Nantes.

About an hour after take-off at 7.15pm from Nantes, the plane lost radar contact over the English Channel. It had been flying at 5,000ft but Ibbotson lost control while descending to avoid clouds and crashed into the water, 22 miles north of Guernsey.

Sala’s body was recovered from the wreckage when it was discovered 68m (223ft) below the waterline, two weeks after the crash. The plane, registration N264DB, was left on the seabed. Ibbotson’s body has never been found.

The inquest concluded Sala died from head and chest injuries but would have been “deeply unconscious” from carbon monoxide poisoning by the time the aircraft hit the sea. The jury said it was likely Ibbotson had also been affected by carbon monoxide fumes.

At the end of the four-week hearing in March 2022, Dorset coroner Rachel Griffin called for a clampdown on illegal private charter flights.

Solicitor Daniel Machover, speaking on behalf of Sala’s mother and two siblings, said the inquest “exposed the complex facts leading to Emiliano’s untimely death. It has shone a bright light on many of the missed opportunities in the worlds of football and aviation to prevent his tragic death.”

It did not take long after Sala’s death for the legal battles to begin.

Cardiff initially refused to pay the first instalment of his £15million transfer fee to Nantes, claiming he was not officially their player when he died.

Nantes reported Cardiff to football’s world governing body FIFA, which ruled in favour of the Ligue 1 club. Cardiff refused to pay and appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), prompting a three-window transfer ban by FIFA and the English Football League.

Cardiff lost their CAS appeal in August 2022 but Dalman, the club’s chairman, said: “We haven’t paid and at the moment have no intention of paying.”

The club’s owner, Vincent Tan, promised to keep fighting, saying: “I am still angry about it. We don’t have the choice, we won’t stop. It is only the start, not the end.”

Cardiff eventually paid the first instalment — around £7million — in January 2023, ending their transfer ban by FIFA. Their EFL transfer embargo was also cut to one window, although the club were still allowed to sign free agents and loanees in that time.

Cardiff finally took their case to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, who upheld the CAS ruling in May 2023.

A month later, Cardiff were ordered by FIFA to pay Nantes the second and third instalments of the £15million transfer fee. The club initially said they wanted to defer those payments but the final part of Sala’s transfer fee was paid in full the following month.

The Swiss Federal Tribunal then ruled CAS did not have jurisdiction to deal with Cardiff’s claim for damages and the Welsh club pushed on with a compensation claim on the basis Sala’s death was negligent. They maintain Nantes are responsible for Sala’s death as McKay acted on their behalf and organised the flight.

On April 22, they filed a complaint in the Nantes Commercial Court claiming losses of €120.2m.

Dalman told The Athletic: “We’d like to win this case. It’s been a while that this has been going on but I always felt this was where we were going to end up because when we applied to FIFA for a ruling, they took a very narrow interpretation which was a contractual one and very clearly said the commercial aspect was not really in their jurisdiction. So this is much more of a civil and commercial action.

“We argued the case that he (Sala) wasn’t our player when the plane crashed and they (FIFA) ruled against that position and we accepted it. CAS (the appeal) made the same conclusion. Now they’ve ruled he was our player, we’re out of pocket because of someone else’s negligence, that’s the logic behind it, which you would do in any case.

“I don’t think we’re doing anything that any (person with) common sense wouldn’t do. We just want to get some justice.”

Dalman added that Cardiff were in constant communication with Sala’s lawyers who were fully aware of what the club were doing.

“I’d like to think they are supportive,” he said. “As you know, we set up a trust for them, we put some money in and no one else did.” The Emiliano Memorial Trust fund was set up by Cardiff in January 2020 and finally launched a year later, with the aim of supporting Sala’s family and grassroots football projects in his memory.

A spokesperson for Analytics FC said: “We were retained to provide an impartial, objective assessment for the case.Using our expertise and experience in player profiling and scenario modelling, we provided independent analysis detailing a variety of potential outcomes in relation to Cardiff City’s Premier League status.”

Lawyers Jerome Marsaudon and Louis-Marie Absil, representing Nantes, told AFP: “We’ll take the time to study these new voluminous documents and these figures.” They referred to the “highly imaginative hypotheses” and “far-fetched” findings.

Nantes have since launched a counterclaim stating “moral damage”. The Ligue 1 club and their lawyers did not respond to multiple requests from The Athleticto further explain their position.

It doesn’t stop there.

In a separate case, Cardiff reached a settlement with insurance broker Miller Insurance Services LLP in September 2023. They had planned to sue for £10million, claiming the firm failed to properly communicate the process for immediately insuring new players. The financial terms of that settlement remain confidential.

Meanwhile Cardiff, via Capital Law, have also now applied to a court asking that the McKays be held in contempt of court. They argue they withheld information and have not disclosed all the documentation relating to their involvement in the Sala transfer.

Each of the McKays will be cross-examined during a one-day hearing at Cardiff Business Court in July.

Willie McKay told The Athletic that Cardiff’s claim was a “disgrace”, he and his family had nothing to hide and that the club were looking for something that wasn’t there.

He said: “Through my son, I was trying to do the boy a favour because he was stranded in Cardiff and I used a guy [David Henderson] that everybody used. It was a tragedy (but) this is five and a half years now. We have had nothing to hide from day one… so it’s contempt of court for what?”

He said he and his son had “been through hell and back over this” and expressed his bemusem*nt as to why his wife had been dragged into it.

As legal battles over Sala’s death continue across courtrooms in Europe, this tragic story shows few signs of nearing its conclusion.

(Top photo: LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images)