Paul Rouse: Cruel lack of humanity in the squabble over Sala

Emiliano Sala was an Argentine striker who was signed by Cardiff City from FC Nantes in the January 2019 transfer window before he perished in a plane crash in the English Channel.

TRIBUTE: A mural by Argentinian artist Gabriel Griffa paying homage to late Argentinian football player Emiliano Sala in Carquefou, western France.
Picture: LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Images)

Something cruel runs through the press release that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) put out last Friday.

The cruelty began with the headline: ‘CAS dismisses the appeal filed by Cardiff City FC and confirms that the transfer of Emiliano Sala had been fully completed prior to his death.’ 

Emiliano Sala was an Argentine striker who was signed by Cardiff City from FC Nantes in the January 2019 transfer window. On the night of 21 January 2019, Sala – along with pilot David Ibbotson – was on board a Piper Malibu N264DB which lost radar contact near Guernsey.

It took nearly three weeks to find his body; it was recovered after extensive underwater searches found the wreckage of the plane deep in the water of the English Channel. That it was Sala was confirmed after the body was brought to Portland Port and formally identified by the Coroner for Dorset. The body of the pilot was never found.

The scale of the grief was immense.

Players who played with Sala loved him. He was not particularly technically gifted but be was hugely brave and endlessly committed. The scale of their words after his death was a testament to how they felt about him.

But all of this paled beside the trauma of his family. His father, Horacio, a lorry driver in Argentina, died of a heart attack just three months after the plane crash which killed his son. He simply could not cope.

His mother, Mercedes, had wandered up and down beaches on the Channel Islands, shouting out her son’s name, hoping that he might somehow hear his name, in those weeks before his body had been recovered from the sea. She has subsequently described herself as being “dead while living”.

The nature of Emiliano Sala’s death ensured that formal investigations were inevitable. It emerged that the pilot of the plane, David Ibbotson, did not have a commercial licence for carrying passengers, did not have the correct certification to fly at night, and his rating to fly the single-engine Piper Malibu had expired.

Last November, David Henderson – who managed the plane – was jailed for 18 months. Henderson had actually been meant to be flying the plane that night but was holidaying in Paris with his wife, so asked Ibbotson to fly Sala to Cardiff.

Henderson was convicted of endangering the safety of an aircraft for allowing it be flown by a pilot who did not have the relevant licences. The judge in the case, Mr Justice Foxton, said that Henderson had shown 'a cavalier attitude', had not kept even the most basic records, had intentionally breached Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulations “for reason of profit”, and was "reckless, not merely negligent".

Then, earlier this year, an inquest jury ruled that Sala had died from head and chest injuries, but had been deeply unconscious, having been poisoned by fumes from the plane's faulty exhaust system.

But, of course, in all of this, the fact that Emiliano Sala was a professional sportsman who was entering the prime of his career conferred on him a value that was measured in money.

In this instance, two clubs – Cardiff City and FC Nantes – valued him at £15 million. This was a figure which was arrived at following negotiations that had started in December 2018.

The deal happened because FC Nantes needed the money, Cardiff City badly needed a striker, and Sala could realise his dream of playing in the Premier League. There were also agents involved, who were to receive fees.

As is often the case with the sale of professional players, the deal was structured whereby payments are staggered across several years. This is often the case for the core fees, as well of course as for performance-related add-ons.

And in all of this cruel business, it is striking that even before Sala’s body had been recovered from the sea, FC Nantes wrote to Cardiff City asking them to pay over the first instalment of the transfer fee which amounted to €6 million. Two more instalments were to be paid over the following three years.

Cardiff City declined to pay.

The dispute over the payment of the transfer fee was brought before the FIFA Players’ Status Committee and on September 19, 2019 it ruled that Cardiff should pay FC Nantes the money owed in the first installment. FIFA also proposed a three-window transfer ban on Cardiff City if they failed to pay.

Cardiff immediately decided to appeal, which they lodged on November 20, 2019. it was then that the case was brought before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). What followed during 2020 and 2021 was the submission of lengthy written submissions and then the agreement that a hearing would be heard in person.

Eventually, the hearing took place on March 3 and 4 2022; it was the first hearing to be held at the new CAS headquarters at the Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Cardiff City essentially argued that the transfer had not been completed, while FC Nantes argued that it had.

The three-man CAS panel found in favour of FC Nantes that the transfer had indeed been completed and that Cardiff must pay.

The CAS ruled also that FIFA were right not to entertain the claim of Cardiff City that it was not required to pay any transfer fee to FC Nantes, because FC Nantes could be liable for the Player’s death.

In response to the CAS ruling, FC Nantes welcomed the decision “that the player's transfer to Cardiff City was over when he died tragically in an aviation accident.” 

They also expressed happiness that Cardiff City had been sentenced to pay “a historically high sum, in respect of procedural costs and arbitration costs.” And they expressed delight that the process “is finally over.” But it appears to be anything but over.

Cardiff City said they would not pay the money they were said to owe and that they would be appealing the decision. They also said: “If those appeals are unsuccessful and the club is liable to pay the transfer fee, the club will take legal action against those responsible for the crash for damages to recover its losses. This will include FC Nantes, and its agents.” 

It is an abject failure of basic decency that Cardiff City and FC Nantes could not find it in themselves to resolve this dispute beyond closed doors and in a way that did not have them arguing over the monetary value of a dead man whose loss has destroyed his family. You can seek refuge in contractual law all you want, but there is an absence of basic humanity at issue here that is cruel.

*Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.