Remembering Emiliano Sala: A Five-Year Legal Battle and the Quest for Justice

Five years have passed since the tragic death of Argentine striker Emiliano Sala (Photo: Reuters/Stephane Mahe)

The death of Emiliano Sala after a tragic – and avoidable – accident is a topic that will continue to resonate throughout the years. The issue naturally impacted Argentina, his country, but it is also a constant point of analysis throughout the world. Especially in British lands and France, headquarters of the clubs involved in that transfer that ended fatefully on January 21, 2019.

After five years of that event, in England they published a shocking report titled: “Grindy and classless, the five-year legal battle over the victim of the plane crash Emiliano Sala takes us to the sewers of football… where the players They are pawns and chronically inept clubs are desperately trying to save money”, which is signed by journalist Ian Herbert in the Daily Mail.

The journalist covered the trials, which ended with the flight organizer David Henderson being sentenced to 18 months in prison for not taking sufficient security measures. There he could see how Mercedes Taffarel’s statement moved when it was read by the investigating judge: she reminded the world of the “child she loved and lost.”

“The little details broke your heart. How he had traveled around the Channel Islands after the plane carrying him crashed, strolling along the beaches, calling out her name, hoping he could somehow hear her. How her boy, who was simply “Emi” to her, had been preparing to learn English and “travel to the most important places in the United Kingdom,” she relives. “Cardiff had put a lot of pressure on him to sign, she said. There had been haggling over money with Nantes, who were selling him. Emi felt in the middle of all that. She had doubts. Those weeks were intense’”, were the words she reviewed from the mother of the Argentine goalscorer.

It should be remembered that investigators concluded that Sala, and possibly pilot David Ibbotson, whose body was never found, suffered “severe carbon monoxide poisoning” that left them “unconscious” before the aircraft crashed into the Channel. of La Mancha. Faced with all this, Herbert assures that this case “took him to the sewers of football.” “Reminding us of the pawns players become when chronically inept clubs desperately search for solutions in the January transfer window,” he said.

The case left “endless consequences”, but he pointed out a “tacky epilogue to the tragedy, a dirty and classless dispute”: the debate over whether Cardiff had signed Emiliano Sala and that forced him to pay more than 19 million dollars scheduled.

Beyond the fact that the columnist – author of the book ‘Tinseltown’, the story of Wrexham FC and Hollywood – is convinced that Cardiff must pay that figure, he puts his gaze on the legal documents of an issue that has already passed through the Commission. of the FIFA Player Statute; the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the Swiss Federal Court.

“Examine the images of Sala signing for Cardiff, published on the club’s website. He has a silver pen in his hand. But the club still does not accept it,” he says, while expressing his displeasure because Cardiff will now seek to obtain a favorable ruling at the Nantes Commercial Court, where they will argue that the French are responsible for what happened with Emiliano Sala because they proposed the British agent Willie McKay as intermediary of the transfer, who also participated in the organization of the tragic flight.

Emiliano Sala at the signing of the contract with Cardiff

Ian Herbert erodes this argument with his pen: “Cardiff were more than willing to allow McKay to fly his coach, Neil Warnock, to Nantes on two occasions to watch Sala play. Cardiff were delighted that McKay brought Sala and his agent to Cardiff, first to see the club and then to sign. They even allowed McKay to arrange transportation from a local airport, near Barry, to Ninian Park. Only when the plane crashed did McKay’s attachment to Nantes become a factor in his resistance to paying the fee.”

But there is a detail in the justifications that Cardiff prepares that forces it to turn its attention again to the pain of the family of the man born in Santa Fe. A “last attempt” by the lawyers to recover the money and force Nantes to pay more than $70 million “for lost revenue due to relegation from the Premier League that year.” The focus of the Wales-based entity? “It consists of turning to statisticians to determine whether, on the balance of probabilities, Sala would have scored enough goals to keep them in the top flight.”

These Cardiff “specialists” assure – logically – that “he could well have done it” because he scored a goal every three games in Ligue 1 with Nantes and a goal every two games when he played in the second division (Niort) and third division (Union Sportive Orleans) French.

This extensive legal battle will have a new chapter, with all these condiments, next month and for Herbert it is impossible not to focus on the feelings of Emiliano Sala’s family when listening to the devices that the clubs are looking for to free themselves from the economic responsibility of the event. “It’s hard to imagine how the family will feel when the professional merits of the boy they lost become a matter of intellectual debate in a court of law. That family could not remotely imagine the collection of court cases, lawsuits and countersuits that would be unleashed after receiving a call at 6 in the morning on a fateful Monday, five years ago, informing them that the plane had disappeared from radar.

In 2021, David Henderson was sentenced to 18 months in prison (Photo: Geoff Caddick / AFP)

In that trial in Bournemouth, after Henderson was sentenced, it was the only time that the journalist felt that the family “had a few crumbs of comfort.” At that time, the investigating judge, Rachael Griffin, was in charge of slowing down each witness statement so that “a Spanish translator, who was in court with Darío, Sala’s brother, could relate the evidence to him.” At the same time, she says that she “helped Darío choose an image of his brother to present to the investigation jury, after the suitcase containing one of the images chosen by the family did not appear when they arrived from Argentina”.

During an interruption inside the court, Herbert ran into Emiliano’s brother in the hallway and recalled the brief dialogue they had: “I ran into Darío by chance in a hallway. There was no conversation per se. He didn’t seem to speak English. There were lawyers around. More than anything to fill a momentary silence, I asked him if he thought the investigation could be the end, the end of the headlines, the end of the line. The expression on his face seemed to say “yes.” Little did he know. Five years have passed and the cheap haggling for money still continues.”

A tribute to Emiliano in Nantes during 2020 (Photo: Reuters/Stephane Mahe)
2024-01-24 12:56:00
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