Now that a French court has dismissed Cardiff City’s claim, Michael L Nash reflects on lessons to learn from the case of Emiliano Sala
When I first wrote about the death of Emiliano Sala in 2019 there remained a number of questions which had not been resolved (‘A footballer’s death: contracts & consequences’, 169 NLJ 7847, pp13-15). Seven years later, most of these are still hanging fire.
What has prompted this revisit is the concluding of a court case in the French city of Nantes, where Emiliano Sala had been a star player. Such were his growing talents that Cardiff United felt he could be the saviour of their League and Championship troubles, and offered FC Nantes an astronomical sum for him. When fate decreed otherwise, and the plane he was on crashed near Alderney in the Channel Islands, both Nantes and Cardiff lost.
The case the court in Nantes had to consider was whether Cardiff’s loss (estimated at £15m) could be justified, and whether Sala’s agent in Nantes was to blame for his death by booking
