IAN HERBERT: Grubby, classless, the five-year legal battle over plane crash victim Emiliano Sala takes us into football’s sewers… where players are pawns and chronically inept clubs desperately try to save cash

There weren’t many of us in the chilly, oak-paneled coroner’s court when Emiliano Sala’s mother finally got the chance to tell the world about the child she loved and lost.

Mercedes Taffarel’s statement was read out by the coroner that day at the inquest into his death, but the little details still broke your heart.

How she had traveled around the Channel Islands after the plane he was on crashed, wandering the beaches and calling his name, hoping he could somehow hear her.

How her son, who was just ‘Emi’ to her, had prepared himself to learn English and ‘travel to the most important places in the UK’, now that he had put his doubts out of his mind and joined Cardiff City from Nantes drawn.

Cardiff had put a lot of pressure on him to sign, she said. Money had been negotiated with Nantes, who sold it. ‘Emi was in the middle of it. He felt some doubt. These were intense weeks,” says his mother.

After emptying his flat and saying goodbye in France, the young Argentinian died – five years ago this week – in the fatal fall from a plane carrying him to South Wales. Carbon monoxide from the plane’s faulty exhaust system seeped into the cabin.

It was a case that took us into the sewers of football and reminded us of the pawns players become as chronically inept clubs desperately look for solutions in the January transfer window.

The young Argentinian died – five years ago this week – on a plane carrying him to South Wales

And in the interminable aftermath there was a tawdry epilogue to the tragedy, a grubby and classless squabble over whether Cardiff had technically signed Sala and were therefore liable to pay the £15 million transfer fee.

They categorically were – and don’t just take my word for it. Read the court papers. There are a lot of them, because the whole money-grabbing affair was carried out by the FIFA players.

Status Committee, the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the Swiss Federal Court, all of which agree on this point.

Watch the images of Sala signing for Cardiff, published on the club’s website. In his hand is a silver pen.

But the club still doesn’t have it. They will now take the case to the Nantes Commercial Court, where they will argue that Nantes is financially liable for the £15 million they were ordered by FIFA.

According to their lawyers, this is because former British agent Willie McKay, who worked as a fixer and middleman for the selling club, was involved in setting up the flight.

The Piper Malibu plane on the tarmac of Nantes airport, France, before the tragedy

Cardiff were only too happy to allow McKay to fly their manager Neil Warnock to Nantes twice to watch Sala play. They were happy to allow McKay to fly Sala and his agent to Cardiff, first to view the club and then to sign. They were even happy that McKay was able to arrange transport from a local airport, near Barry, to Ninian Park. It was only when the plane crashed that McKay’s attachment to Nantes became a factor in their opposition to paying the compensation.

Their lawyers’ latest bid to recover that sum, plus an additional £60 million from Nantes plus interest for lost income due to the club’s Premier League relegation that year, involves deploying statistics specialists to determine whether Sala, based on probability, would have scored. enough goals to keep them in the top flight.

Their conclusion – you guessed it – is that he might have. He scored a goal every three games for Nantes in Ligue 1, you see, and a goal every two games for Union Sportive Orleans, in the French third tier, and for Niort in the French second tier.

Cardiff lawyers are expected to put all this before three judges next month. One can hardly imagine how the family will feel about the professional achievements of the boy they lost, which has become a matter of intellectual sparring in a courtroom.

That family could not have imagined the arsenal of lawsuits, claims and counterclaims that would follow after they received a phone call at 6 a.m. on a fateful Monday morning, five years ago, informing them that the plane from radar had disappeared.

Only once in the entire, endless legal process have they been able to take a few crumbs of comfort, and that was in that examination room in Bournemouth.

Sala signed for Cardiff in 2019, with CEO Ken Choo holding a silver pen

The coroner, Rachael Griffin, couldn’t have done more to offer the family some kindness. She slowed the inquest witnesses to a pace that allowed a Spanish translator, in court with Sala’s brother Dario, to narrate the evidence to him.

She helped Dario select an image of his brother to present to the inquest jury after a suitcase containing an image the family had chosen failed to materialize when they landed from Argentina.

During a break in one of those long days of evidence, I chanced upon Dario in a hallway. There was no conversation as such. He didn’t seem to speak English. There were lawyers around. It was mainly to fill a brief silence that I asked if he thought the inquest could be the end of it, the end of the headlines, the end of the line. The look on his face seemed to say yes.

Little did he know. Five years later, the cheap haggling for cash continues.

Hayes is truly unique, she will be missed

I’ve heard many acceptance speeches at football dinners over the years, but nothing remotely like the speech Emma Hayes gave, without notes, at the Landmark Hotel in central London on Sunday evening.

“I remember when my father was a very prestigious, established ticket seller, we would drive to the Landmark Hotel to drop off tickets,” she said, beginning a speech full of self-destruction, humor, realism and basic wisdom that you understood. exactly why a player would want to be in her number.

‘I often sat outside and thought, ‘That’s a fancy hotel. I would like to stay there for a day.” Well, here I am!’

Hayes did not try to gloss over the unpleasant reality of management when she accepted the Football Writers’ Tribute Award, citing “cutting, benching or selling players” as downsides of the job. She also emphasized the need to do these things well.

“I always wanted to do it with some degree of humanity, because it’s important,” she said. “No one wants to work for a hole.”

On these occasions it is common for the very famous player or manager to leave the room before the evening’s formalities are over. But long after the speeches ended and the lights came up in the Landmark banquet room, Hayes was still sitting there, at the far end of the top table, patiently talking about whatever those of us who approached her wanted to say. A rare kind of class.

This summer she will leave these shores to take charge of the United States, at a time when our own women’s soccer is still looking for a bigger breakthrough.

It feels like we should have moved heaven and earth to keep her. It is the defeat of British football.

• Much has been said about the genius of Manchester United in hiring the Manchester City man who helped sign Erling Haaland, a feat achieved by throwing a pay package of mind-boggling proportions at the player. Hopefully the new CEO, Omar Berrada, will be able to look beyond the oceans of money and understand that United are missing some of the fundamental characteristics of a family-friendly club. When my eldest visited the Old Trafford Megastore with my grandson last weekend, there wasn’t even a stand to lock their bikes in the stadium. “You could leave them in the parking lot,” someone suggested. Then the full Megastore experience: £65 for a child’s zip-up top. And that was on sale.