To the very end, it seems the bereft mother of Emiliano Sala was given reason to believe that some flagrant supposed injustice surrounding his death, seven years ago, entitled Cardiff City to a vast sum of money in compensation.
She, Mercedes Taffarel, has made her first journey to the French city since losing her son to a plane crash, in recent days. She has retraced the last steps of the boy she called ‘Emi.’ She has visited Carquefou, the district of Nantes he called home – even the house where he lived, without actually knocking at its door.
Then, on Monday afternoon, she attended Nantes Commercial Court, labouring under the illusion that its judges would be ordering the city’s club to pay Cardiff City £100million, no less, because of the 28-year-old’s death in the immediate aftermath of his transfer between the two.
Cardiff said Nantes were legally responsible because the one-time agent Willie McKay, who worked for the French club as a fixer and intermediary, was involved in setting up the flight.
Though McKay fixed a lot of stuff for them, too, Cardiff demanded money extending way beyond the record £20million they’d paid for Sala to include pay-back for ‘lost opportunity’. That’s to say, the ‘lost’ Premier League status Cardiff suffered, as their lawyers framed it, which would have been retained had their new striker lived.
Madness. All of it.
Madness that Cardiff should still have been claiming Nantes’ liability so many years on, when they, and McKay, could never have known that the plane’s pilot was unqualified and that the plane was a death trap.
Madness that Cardiff, whose communications department had tweeted images of Sala signing on the dotted line for them in January 2019, should have abrogated responsibility for the transit of their player and put it onto others.
Madness that Cardiff had thrown a new gamut of nonsense at their ‘lost opportunity’ claim – compiling ‘virtual projections’ of ‘expected goals’ and ‘expected points’ from that 2018-19 season to demonstrate that they would have remained in the top-flight had their Argentine attacking asset not died. ‘Lost opportunity?’ Lost minds, more like.
It’s nearly four months since I pointed out that the League One club’s case in the latest chapter of their interminable attempt to recoup cash was ‘delusional.’ And sure enough, on Monday, the court rejected all Cardiff’s demands and ordered the club to pay Nantes about £400,000 in legal fees and ‘moral damages’ caused by sullying the French team’s name. The penalty is payable immediately, regardless of any possible appeal.
Amid Cardiff’s long and utterly unsuccessful pursuit of cash for Sala, we have heard nothing about real the scandal at the heart of the case: the way he was touted around clubs in a way beyond his personal control, which left him deeply uncertain and unhappy about the pace at which the Cardiff move came about.
‘Cardiff put a lot of pressure on him to complete the sale quickly but Nantes wanted more money and he felt in the middle of that,’ Mrs Taffarel said in a statement read at her son’s inquest in Bournemouth, which I attended. ‘He felt in some doubt. Those weeks were intense.’
If there was something to be taken from his death, then it might have been a reappraisal of the way players are hawked around like meat in such a way. Yet nothing has changed.
Jonathan Booker, a former agent now working in sports mediation, told the BBC, on Monday, that there had been a ‘flurry of activity’ in player welfare and duty of care following Sala’s death, but this had not been sustained. Lorna McLelland of the National Association of Player Welfare Officers, told the BBC: ‘In terms of movement of players, central to that is money…it’s always the case and it’s still a little bit of a wild west.’
If, as one suspects, Mrs Taffarel had timed her visit to France because she may have been led to believe that some kind of injustice would be resolved at the courthouse, then she will soon be leaving for Argentina with more disappointment. It wasn’t to be and was never to be.
Word comes down from France that Cardiff have the right to appeal this latest verdict, but she and her family are the ones who are owed something now: closure and peace. It’s time for the club who bought her son seven years ago to cease, end this nonsense and, for the sake of the real victims, let it go.
