Emiliano Sala, a tragedy that continues to shame football

Publish date: 2024-06-30

Dario Sala scuttles down the stairs of his family home and returns to the living room. In his hands are a pair of football boots. They are, he believes, the final pair worn by his brother, Emiliano, before his tragic death in January.

The boots are personalised. The left boot is adorned by the blue and white flag of Argentina and the right boot has a small but meaningful inscription. “Tito, 9,” Dario smiles. “Tito means uncle in Spanish and he did this for his baby nephew, Augusto. Our sister Romina made Emi his godfather. So these boots, they say little but tell you a lot about Emi. Football, home and family.”

Dario, only 24, reaches for a sip of water. Six months have passed since this humble and tight-knit family from rural Argentina were catapulted into the global spotlight. Emiliano Sala, a 28-year-old striker, signed for Cardiff City from the French club Nantes and, in doing so, became the club’s record signing in a £15 million transfer. The elation would be short-lived.

Sala, after signing his contract at Cardiff and posing for pictures with his new jersey, returned to Nantes for a final farewell with his team-mates. On January 21, weather conditions were icy and stormy over the English Channel. Yet Sala needed to return to Cardiff for training by the following morning and the intermediary Willie McKay organised a private flight, although he says he did not select either the pilot, David Ibbotson, or the plane.

The light aircraft – a single-engine Piper PA-46 Malibu, registration N264DB – left north-west France at 19.15 but lost contact at 2,300ft and disappeared off the radar. The Sala family endured an agonising two-week wait to confirm their worst fears. A private search, led by oceanographer David Mearns, identified debris from the plane and a body was identified as that of Emiliano.

Sala’s brother Dario with Emiliano’s dog

Dario is now sitting at the dining table, telling his brother’s story through the photo frames that make this living room a shrine to Emiliano’s life. Every so often, he glances over to the mantelpiece to our right, where his brother’s ashes stand in a pristine urn. He runs his hand over a picture of Emiliano and his mother, Mercedes, who is out of town babysitting for her grandson. “This is mum’s favourite,” he says. “Sometimes… it just feels like a nightmare that is going to end, you know? When I wake up in the morning or the middle of the night, for a split second I feel like everything is normal. Then I remember. Honestly, my sleep is bad. I struggle. It is impossibly hard for mum. How can there be any plan for this? How can there be anything worse than losing your son? We are supporting her every day.”

Last week, little Augusto celebrated his first birthday. “He gives hope and fresh life to my mum. A ray of sunshine. Babies have this rare ability to make you smile and laugh, in spite of anything. It is a magical quality.”

In Sala’s boyhood village of Progreso, some 6,500 miles from the scene of his death, emotions remain raw. Progreso is, in truth, an unremarkable place: home to only 3,000 people, and conditions are basic. It is winter, drizzly, windy and close to freezing temperatures, but the two restaurants in the village do not have central heating. There is no real social hub. There is a small tree-lined plaza, where village folk came together in January to pray for Sala’s safe return. There is a little café, where pensioners sip on coffee and gossip at lunchtime while the church stands at the corner of the square. There is a Shell gas station, where teenagers hang out. “It is simple, but it is home,” says Joaquin Carestia, a friend of Sala. “If there is a frustration, it is that the business, the money, the controversy has taken over. Emi was a human being, our friend. We want to tell his story.”

Martin Molteni rolls up his sleeve. On his upper arm, he has marked the passing of his best friend with a tattoo. It replicates Sala’s celebration after scoring for Nantes and matches the picture that adorns the home screen on his mobile phone. Last season, as Sala became Ligue 1’s joint-leading goalscorer by mid-December, scoring more than Neymar and as many as Kylian Mbappe, Molteni visited his friend in France.

He says: “I can’t tell you what it is like, watching your best mate score goals in a big stadium and the whole place singing his name. Incomparable. We left the game and went for a beer. It was just my pal Emi. And everyone wanted his autograph, his picture.

“The year before, four of us went along. We’re a long way away but this brought it all home, that our best friend really was smashing it in a major league! I was a centre-back in our local team. I marked him in training, so I suppose I can take credit for improving him.”

He smiles. “Gabriel Batistuta was his hero. He always talked about him. Ironically, Batistuta put a message on Twitter about Emi amid his disappearance. Part of me wishes Emi could see that.”

Que tristeza, la peor de las noticias. Q.e.p.d Guerrero, Mi pésame a los familiares y afectos de Emiliano Sala. pic.twitter.com/lRdOph01au

— Gabriel Batistuta (@GBatistutaOK) February 7, 2019

His mind briefly wanders back to childhood and “those afternoons when we’d run home, drink chocolate milk, grab a cookie and play football until the sun goes down”.

Their friend Joaquin continues: “In school, he was a bad student, but we all were. We just waited for playtime, to get the football out. He scored 40 goals every season for us. He was fiercely competitive. We trained for 90 minutes and then he’d drag us out to do more. He was passionate, angry, he’d cry, demand more from us if we lost. We won most games 5-0, because of Emi.”

In Progreso, they always knew Sala was different. He played for village team San Martin until age 15, when he left home and moved 90 miles away to San Francisco in Cordoba. “An amazing boy,” says Diego Solita, his coach at San Martin. “I had him between age 13 and 15. Incredible strength, a natural athlete, always the tallest, a great header of the ball. Free-kicks out of the box, he’d always score. When other boys went to a party, he’d do extra training.”

His brother Dario says: “When mum took him to play at the age of four, he came back saying he wanted to be a footballer. He kept saying it. He was a great swimmer, he competed in 1,000m track events. At San Francisco, they sent him on trials to Europe. He went to Mallorca, Benfica, Bordeaux. This was hard for mum, letting her little boy fly and follow his dream when he was so young.”

Solita adds: “At Benfica, Rui Costa told him ‘Keep training like this and you will be a star’. He felt 10 feet tall after that.”

As a South American teenager in a foreign country, the adaptation was complex in France. When Sala eventually signed for Bordeaux, he organised a private tutor for two years to enhance his French. He battled his way up, earning a reputation during loan spells in the second and third tiers at Orleans, Niort and Caen, scoring 42 goals in 87 games before joining Nantes in a £1 million deal in 2015.

His friend Joaquin says: “I always find his courage amazing. I compare him to a trampoline. With every jump, he just got a little bit higher. We called him tanque (tank). The most horrible part of all this is that after putting so much in, he deserved this shot at the Premier League. He is the first player in the hundred-year history of San Martin to go so far.

“He gave up his teenage years to follow his dreams. He overcame so much, sacrificed so much. At his home in Nantes, he had a gym built in so he could do more training. If we had a barbecue here, he’d go running the next morning to make up for it. And then for his dream to be snatched away, just as he reaches the Premier League summit, it is incredibly unfair.”

The early hours of Friday, January 22 will forever be imprinted into the minds of the Sala family. Dario says: “Meissa Ndiaye, his agent, called me early in the morning. He said the plane had disappeared. It knocked us all for six. I had spoken to him a day or two before. It was tumultuous. He had signed his new contract at Cardiff. We’d already started planning to visit him. Then I had to tell mum…”

Joaquin recalls: “I got up to go to work and turned the television on. It was 7.15am, I remember the clock-face. My friend was national news. We started talking on the WhatsApp group of our close mates. How can it be? No, surely, please, no. I checked the last time Emi was online on WhatsApp and immediately felt sick. I spoke with his brother and he was completely overwhelmed.”

Sala with his mum

The live search became a global media frenzy. Daniel Ribero, the president of local side San Martin, says he had hundreds of media requests “from the USA, Peru, Ecuador, France, Spain, every province in Argentina”. Film crews tracked down the family, who urged the search teams not to give up the rescue mission for Sala and Ibbotson. The story captured hearts and minds. The BBC say that their initial news article covering Sala’s disappearance received nine million page views.

For Emiliano’s father, Horacio, the pressure took an unbearable toll. Overwhelmed by the attention and his son’s disappearance, his pleas became more desperate. On April 26, less than three months after his son’s death, Horacio suffered a heart attack at his Progreso home and died.

Horacio had separated from Emiliano’s mother but his most recent partner, Liliana, says: “It all affected him hugely. He became a different Horacio, suffering terribly. He was convinced his son could still be alive throughout the search. He just kept saying, ‘My son is suffering, he will be cold and hungry.’

“The process drained him; the disappearance, the search, the hope, the dwindling hope. It was destructive and he never recovered.

“He did not sleep well. He kept waking up in the middle of the night. He did not have health problems, just the pain and anguish of this event. I organised a psychologist. He did find it hard, as a man, to communicate his feelings and the psychologist struggled to get much out of him.”

In truth, Liliana explains, the relationship between Emiliano and his father had badly frayed and contact had been minimal for several years. When confronted by the glare of flashing cameras, Horacio claimed to have spoken to his son in the week before the incident. Liliana says this was not true but Horacio worried how the media may judge him if he admitted relations were fractured with his son.

She says: “He was mourning not only his son, but for what he missed out on, what they could have had together. He just could not come to terms with it all.

“The night before he died, we ate together, watched a football game. It was totally normal. A nice meat dinner and a glass of wine. Then at 4am, he woke up and had a pain in his chest. We did everything to keep him alive, oxygen, everything…”

Her eyes moisten. “It has been the most horrendous period. How am I? Honestly? Terrible. I have a daughter and he was like a father to her, too. She is 12 and asks, ‘Why did daddy have to go?’ He was a great man, a great companion. We have been together the past five years but when Horacio was 22 and I was in my late teens, we were together. He was my first love. We split up, married different people and then came back together. It is a real love story. I want justice, for Emiliano but also now for Horacio. This has taken a third life, as well as the pilot. I want light shined into darkness.”

It is the basic, raw details of the tragedy that stop Sala’s friends in their tracks. In the aftermath of the crash, concerning reports emerged. Willie McKay was not Sala’s agent but his son Mark acted as an intermediary in the transfer and Willie made arrangements for the fateful flight. He inquired with David Henderson, his go-to pilot, but he was not available and the man at the controls was instead Ibbotson, a 59-year-old part-time engineer.

Ibbotson did not have a commercial flying licence and had £23,400 worth of county court judgments against him. The BBC reported that the pilot was also colour-blind and his licence restricted him to flying in daylight hours only. Ibbotson’s body has never been found.

In a haunting final WhatsApp audio message, Sala told friends “I’m on a plane that looks as though it’s going to fall apart.” The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) have been informed as to the owner of the plane but this is still to be revealed publicly. The AAIB will be duty-bound to inform the authorities as Dorset Police continue their inquiries.

Little wonder, therefore, that Sala’s friends want answers. Nicolas Dobler, a childhood friend, says: “Look at the details. With all the control in modern football, was he looked after? If you make someone your club-record signing, do you not do absolutely everything to make sure it is right? Do the airport have questions to answer, too? The weather was terrible that night. Could they have waited until the morning? OK, maybe we would understand if this happened in rural Argentina but this is the Premier League, England, the place held up as an example for everyone.”

Cardiff insist that they acted professionally, offering a commercial flight to Sala, only for the player to prefer a speedier route after a text message from Willie McKay’s other son, Jack, saw the family offer to schedule a private flight. At 7.56pm on Friday, January 18, the message from Jack, a Cardiff player at the time, read: “My dad has told me that you are going home tomorrow. He could organise a plane to take you direct to Nantes and to come back on Monday, at a time that suits you, so you can get to training on Tuesday.”

Joaquin adds: “I feel angrier as more time passes. Before it was sadness and pain. Now it is raw anger. Six months have passed and we want answers. The nagging question is: “Could the death of my friend have been avoided?'”

For many experts, the answer is a resounding yes. Terry Tozer is a former airline pilot and his analysis is cutting.

Tozer told The Athletic: “There is no excuse and no defence at all for this flight to have taken place. Firstly, it is generally a major risk for a single-engine aircraft to fly over water. You should be flying a twin-engined plane, even in glorious conditions, because if the one packs up, you’re in the drink. You should also avoid having a single-crew operation, which increases the risk and the workload, even for a professional pilot.”

At 8.15pm, an hour into the flight, Ibbotson asked air traffic control to reduce the altitude from 5,000 to 2,300 ft. Tozer says: “As someone who has flown at altitude in cloud, it is very easy to become disorientated very quickly. A lot of bad decisions can happen. The pilot did not have a night rating or current instrument qualifications and therefore should not have flown at night or in cloud. This is particularly an issue if you are not instrument-qualified. You could do that flight in icy conditions because even when airborne, you could file up an instrument flight plan to get to a safe altitude even up to 25,000 ft to fly in commercial controlled airspace. But the pilot Ibbotson did not have the instrument qualification to do that.”

Tozer insists that an airport or airfield would not have a say as to whether a flight takes off. He explains: “The responsibility lies with the pilot in the cabin as to whether to fly. The airfield would not intervene; that is not what happens. If the weather is deemed too bad to fly, you should not go. But people suffer from Get-home-itis. Hundreds of private plane accidents take place because people have a promise to get somewhere at a certain time and therefore they feel pressurised and make bad decisions. The French authorities would only intervene if they were tipped off that a dangerous illegal flight is due to happen. There are no checks and balances at the airfield. It comes down to the pilot’s judgement.”

Cardiff declined to formally comment while the 60-year-old McKay, his family and Vinci (who run the French airport) did not respond to requests by The Athletic.

Ribero, the president of San Martin, says: “I am not a student of aviation. But from what I read and what I hear, this was not the plane for this moment. The pilot did not seem correct. The investigations will tell us what happened but I sense negligence, people prioritising business over the human being. Look, accidents happen but the feeling persists that this could have been avoided. If the flight was correct, the conditions were correct, the pilot was correct, then it was an accident. We are human beings, we make mistakes, machines go wrong. But everything indicates negligence, a lack of care, and this intensifies the sadness.”

On February 25, the AAIB published an interim report. The aircraft’s Airworthiness Certificate was dated April 27 1984 but an annual maintenance was completed in November last year. The report concluded by detailing its determination to further “assess the possible implications of the weather conditions” and “consider the regulatory requirements surrounding the flight, including airworthiness requirements, aircraft permissions and flight crew licencing”.

In June, a further development, as police arrested a 64-year-old man from North Yorkshire on “suspicion of manslaughter by an unlawful act”. The force told The Athletic he “remains released under investigation” but has not been charged.

Former pilot Tozer concludes: “It is mind-blowing when a professional charter flight could have been arranged for a fraction of how valuable the player had become. It is terrible for the aviation industry. We have to ask what the authorities are doing here. There needs to be greater scrutiny.”

It is not only the flight that rankles in Progreso. In the aftermath of Sala’s death, a public battle has played out between Cardiff and Nantes as they wrangle over the transfer fee. FIFA are now intervening to decide how much of the £15 million must be paid for a player who signed a contract at Cardiff and posed with the jersey but did not train or play for his new club. Cardiff are yet to pay a penny and this is where the situation becomes even more extraordinary.

In their submission to FIFA, Cardiff are understood to have argued that elements of the paperwork were not complete at the time of the incident. This is despite social media promotion of the signing, a statement on the club website headlined “Sala is a Bluebird” and a comment from Sala declaring his “great pleasure to be in Wales“. The article also states that Sala had “signed a three-and-a-half-year deal”. The statement does, however, say the transfer remained subject to international clearance.

It has now emerged that Cardiff’s unveiling was premature. The Premier League, Cardiff claim, initially rejected the transfer due to the payment schedule that had been agreed between the two clubs for the deal. A deadline for the revised contract was then set for January 22. Cardiff insist that Sala had not signed this before his plane crashed on the evening before the cut-off point.

This, they believe, renders the transfer “null and void”. He wouldn’t be the first player to have done media duties with a new club only for the deal to not go through. The same happened with Nabil Fekir to Liverpool and Lazar Markovic to Anderlecht in 2018 and Jordan Lukaku to Newcastle this year.

It is a remarkable coincidence, but a source close to the Premier League has backed up this version of events. FIFA’s investigation continues.

Amid the recriminations, village club San Martin are also owed a six-figure fee as a percentage of the transfer. They say it would refurbish a run-down sports hall, the dressing rooms, new floodlights and ensure Sala’s legacy can be felt in his hometown.

“Cold” and “distasteful” are two words used by Ribero to describe the public spat between the European clubs. Sala’s friend Molteni sighs. “I love football. But there is a difference between the sport we see on the pitch and the business of the sport off the pitch.”

Beyond the finances, friends and family are still coming to terms with life without Emi. Martin says: “I have not deleted any of his text messages. I cannot do it. I read them back. I listen back to voice notes, look at our pictures together. I was a pallbearer at his funeral. How can you ever prepare for that? Your best friend, age 28. Never. But I wanted to be close to him until the final moment. That’s why his tattoo is on my arm.” He turns away, dabbing his eyes.

Back in the Sala household, the garden door opens. A black Labrador bounds into the room, sniffing out the guests and perching on Dario’s lap. Nala was Emiliano’s dog back home in Nantes. When her brother was missing, Emiliano’s sister Romina posted a photograph of Nala looking outside the window of his Carquefou home in France, waiting for his owner to return. Now in her new home, Nala pauses to gaze longingly at photos of Emiliano. It is an extraordinary, moving scene.

“She feels his absence,” Dario says. “We all do. We cannot move on. It is the first thing in my mind every morning and it is always there. He is my brother, everything to me. I cannot see life without him. He did not have an easy childhood. It was basic but look what he made of his life. I will tell little Augusto all about him.

“God, this is hard… I will tell him how Emi was, how this humble little boy from Progreso, through persistence and dedication, made it to Europe and reached the most famous league in the world. We will keep his flame burning. We will make Augusto proud of him.”

UPDATE (14/8/19 3pm): The Air Accidents Investigation Branch has highlighted a further concern around conditions in the aircraft. In a special bulletin, the AAIB revealed that toxicology tests on Sala showed the footballer had been at risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. The AAIB said: “This Special Bulletin highlights the danger of exposure to carbon monoxide in both piston and turbine engine aircraft. Toxicology tests found that the passenger had a high saturation level of COHb (the combination product of carbon monoxide and haemoglobin). It is considered likely that the pilot would also have been exposed to carbon monoxide.”

Daniel Machover, the lawyer for the Sala family, said: “The family believe a technical examination of the plane is necessary. The family and public need to know how the carbon monoxide was able to enter the cabin. Emiliano’s family call on the AAIB to salvage the wreckage of the plane without further delay.”

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(Main image: LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images)

(All other photos: Jose Almeida)

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Emiliano Sala, a tragedy that continues to shame football