Foot: Cardiff City calculates its loss at €120m after Sala's death

Since the death of the Argentine striker in a plane crash in 2019, FC Nantes and Cardiff have been demanding money from each other. The latter figure is more than 120 million euros. After “an in-depth analysis” carried out by a legal expert, “Cardiff’s damage was estimated at 120.2 million euros,” the Cardiff club’s lawyer, Me Céline Jones, told AFP on Monday, confirming information from the newspaper L'Equipe.

This analysis must be formally filed this Monday afternoon at the Nantes commercial court during a technical hearing which should set the timetable for the continuation of the procedure in this case. “We will take the time to study these new voluminous documents and these figures,” reacted to AFP the lawyers of FC Nantes, Messrs Jérôme Marsaudon and Louis-Marie Absil, evoking “almost phantasmagorical hypotheses”.

Argentinian striker Emiliano Sala, aged 28, died in January 2019 in a plane crash over the English Channel as he joined his new club, Cardiff City, to which he had been sold by the FC Nantes. He had not had time to play with the Welsh club.

Cardiff City believes that FC Nantes was responsible for the private flight on which the footballer took a seat and that the transfer was not effective at the time of his accident. The Welsh club therefore took action before the Nantes commercial court to claim compensation for loss of income and other damage suffered by the club due to Sala's death. “If Sala had been able to play, he would obviously have scored goals between January and June 2019 and Cardiff would have remained in the first division. It would be unrealistic to think that he would not have scored any goals,” Mr. Jones argued during a hearing in June 2023.

For FC Nantes lawyers, this is “very far-fetched” reasoning. And according to them, the Nantes club cannot be held responsible for any damage because “Fifa, then the Court of Arbitration for Sport have already ruled that the transfer had been carried out at the time of the theft and therefore that Emiliano Sala was indeed a Cardiff player at the time of his death. In another procedure linked to the dispute between the two clubs, the FIFA Football Court ordered Cardiff last year to pay FC Nantes the balance of the transfer of the Argentine player, at the time just over 11 million euros out of a total of 17 million.