Seven years on, Cardiff City is still fighting — this time in a commercial court in Nantes, seeking more than 120 million euros from the club that sold them Emiliano Sala.
The Welsh side's claim stems from the January 2019 plane crash that killed the 28-year-old Argentine striker during his transfer from Nantes. Cardiff had signed him for a club-record 17 million euros, desperate to survive in the Premier League. He never played a minute for them. The single-engine Piper Malibu carrying Sala from France went down into the sea near Guernsey. Pilot David Ibbotson also died — a man who, it later emerged, held no commercial pilot's license, no qualification to fly at night, and whose rating to fly that specific aircraft had already expired.
A legal road paved with setbacks
Cardiff didn't get here without taking some serious hits along the way. FIFA ruled the transfer had been properly completed. The Court of Arbitration for Sport agreed. Switzerland's supreme court backed that verdict too. Three rulings, three losses. Now Cardiff is pursuing a different angle entirely — civil liability through the French courts, targeting what it claims are the "faults committed" by football agent Willie McKay, who helped arrange the flight and who Cardiff argues was acting on Nantes' behalf. Nantes denies any wrongdoing.
The 120 million euro figure — roughly eight times the original transfer fee — reflects not just the cost of Sala's death but the cascading consequences Cardiff say followed from it. They were relegated at the end of the 2018-19 season and currently sit in League One, England's third tier. The Premier League revenue they lost when they went down runs into the hundreds of millions over the years. Whether a French commercial court is willing to pin any of that on Nantes is a very different legal question.
David Henderson, the businessman who organised the flight and handed it off to Ibbotson while on holiday, was convicted of endangering aircraft safety in 2021. That criminal finding doesn't automatically translate into civil liability for Nantes — but it does keep the chain of negligence on the record.
What the ruling could mean
A verdict in Cardiff's favour would be one of the most significant civil rulings in football's legal history. It would establish that clubs can be held financially responsible for third-party arrangements made during a player's transfer — a precedent the entire industry would feel.
A ruling against Cardiff ends the saga for good. They'd be left having lost the player, the Premier League status, and every legal avenue pursued across four different courts over seven years.
The court in Nantes will decide which version of that story becomes official.
