The club Cardiff City estimated at more than 120 million euros (about 128 million dollars) the damage he suffered in the contentious trial against the French club Nantes, based on the plane accident that cost the life of the Argentine striker Emiliano Sala in 2019, according to his lawyer on Monday.
After “an in-depth analysis” carried out by a judicial expert, “Cardiff’s damage is estimated at 120.2 million euros,” the Welsh club’s lawyer, Céline Jones, told the AFP agency on Monday, confirming a newspaper report. The team.
The French newspaper detailed that Cardiff, which is currently eleventh in the Championship, the second division of English football, hired Analytics FC, a company specialized in “data science”, and according to the report they presented, which included the goals that Sala could have scored if he had played, and the points that the team would have scored with those goals, it was determined that Cardiff could have remained in the Premier League at 54.2 percent.
Then, a French legal expert determined the “loss of luck” and total damage suffered by Cardiff at just over 120 million euros, in accordance with the deficit suffered by the club since that first season in which Sala would have played and the relegation. in the middle of last year, with losses estimated at around 67 million of the European currency.
This analysis was presented before the Nantes Commercial Court, which must set the calendar of the process that has pitted the two clubs against each other since the death of Sala, in a plane accident in January 2019. The 28-year-old forward from Santa Fe died. on January 21, 2019, in the accident of the small plane that was taking him from Nantes to Cardiff, where he was going to be presented with his new team, after both entities agreed on the transfer of the footballer. The forward’s body was found 17 days later, 67 meters deep. The British justice system determined that Sala was unconscious at the time of impact, after suffering poisoning from inhaling toxic gases.
Cardiff City considers that Nantes was responsible for the private flight and that the signing of the Argentine striker was not yet effective at the time of the accident, which occurred in the English Channel. In this context, the Welsh club claims compensation before the Nantes Commercial Court for the loss of income suffered by the entity due to the striker’s tragedy.
”If Sala had been able to play, he would have scored goals by force 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 goals,” Jones said in a hearing held in June 2023.
In another process related to this dispute, Last year, the FIFA court ordered Cardiff to pay Nantes the remainder of the transfer agreed, that is, about 11 million of the 17 in which the operation was based.
The entire conflict that Sala’s transfer from Nantes to Cardiff went through took a long time to resolve. Four years after the player’s death, Cardiff, which had acquired his pass, paid Nantes the last two overdue installments corresponding to the contract for a total of 17 million euros, as determined by the FIFA ruling. which forced the Welsh institution to pay the two final transfers for five and six million euros, respectively, which accumulated 5 percent interest for having refused to settle this debt with the payments agreed for January 2020 and 2021.