Cardiff City will appeal to the court of arbitration for sport against Fifa’s ruling that they must pay Nantes the transfer fee for Emiliano Sala, the 28-year-old Argentinian player killed in a plane crash two days after Cardiff announced his signing on 19 January.
On Monday Fifa’s players’ status committee, which determines disputes relating to international transfers, found against Cardiff, ordering the club to pay the overdue first €6m (£5.3m) instalment of the €17m total payable over three years, which was agreed with the French Ligue 1 club.
Cardiff had refused to pay the transfer fee after Sala died, arguing that as there were details in the club’s employment contract with him which were still to be concluded, the transfer had not been finalised.
The Fifa committee, chaired by the South African lawyer and senior football administrator Raymond Hack, determined that the transfer from Nantes had been agreed by Cardiff and all necessary elements of the paperwork concluded, just hours before the plane crashed on 21 January, so Cardiff are legally obliged to pay the agreed fee.
In a statement on Wednesday morning, Cardiff said they were “extremely disappointed” with the Fifa committee’s decision and would appeal to Cas. The ruling was reached “on a narrow aspect of the overall dispute”, they argued, without considering all the documentation.
“There remains clear evidence that the transfer agreement was never completed in accordance with multiple contractual requirements which were requested by Nantes, thereby rendering it null and void,” Cardiff said.
Following the ruling on Monday, Nantes’ lawyers Jérôme Marsaudon and Louis-Marie Absil told L’Équipe that “justice is done” and accused Cardiff of acting in “bad faith” and exploiting Sala’s death to avoid payment. The lawyers said the ruling meant Cardiff would be liable for the next two instalments when they are due on 1 January 2020 and 2021, but that they expected Cardiff to take the argument to Cas, as did Fifa.
“We can imagine that Cardiff will continue the legal battle,” the lawyers said. “It can last if Cardiff wants it to last. That is what they have been doing since the beginning of this case. They use any pretext, up to the death of a man, to not respect their commitments. When you have creditors in bad faith, you cannot prejudge the time of the proceedings to reach a final decision.”
Cardiff reject the accusation that they are acting in bad faith, maintaining that there is a legal question over the validity of the transfer, as it had been a condition of Nantes’ that Sala’s own contract with Cardiff had to be finalised by 22 January.
Fifa’s committee considered the completion of the relevant paperwork for the transfer of Sala to Cardiff, who wanted to sign a striker in the January window to help them avoid relegation from the Premier League. The former agent Willie McKay and his son Mark, who is a current registered agent, worked on the transfer on behalf of Nantes, who gave Mark McKay a mandate to sell the player to a club in the UK for 10% of the agreed fee.
Cardiff publicly unveiled Sala as their record signing on 19 January, and at 3:32pm that day, according to France’s Ligue de Football Professionel, Nantes uploaded the transfer agreement onto Fifa’s TMS international transfer registration system. Forty minutes later, the transfer of Sala to Nantes was “matched” on TMS, which meant that the necessary international player certificate (ITC) could be requested by the Football Association of Wales (FAW).
On 21 January the FAW did request the ITC from the French FA via the TMS system; the French FA is said to have checked with its league that this was in order, then having been told that it was, sent the certificate to the Welsh FA, at 5:14pm. The FAW is said to have acknowledged receipt of the certificate at 6:30pm (5:30pm UK time), which is the final step to conclude an international football transfer according to Fifa’s regulations.
Sala had been flown to Nantes from Cardiff to say his farewells, but the Piper Malibu light aircraft carrying him crashed into the Channel at 8.16pm that night, 21 January, on the return flight to Cardiff, less than three hours after the official conclusion of his transfer to the Premier League. Investigators have since said that Sala may have died because of carbon monoxide poisoning, and that the pilot, Dave Ibbotson, 59, was likely to have been similarly exposed to the gas leaking into the plane, although his body has never been found.
