Cardiff City wants €120 million from Nantes. A French commercial court is now deciding whether they'll get any of it — seven years after a plane crash killed Emiliano Sala before he'd ever played a single minute for the Welsh club.
The case is a long, painful tangle of grief, legal failure, and accountability. FIFA ruled against Cardiff. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled against Cardiff. Switzerland's supreme court ruled against Cardiff. This commercial court in Nantes is the latest front in a legal battle that the Welsh club has, so far, lost at every turn.
What Cardiff is actually arguing
Cardiff's position isn't just about Sala's death — it's about who arranged the flight that killed him. The club argues that football agent Willie McKay, who helped organize the journey from France to Wales, was acting on behalf of Nantes when he sourced the plane. Nantes denies any responsibility.
The plane itself was a single-engine Piper Malibu. The pilot, David Ibbotson, didn't hold a commercial license, wasn't qualified to fly at night, and his rating to fly that specific aircraft had expired. He was asked to take the flight because the usual operator, David Henderson, was on holiday. Henderson was convicted in 2021 for endangering the safety of an aircraft.
Sala was 28. He'd just been signed for a club-record €17 million as Cardiff tried to survive in the Premier League. The plane went down near Guernsey in January 2019. Both Sala and Ibbotson died.
The bigger picture for a club now in the third tier
Cardiff didn't survive relegation that season. They went down at the end of 2018-19 and have since dropped further — they're now competing in England's third tier, a long fall from the top flight they were trying to hold onto when they signed Sala.
A €120 million ruling in their favor wouldn't just be symbolic. For a club at that level, it would be transformational. But given the string of defeats in higher courts, the odds of a clean victory here look slim — and Nantes has consistently denied any wrongdoing throughout the entire process.
The court will rule. Cardiff has run out of other options.
