Cardiff chairman calls for shakeup in transfer rules on the sixth death anniversary of former striker Emiliano Sala.
Cardiff chairman, Mehmet Dalman, hoped he would be able to speak about some good borne from tragedy.
Rather, Dalman continues to urge football’s authorities to take note of Sala’s passing and strengthen oversight of the game’s dubious transfer market. Dalman claims that nothing noteworthy has changed thus far.
“You would have thought the death of two individuals would have caused an outcry,” he says. “But it hasn’t. It’s not proven to be the catalyst for regulatory change that we hoped.”
The aircraft carrying Sala from his old club in Nantes to Wales crashed into the Channel on January 21, 2019. At £15 million, the 28-year-old Argentine striker had just become Cardiff’s most expensive acquisition and was the team’s best chance to escape Premier League relegation. Finding the debris that contained Sala’s body took nearly two weeks. The corpse of pilot David Ibbotson has never been located.
In the midst of sadness, a string of ongoing legal disputes started. The Swiss federal tribunal, the court of arbitration for sport, and football’s governing body Fifa all rejected Cardiff’s argument that they shouldn’t be responsible for the transfer money because Sala wasn’t technically their player when he passed away.
Since then, Cardiff has filed a commercial claim for almost £100 million against Nantes. This year, a verdict is anticipated.
Last year, Cardiff also agreed an out-of-court settlement with Willie McKay, the agent who helped organise the disastrous unlicensed private aircraft to Cardiff and served as a middleman in Sala’s move. Ibbotson, 59, was not qualified to fly at night and did not possess a commercial pilot’s license. Additionally, his rating to operate the single-engine Piper Malibu aircraft had expired.
Some people might think that Cardiff should move on and let it go altogether. Dalman maintains that his reasons go beyond merely trying to get the money back for the club. He thinks that institutional reform regarding football’s transfer industry is the only way to bring about justice for Sala.
“My background is finance,” he says. “In 1986, the ‘big bang’ changed the entire way we did business in the City of London. What football needs is a big bang. It needs to be taken by the scruff of the neck and review the regulation.
“There are two fundamental drivers. One is the people in the industry who are agents and intermediaries. They are non-regulated apart from the basic licence that they apply for. The politics, threats and blackmails that go on are beyond imagination.
“The second is, why do clubs use these agents and intermediaries? These questions need to be addressed consequently. I’ve seen absolutely no movement [since Sala’s death].”
“No agent should be able to take a player that belongs to another club, and put them in an aeroplane, without the express position of that particular club. You had an agent acting for a selling club, making arrangements for a player of a buying club. That would never happen in a fully regulated environment.”
Dalman stated that Cardiff “in many ways” is still affected by what transpired six years ago, but denying that the team’s predicament in a Championship relegation fight is directly tied to Sala’s passing. Since then, Cardiff has neither paid more than £5.5 million for a player nor made a comeback to the top flight.
“We got relegated that season [2018-19] by two points,” Dalman says. “We’d this player and if he had helped us win one game. We would not be in the predicament we are today.
“We have an owner [Vincent Tan] who finances the club. He forked out just shy of €20m to buy the most expensive player the club has ever bought and he has no player. So he has become less confident about the whole system of transfers.
“He has consequently become very cautious every time we see a player that has any value attached to them.”