Attention now switches back to club football and the seven game run in to this season which, amazingly, has little moire than a month left to go providing you do not make the Play Offs.
Cardiff City have got themselves in a position whereby they’re eleven points clear of third placed Bolton Wanderers with a substantially better goal difference. With only twenty one points to play for (fifth placed Stockport have twenty four to play for, but are three points behind Bolton), you’re looking at the chasing pack having to win their next four or five games to get to in a position where they can overtake us, but City are giving them a little hope as they’ve lost form just as fans were asking what game do you think we’ll confirm automatic promotion in.
In footballing terms, it would be disastrous for City to not go up automatically now given they’re in a position whereby their promotion chances have , amazingly, tended to increase despite them finding it harder to secure the wins that people had been taking for granted.
In truth, City’s loss of form would have to be transformed into a run where they get to the stage where they don’t know where the next point is coming from for us to miss out on a top two finish, but, if it were to happen, I’d give us little chance of success in the Play Offs.
It will be a humiliation if looked at in purely football terms if we end up still in League One next season, but you would hope that what is a young, developing squad could use it as part of a learning process and come back ready to get things right in 26/27. However, what happened in Nantes on Monday has added a new dimension to what occurs over our next seven games – our finances were already precarious (as indicated by the 24/25 accounts), but the conclusive defeat the court handed the club three days ago surely means that things have moved on now.
If you’re looking for a detailed breakdown of the Emiliano Sala case, you need to go somewhere else. From day one, I’ve accepted that the consequences of his tragic death more than seven years ago are beyond my level of full understanding. I can’t comment with any real authority on the world of agents, the minutiae of transfers deals, the negotiations which lead to them being concluded, aviation law and the validity of reports regarding how many points a team would have ended up with if a new player, who turned out to be unavailable for whatever reason, had been able to play a full part in the rest of the season.
No, any opinions on the various legal developments in the 2,600 plus days since that plane crashed not far from the Channel Islands that I’ve given on here have tended to be in the form of gut reactions.
Therefore, when the news emerged that City’s claim against Nantes for up to £120 million (the sum they contended they would have got when Emiliano Sala scored the goals to save us from relegation from the Premier League in 18/19) was thrown out (not just thrown out, they were also ordered to pay Nantes £480,000 in compensation for the damage to their reputation suffered by the French club with this sum is to be paid regardless of the outcome of any appeal by City against the decision), my gut reaction came out in what I posted on the City messageboard I use.
“Think it’s a bit too convenient to blame the French. What would you think of any club, no matter where they’re from. That ;-
1. Announces they’ve signed a player on a Friday for a club record fee.
2. Three days later, the player is killed in a plane crash and, hardly surprisingly, a court case results in which the buying club claims that, contrary to what they said on their website, the player concerned was never theirs because they’d made a mistake in filling out some registration forms.
3. When they lose the court case, the buying club returns to the courts this time claiming eight times the amount they paid for the player from the selling club because they contend that’s how much money they lost by being relegated. They claim that the selling club, or their agent, were liable for the death of a player whose goals would have saved them from relegation.
Now, I would say that no matter what country the second case was held in, the buying club’s legal team would have faced a hell of a task convincing the court they had a winning case.”
It was pointed out to me in a reply that there was also a mix up whereby City were not insured in the event of Sala being unable to play for the club for any reason. As it turns out, I did debate with myself whether I should have included that in my message, but decided against it, because that was, seemingly, more down to an error by the insurance company than anything City had done.
Nevertheless, it all adds to a feeling of amateurism about the handling of the aftermath of Emiliano Sala’s death on the part of the club. That said, the mood music coming out of City, sections of the local press and supporters organisations was unfailingly positive going into this latest case.
It would appear that this optimism stemmed from two things. First, in a sort of “no win, no fee” agreement something like what we’ve all been offered by companies seeking compensation for what we’ve paid in HP for things like cars, electrical goods etc, a company was willing to offer City £12 million I believe it was based on their certainty that the case would be won. Secondly, the club seemed to believe that they had right on their side and, to a degree, the case was framed as a battle for football’s integrity – the fact that members of the Sala family backed City tended to give this line of argument more authority it seemed.
Therefore, any shock at the conclusive nature of City’s defeat has to be based mostly on the these two factors. However, speaking for myself, while I found the argument that a company had given City financial aid because they were so sure they had a winning case a pretty compelling one, there was also the realisation that trying to convince a court that Emiliano Sala would definitely have scored the goals which meant that the club would net a £100 million plus in things l;ike TV fees, prize money etc seemed such a long shot.
Again, the word “amateurish” springs to mind and this is only magnified by the fact that coming up to three days after the verdict was announced, the club have still not commented on the case and what happens next on their website. Rightly or wrongly, it feels like City are in state of shock following the verdict and don’t know what to do next . My own hope is that this will be an end to the legal wrangling,.
Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely that there will be an appeal by City which means that there’ll be more years of delay, so that, disgracefully, it will be something like a decade before the Sala family finally gets the opportunity for closure in a matter that has, surely, played a part in the deaths of other family members since that night in January 2019.
Outstanding summary from you Paul, on a matter that you rightly say is mightily complicated. Legal brains opining on this can come into a revolving door behind us, and come out in front of us.
My thoughts? Well… like you I was not surprised the French commercial courts threw out the case. The way I felt was not that the French would would automatically favour their own (FC Nantes) against ‘perfidious Albion’… but that they would look at the history of this dispute, and see that UEFA’s highest authority plus The Court for Arbitration for Sport had decided in favour of the French team… so what chance did we have of expecting a different outcome in France itself? Somewhere between none and zero?
And at the back of my mind I cannot help but feel that although none of these authorities who were passing judgement on the case, were particularly interested in knowing the minutiae of our playing staff, news must have got to them that Willie McKay the alleged true villain of the case who has scandalously got away scot-free (pun unintentional)… had somehow got his buddy Neil to somehow take two of his sons on to our playing staff.
We shipped them out soon after the tragedy occurred, but methinks the damage to our future case was already done. (I mean to say, the optics were terrible… there is Cardiff City claiming this abrasive Scot was acting for Nantes and not them… yet he has had his two sons who are – almost by universal consent –underwhelming footballers, taken on by his friend Neil… who happens to be our manager…!!)
And we will leave aside the wider aspects of this dreadful affair… the fact that McKay clearly overstated the interest of two other EPL clubs in order to drive up the fee to an absurd £15m… double the fee what a player should have commanded when he was having his first decent season of his five in Ligue 1.
But it was par for the course with Neil… of the £82m he spent, I reckon only one player was true value for money… the wonderful Lee Tomlin. Yes you can point to Josh Murphy and Bobby de Cordova (the brother of the blind MP)… but when they were at Cardiff the former never really produced and eventually left for no fee, and the latter also was anonymous… but fortunately we saved face in his case by getting the fee back from Fulham.
Why did Neil consistently overpay? Well, that is not for me to answer. But the Sala transfer was one of the most blatant cases.
TTFN,
Dai.
Thanks Dai, I think you’ve come up with some very good points there. I’d mildly disagree about Bobby Decordova Reid to the extent that for much of his time at Fulham, he was a Premier League standard player, but, looking from the outside, it seemed Neil Warnock never fully trusted him. The only other point I’d make is that while agreeing that Lee Tomlin was, pound for pound, the best player Warnock paid a fee for, he was singularly unable, or unwilling, to get the best out of one of the most talented players in the EFL. Tomlin only really prospered at Cardiff after Warnock had moved on – in fact, he spent much of the two and a bit years he had under Warnock either out on loan or playing for the under 21s’ – it was Neil Harris who Tomlin really performed for while he was with us.