À lei da bola is an opinion column by Joao Lobao, a lawyer specializing in sports law and founder of L&SP Advogados.
The Emiliano Sala case began like so many others in football = a winter transfer, a striker in top form, a club making a big investment. It ended tragically and unexpectedly. In the meantime, it gave rise to one of the most significant disputes in recent years in international football, which reached its conclusion this week.On January 19, 2019, Cardiff City formalized an agreement with FC Nantes for the signing of the Argentinian forward, for approximately 17 million euros. Emiliano Sala signed a three-and-a-half-year contract, said goodbye in France, and left for Wales. He never reached his destination. The plane he was traveling on crashed in the English Channel on the night of January 21.
Cardiff refused to pay the first installment of the transfer fee = around €6 million = arguing that the deal was not fully completed and raising doubts about the flight arrangements. Nantes, for its part, demanded full compliance with the agreement, but, faced with Cardiff City’s refusal to pay, was forced to appeal to FIFA to assert its rights.
The response from the football authorities was unanimous: both FIFA and the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne (CAS) = the latter confirming FIFA’s decision after an appeal by Cardiff = considered the transfer contract valid and effective, primarily because the International Transfer Certificate (ITC) had already been issued and the player was duly registered as a Cardiff player, thus concluding the transfer. From that moment on, the risk passed to Cardiff. Simply put, the contract was to be fulfilled. And that is what ended up happening, with the Welsh club paying the full transfer fee throughout 2023.
But the dispute didn’t end there. In response, seeking to reverse the financial burden of what happened, that same year Cardiff went to French courts with a claim for compensation of around 122 million euros, arguing that Nantes had organized the private flight on which the player was traveling, thus attributing responsibility for the tragedy to the French club. This claim for compensation was based on a controversial argument: a calculation of expected points and goals, carried out by the club, which considered that the absence of the Argentinian player had contributed to the club’s relegation to the English Second Division in 2019 = the year of the tragedy = which caused a drastic drop in its revenue.
The Nantes court did not accept this argument, concluding that there was no evidence to demonstrate a causal link between Nantes’ conduct and the accident, nor any basis to support compensation of this magnitude. Essentially, it sent a clear message: the law does not decide games or validate hypothetical scenarios.
The curtain fell with a twist: Cardiff, which was claiming €122 million in compensation, ended up being ordered to pay €480,000 to Nantes, €300,000 for moral damages and €180,000 for legal representation expenses.
It is important to clarify that the coexistence of these two judicial decisions, within the same case, results from assessments of different matters. In the realm of international sports law, FIFA and the CAS/TAS ruled on the validity and execution of the transfer contract, reinforcing the centrality of the principle “pacta sunt servanda” (agreements must be kept) and the tendency to objectively allocate risk to the buying club once the transfer is considered concluded. In the realm of ordinary courts, the decision of the Nantes Court focused on civil liability, defining the damages that are actually compensable and demonstrating that the imputation of liability requires the rigorous verification of the classic prerequisites; the mere occurrence of a harmful event is not sufficient to justify claims for substantial compensation. It is precisely at the intersection between sports law and common law that this case reveals itself as a paradigmatic example of the legal complexity in professional football, demonstrating how different jurisdictional orders can analyze the same event according to their own normative frameworks, without compromising the overall coherence of the legal system.