5-year legal battle over plane crash victim Sala takes us into football's sewers

There weren’t many of us in the chilly, oak-panelled coroner’s court when the mother of Emiliano Sala finally got the chance to tell the world about the child she loved and lost.

Mercedes Taffarel’s statement was read out by the coroner at the inquest into his death that day, yet the small details still broke your heart.

How she had travelled around the Channel Islands after the plane carrying him crashed, wandering up and down beaches, shouting out his name, hoping he might somehow hear her.

How her boy, who to her was simply ‘Emi’, had been preparing to learn English and ‘to travel to the most important places in the United Kingdom’, now he had put the doubts out of mind and signed for Cardiff City from Nantes.

Cardiff had been putting him under a lot of pressure to sign, she said. There had been haggling for cash with Nantes, who were selling him. ‘Emi felt in the middle of that. He felt in some doubt. Those weeks were intense,’ his mother related.

It was after clearing his flat and saying his goodbyes in France that the young Argentine died — five years ago this week — in the death trap of an aircraft which was carrying him to South Wales. Carbon monoxide from the aircraft’s faulty exhaust system seeped into the cabin.

It was a case which took us down into the sewers of football, reminding us of the pawns players become as chronically inept clubs desperately seek solutions in the January transfer window.

And in the endless aftermath there has been a tawdry epilogue to the tragedy, a grubby and classless wrangling over whether Cardiff had technically signed Sala and were therefore liable to pay the £15million transfer fee.

They categorically were — and don’t just take my word for it. Read the court papers. There are reams