Kayley Thomas was kind enough to talk to me about the BBC’s recent podcast series on the tragic death of Emiliano Sala. It was a huge undertaking on a very difficult subject, but was handled very sensitively and thoroughly.
When I heard that the BBC were releasing a podcast series on Emiliano Sala, I was a little bit apprehensive because it’s such a heart-breaking situation, littered with shady characters and so much of the coverage has been sensationalised, but you did a great job. How did you get involved in reporting the story? Were you assigned the story or did you volunteer yourself and is this the sort of story you would ordinarily cover?
When the accident first happened, my colleague Jenny Johnson and I were asked by our Editor Lorraine Walsh, who went on to Series Edit Transfer, to look into what had happened in a bit more detail. We’re investigative journalists and are often called in to take a deeper look at stories and some things about this flight just didn’t feel right. Early on we established that David Ibbotson wasn’t a commercial pilot and the American registered plane he was flying couldn’t be used for paying passengers. Many sources were telling us this wasn’t a plane they’d have been happy flying either and soon we’d unearthed a wealth of detail that simply wouldn’t fit into a three minute, TV news item or even a long read online. There were also so many different ways to consider this tragedy too; from a human perspective, from an aviation viewpoint or through the football lens, so that’s where the idea to turn it into a podcast came from.
How early on did you realise that this was going to be such a substantial story and from that point on, did you start documenting the events with a future, in depth project in mind?
I think from the off it was pretty obvious that this would turn out to be a huge story. You had an Argentine footballer, who played in France heading to Wales to start life in one of the world’s richest leagues. So, there was the international dimension as well as that very human story of a destiny unfulfilled. Add in how he was described by his friends and family, a really humble guy who didn’t really want all the trappings that come with being a footballer. It’s a tragedy on so many levels and I think you can relate to that whether or not you’re a football fan.
We became the go-to journalists in the newsroom on any developments in the story as we were tracking it closely. We recorded everything, with the view that it might be used in a future podcast, or at least serve as a reminder of what was happening at the time, like a kind of audio diary. That was really helpful when it came to writing the episodes.
Covid obviously hampered things. I remember being in Farnborough for the AAIB’s final report in March 2020 and recording some thoughts before and afterwards saying there’s ‘a virus’ sweeping the world and we don’t quite know what that means for our work. As it turned out, it meant Jenny and I returned to daily news coverage and had to put to podcast on the back burner. We maintained our contacts throughout that period though, knowing at some point we’d return to it. Covid meant the trial of David Henderson got delayed and the inquest too. We wanted to reflect them in the series, so we had to wait until both those processes had concluded before we launched Transfer.
The story is equal parts devastating and grubby. Is it difficult covering and interacting with subjects that have questionable morals and practices, while maintaining some sort of impartiality?
I think it’s always about getting to the truth. That’s the singular goal. You want to understand exactly what has gone on, has there been any wrongdoing and what’s being done to ensure that could never happen again. That’s ultimately what the podcast is about. Yes, we were dealing with two fairly opaque worlds; illegal charter and football transfers, so a lot of people didn’t want to speak to us. Then you’d think about the Sala and Ibbotson families, who deserved to know the circumstances that led to the plane crash and it just made us push even harder to get to the truth.
Similarly, does it take an emotional toll reporting on such a heart-breaking tragedy?
There’s definitely a weight of responsibility you feel towards the families involved. Both the Sala and Ibbotson families lost a really central member of their families. I can’t begin to imagine what that must be like, so we wanted to ensure that we were sensitive to their loss, whilst trying to highlight just how avoidable this tragedy was.
I remember sitting in the car park at Leckwith after doing the shopping one weekend and a rainbow appeared over the Cardiff City Stadium and I took a photo and sent it to Emiliano’s friend Alan, who features in the podcast. He dropped everything in Argentina to go and search for Emiliano in the days following the crash in 2019. I think in that moment, where the story was no longer in the headlines, I just wanted one of his closest friends to know that he was still thought of here. I think I just sent the photo saying it had made me think of how warmly Emiliano would have been welcomed in Wales. I’d often find myself walking around Cosmeston Lakes thinking how Emiliano might have walked his rescue dog Nala there, especially when I heard how much he loved the outdoors. When you are researching something like this, it naturally occupies a lot of your thinking.
Certainly in the final production phase of that last episode, we were listening back to it honing it for launch and I think we all had tears rolling down our cheeks at various points. It’s a pretty emotional episode anyway, so it was a combination of that; the culmination of all our work and again the futility of his death. I’ve spent hours speaking to the people who loved him most and you want to make sure at the end of it all that you have given listeners a real insight into the man behind the football persona. I really hope we’ve achieved that.
I’ve listened to the whole series and I really liked how it was structured, with episodes devoted to the technicalities of the flight and one covering David Ibbotson, who is often neglected from coverage. How did you set about forming some sort of structure for the series and why did you choose a podcast as your platform over other formats?
We knew we’d have to set out what happened right at the start of the series, but it was about bringing new, additional detail to what people already knew through voices like the shipwreck hunter David Mearns, who found the plane. Many wrote to us to say they found the story about Burhou island very moving in Missing, Episode 1 (I won’t say any more for anyone who’s yet to listen).
When it came to setting out what happened beyond the crash, it almost fell into chapters. You have the world of these little planes, or general aviation as it’s known, and also the world of football transfers. Two worlds we rarely get to see behind the scenes, so we knew we wanted to try and tell those stories as best we could.
It was Lorraine (who’s an avid podcast listener) who first suggested that this could be a podcast series. I really got into podcasts during lockdown in 2020 and could see that she was right. It’s such a personal, intimate medium and I liked the idea of being able to speak directly to listeners. This story is pretty complex, so to be able to interject and quickly explain things, during The Can of Worms, Episode 5 (David Henderson’s trial) for example, really appealed. In this episode, we were also able to use bits from the daily audio diary we recorded in court (we had special permission from the Judge to record these reflections) to give listeners a sense of being there and listening in, which is something you don’t often hear in a news context.
As a Cardiff City fan, I mourned both the player and the man. Devastated for his friends and family, but also gutted not to see such a good player in action. I appreciated that you put Emiliano the man front and centre because so much of the coverage is on Emiliano the player, the shady characters involved or the financial fallout. Was that always a priority when you were planning this project?
First and foremost this is a very human story. Emiliano was on the cusp of playing in one of the world’s greatest leagues, but like any of us would feel when taking on a new job, he was anxious about it. We never get to see that. For any transfer signing, you only ever see the PR photo and a clip of the player saying how happy they are to join. Emiliano was happy to be moving to Wales by the time he’d signed, but to hear him talk candidly in the run up to his transfer about how he felt forced out at Nantes and how decisions were being made for him made him very relatable. This was also about changing perceptions of footballers and the more we learnt about Emiliano the more you started to think of him as a friend, a son, a brother first and a footballer second.
Like any investigation, you didn’t know where the story would lead you, or how long it would last. Does the podcast format allow you the opportunity to add future episodes, if the story continues to develop?
Yes, that’s the beauty of this format really. It does allow for update episodes and that’s certainly something we’d look at because although the podcast may have reached a conclusion, it’s far from the end of the story. Emiliano’s transfer fee is still outstanding nearly four years later. We’ve still to hear if the Swiss Courts will uphold the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling from the summer, which confirmed Fifa’s finding that Emiliano was a Cardiff City player at the time he died. This is the last chance the club has to appeal. If it’s unsuccessful and Cardiff have to pay Emiliano’s transfer fee, the club says that it will take legal action against those responsible for the crash “to recover its losses.” The Sala family are also pursuing civil action against a number of parties, so there are still a number of issues outstanding.
How has the series been received and what sort of feedback have you had?
We’ve been overwhelmed by the response to be honest. Every day we have emails and social media messages to go through from people all over the world who’ve listened and have felt compelled to get in touch with us. Listeners have told us that they appreciate the level of detail we’ve gone into and have thanked us for our sensitive and compassionate storytelling. We’re so grateful to hear feedback like that because you feel so anxious before you release something like this as to how it will be received.
One listener had read an article our Producer Jenny Johnson had written for the BBC’s Sports Insight team and had binged the entire series in a day. Another told me he’d been listening in his car on a long drive with his wife, who was reluctant as she wasn’t into football or planes, but she was the one saying “put the next one on.” It’s obviously of particular interest to football fans and those who work in aviation, but it really transcends that and I’ve particularly enjoyed reading messages from people who’ve said they had no interest in either of those things, but have still been gripped by it.
I think you summed up the situation perfectly in the final episode when you said that: “he was denied the chance to realise his potential because people put money ahead of his welfare.” It feels like many aspects of the story remain unresolved. What are your hopes for the future of this story?
I just hope it helps to shift perceptions about footballers, so we see them more as sons, fathers, friends and husbands rather than as commodities. To consider the sacrifices they might have made to sign for a club. They may have left their country, family, friends, language, culture behind. Imagine that happening in the rush of the transfer window, not having chance to say proper goodbyes and then being expected to perform on the pitch the next day. One footballer told me he completely lost his touch because of the speed of his transfer and it was the start of a downward spiral for him. There’s no denying that footballers are remunerated handsomely for what they do, but they are human and if Emiliano’s story teaches us to show more compassion, then surely that’s a good thing.
Football clubs can deal with each other directly on transfers. They don’t need intermediaries to negotiate deals. Wouldn’t it be great if part of Emiliano’s legacy was that clubs move towards an approach that cut out the middlemen. I’d like to think that we’ve shone a light on the world of illegal charter flights too and made it much more difficult for rogue operators to make a quick buck at the expense of safety.
Shipwreck Hunter David Mearns said to me when I met up with him recently that Emiliano was “a commodity and then he was a story.” I hope through the podcast that we’ve shown that he was so much more.
All 9 episodes of Transfer: The Emiliano Sala Story are available to listen to now wherever you get your podcasts