Soccer Star Emiliano Sala’s Flight Missing: Presumed Dead

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Ryan Caragher, Staff Writer

Cardiff City’s new record signing, Argentinian Emiliano Sala, has been presumed dead. His flight from Nantes, France across the English Channel to Cardiff went missing during the night Monday, January 21st, at roughly 8:30 pm local time. The $19.3 million move was completed January 19th, and after saying goodbye to his teammates at Nantes FC, he boarded his plane back to Cardiff to begin training with his new club.

It was reported that the pilot of his flight had failed to takeoff four times before finally completing a successful takeoff. There were two others on the plane, as well as a pilot and co-pilot. Sala communicated with his ride to the airport, a teammate from Nantes FC, how nervous he was about the flight to Cardiff.

According to the NY Post, some time into the flight, Sala gave a desperate call to his relatives, saying, “I’m in the plane and it looks like it’s going to fall apart…Dad, I’m really scared.” The plane had requested to drop to a lower altitude around Guernsey, and disappeared soon after it passed the British island. According to a CNN International article, the search for Sala has become a “recovery operation,” and there is “no hope of survival” in the barely 50 degree Fahrenheit temperatures of the English Channel. The author of the CNN article wrote that you must be “extremely fit to be able to survive more than four to five hours swimming in that water.”

All thoughts and prayers are with Emiliano Sala and his family in their time of need, and the entire soccer community stands behind him.