I think the type of policy involved here is personal accident rather than life insurance. I work in commercial insurance, and although sports insurance isn’t my thing I’ve seen a few of the policies that Premier League and EFL clubs have taken out. The way they work is this:

· The policy covers all players the club, via their broker, has told the insurer they want to cover, for the value the club has asked for.

· The policy pays out if a player is killed in an accident or suffers permanent disablement due to accident or illness.

· If the club wants to add a player they tell their broker the player’s name and value, the broker tells the insurer and the insurer confirms when the player has been added.

· All pre-existing medical conditions are excluded unless the insurer has assessed medical records and agreed to cover it.

· Cover might also be dependent on the player being between certain ages (eg 16 and 35) and having passed their medical.

· Anything related to things like drugs/alcohol/suicide would be excluded, but surprisingly, risky activities like flying in small planes usually aren’t.

· You can have automatic cover for new signings during transfer windows under this type of policy, which would give you cover for the transfer fee amount (up to a pre-agreed limit) for a few days. It appears though that the club’s policy didn’t have this, or that they didn’t advise the insurer of the signing within the time limit. (If they’d had this on a policy in the past, and their broker hadn’t told them they didn’t have it any more, that would also be a potential claim against the broker).

So, Sala’s death should have been covered if this is the type of policy the club had at the time and if they had added him to the policy in time. They clearly hadn’t added him in time, but are arguing that their broker, who should be providing them with expert advice, hadn’t warned them that they needed to be adding players from the moment they signed a contract. They’re also saying that they’d added players late before and the broker hadn’t told them this was risky. The broker is arguing that they had warned the club. If the broker has evidence of this (an email, letter, meeting minutes) then Cardiff’s action will fail. If they don’t, Cardiff have a chance in my opinion.