Stricken Brazilian club gifted championship title

The Brazilian club Chapecoense, which lost most of its players in an air crash last week, has been awarded the Copa Sudamericana championship by the governing body of South American soccer.

CONMEBOL said it awarded the title “as a posthumous homage to the victims of the fatal crash that leaves our sport in mourning”.

Nineteen of Chapecoense’s players were killed in the crashin Colombia as the team headed to the first of two matches against Colombian club Atletico Nacional to determine the champion of the Copa Sudamericana – Latin America’s second-most prestigious club tournament.

Defenders Helio Neto and Alan Ruschel and goalkeeper Jackson Follmann survived the crash, along with just three other people.

As the winner, Chapecoense qualifies automatically for promotion to next season’s Copa Libertadores, the continent’s top tournament.

This also means that Chapecoense will face Atletico Nacional – the defending Copa Libertadores champion – in an emotion-charged two-game series next year between the continent’s two club champions.

CONMEBOL also awarded Atletico Nacional its fair play award after their directors asked that Chapecoense be awarded the title.

Next season, Chapecoense is likely to field a team of borrowed players from other clubs.

Meanwhile, the airline involved in last week’s crash in the Andes left a trail of unpaid bills that forced Bolivia’s air force to seize two planes and briefly jail one of the company’s owners,.

The revelation added to a string of human errors and unsettling details about the Bolivian-based LaMia charter company’s checkered past that experts say should have served as warnings to aviation authorities.

The LaMia jet carrying 77 people slammed in to a Colombian mountainside near Medellin just minutes after the pilot reported running out of fuel.