Meet Mr Fixit at heart of tragic deal
Willie McKay, the great survivor, is feeling the heat over his role in Emiliano Sala’s doomed transfer. By Tom Morgan and Ben Rumsby
Jet-lagged, weary and sweltering under 30C clear blue skies, the burly Glaswegian in a heavy grey suit trudged towards the doorway of a makeshift chapel of rest in rural Argentina.
Willie McKay, his face shiny in the heat, had already driven 340 miles from Buenos Aires’s Ministro Pistarini International Airport, six hours north along unfamiliar roads, eventually arriving at Emiliano Sala’s remote home town at 10am last Saturday.
The 36-hour round trip from London took him to a converted sports hall in Progreso, Santa Fe Province, where mourners were gathering to see Sala’s coffin. Two security guards flanked the entrance as McKay walked into the 1970s, bleached-white building to join the wake.
His solemn, respectful show was in stark contrast to the no-nonsense, bullish character who, just weeks earlier, had openly told Sala all he and his agent son cared about was “money”. McKay – having launched foul-mouthed attacks against both Cardiff City officials and journalists in recent weeks – is now in need of allies.
As an unsavoury legal row simmers between Cardiff and Nantes over payment for the £15 million Sala, McKay, 59, believes he is being made a scapegoat over a tragic sequence of events that led to the striker’s death in the English Channel on Jan 21. To anyone who asks, McKay complains he has been “thrown under the bus” by Cardiff. Nothing he did in the Sala deal is new and, for years, he has made no secret of his moneymaking operation.
His modus operandi is simple: cream off the best talent in France and find a wealthy suitor in the Premier League. Or, as he wrote in his sales pitch to Sala on Jan 6: “We are not interested in looking after your personal interests, finance, holidays, babysitting... We do transfers.”
However, Cardiff are now cutting ties – and are even considering legal action – against the man who has confirmed, via leaked correspondence, how he muscled in on the deal, created a “buzz” and now, thank you very much, says his son Mark is due a 10 per cent cut.
McKay has, for years, no longer been subject to Football Association regulation. Having been made bankrupt in 2015, the family business is now officially run by Mark, 32, and Willie’s wife, Janis, 58. His explanation for his ongoing involvement is “nepotism”.
Despite handing the keys to the business to Mark, McKay Snr is still living handsomely. His last-known address is a sprawling mansion which Mark bought in 2017 for £1.4million. McKay no longer owns racehorses, but the 35-acre grounds of the six-bedroom farmhouse are an enthusiast’s dream, with an allweather track with a half-mile gallop, 27 stables, tack and feed rooms.
McKay says he has been involved in 600 deals, largely thanks to his strong links with high-profile managers, mostly generated during the early years of the Premier League. Among those at the end of the phone have been Neil Warnock and Harry Redknapp. Cardiff manager Warnock, who denies being “big pals” with McKay, recently told The Telegraph:
“If you want to get the job done, then you need the Willie McKays of this world.” But he also added: “Someone suggested that if I went to Sala’s funeral that Willie McKay would be standing alongside me. That was just distasteful.”
Indeed, while Warnock and officials from Cardiff were conspicuous at last weekend’s wake in Progreso, McKay kept a low profile. He instead arrived with a friend to pay his own respects to Sala and meet the player’s brother, Dario, who has led a humble existence, still living in the town where he once kicked a ball with a young Emiliano.
It was not the first time in his career the Scot had found himself unwanted baggage. Over the years, he has had scrapes with police, footballing authorities and the taxman, but always insisted – often with an expletive or two – that he was a wronged man.
In 2008, McKay was handed a suspended ban by the FA after being found guilty of breaking transfer rules during Benjani Mwaruwari’s moves from French club Auxerre to Portsmouth and from Portsmouth to Manchester City.
The ill-fated City switch went down in transfer-deadline-day folklore after it was claimed the striker fell asleep at Southampton Airport and missed two flights to Manchester. In the ensuing fallout, Portsmouth were fined £15,000, Benjani was cleared by the FA and McKay was found guilty of flouting regulations which did not allow agents to act for two different clubs, in two consecutive transactions, involving the same player. McKay’s reaction to it all was a familiar one. “It’s a witch-hunt,” he said.
He had been equally incandescent after being arrested in November 2007, but never charged, by City of London Police’s economic crime department on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting. A long-running investigation linked to Redknapp – then manager of Portsmouth – and Milan Mandaric would eventually end up in court. Five years later, a jury would throw out the case brought over two deposits, totalling $295,000 (£183,000), paid into a Monaco bank account. Afterwards, McKay told The Telegraph of a conspiracy against his profession. “It’s easy to go after football agents,” he said. “Nobody likes football agents.”
His roller-coaster business ventures continued. He played a key role in getting Joey Barton a restorative loan move to Marseille after the midfielder was handed a 12-match ban while at Queens Park Rangers for attacking several City players on the final day of the 2011-12 Premier League campaign.
That same season there was also an ill-fated experiment at hometown club Doncaster Rovers. McKay helped entice a number of high-profile players to the Keepmoat Stadium. They included El-Hadji Diouf, Pascal Chimbonda, Habib Beye and Freddie Piquionne, signed on reduced wages thanks to McKay’s international contacts. The project was abandoned after Doncaster were relegated from the Championship – ironically with defeat by Portsmouth.
That August, things turned from bad to worse when McKay was stopped while using his mobile phone as he drove down Pall Mall in central London. Officers discovered he was banned from driving at the time and found cocaine in the car. He was branded “arrogant” by a judge, fined £6,000 for driving illegally and cautioned over the Class A drug.
Then, in April 2015, he was declared bankrupt at a hearing in Glasgow. At the time, McKay revealed assets of just £987, while court documents detailed that he owed £713,292. He was discharged from bankruptcy last August, agreeing to a five-year restriction order prohibiting him from being a director or managing a company, without permission from a court.
McKay, it would seem, has always thought the football world was out to get him, but questions surrounding his involvement in the flight that tragically took Sala’s life have left him simmering with rage. “We just tried to help the boy,” he says.
His involvement in bringing the 28-year-old to the Premier League traces back much longer than Cardiff ’s official interest in the player. McKay was optimistic about getting the Argentine a big-money deal and says he even got on the phone to Liverpool’s chief scout. “I said to Barry Hunter, ‘Why don’t you take him? He’s a great player for you coming off the bench’.” He also insists West Ham United were interested in Sala “but they weren’t interested at €25million”.
Cardiff are understood to be enraged that McKay could have pushed up the player’s price by planting stories, but he denies his meddling made Sala more expensive. There is also lingering anger between the club and McKay over the arrangements for Sala’s doomed trip on the single-engined Piper Malibu plane, piloted by a part-time gas engineer, David Ibbotson, but the Scot vehemently insists his “conscience is clear”.
He explains there were multiple flights backwards and forwards from Cardiff to Nantes in the weeks before the tragedy – none of which were questioned. On Dec 5, he made arrangements for Warnock, the manager’s assistant Kevin Blackwell, and him and his son, Mark, to watch Nantes play Marseille. He then arranged Sala’s flight from France to Cardiff on Jan 18 for his medical.
However, over that same weekend, when Sala was due to say his goodbyes to his team-mates in France, McKay’s usual pilot, David Henderson, and another called David Hayman – who had initially flown Sala to Wales – appear to have been busy. “The guy who brought Sala over on the Friday morning couldn’t take him back because he was at a 40th birthday party in Bakewell,” said McKay.
A long-awaited interim report by the Air Accidents Investigations Branch is likely to clear up lingering questions about the crash when it is published tomorrow. McKay is convinced he will finally be absolved of any blame and insists he had no say in Ibbotson, whose body is still missing, ending up at the doomed plane’s controls.
Given his status as a discharged bankrupt and unofficial dealmaker, McKay’s conduct is likely to focus minds at Fifa, which was already looking at introducing tougher rules on intermediaries. Greg Clarke, the FA chairman, refused to comment on the Sala case, but has confirmed he would work closely with the world governing body after being elected one of its vice-presidents.
“I’m an easy target,” says McKay. After decades of toothless attempts by footballing authorities to scrutinise agents better, that target may now be coming into their cross hairs.
‘It’s easy to go after football agents, nobody likes them’
He was banned from driving at the time and police found cocaine in the car