On May 4, 1949, the plane carrying Torino home from a friendly in Lisbon flew into the wall of the Basilica of Superga in fog above Turin. Everyone on board was killed, including the players of Il Grande Torino, who had won every Italian title since football resumed after the war. It was the first time a whole top-flight team was lost in an air crash. It was not the last.
1. Il Grande Torino (May 4, 1949)
Thirty-one people died at Superga: players, staff, journalists and crew. Torino were leading Serie A when the crash happened, and the club fielded its youth team for the last four matches of the season. The opponents did the same as a mark of respect, and Torino were declared champions. Every year on May 4 the club’s captain reads out the names of the dead at the basilica.
2. Manchester United at Munich (February 6, 1958)
Manchester United’s plane was returning from a European Cup tie in Belgrade and stopped to refuel in Munich. On its third attempt to take off from a slushy runway, it crashed. Twenty-three people died, including eight players. Duncan Edwards, who was 21 and already an England regular, died fifteen days later in hospital. The manager, Matt Busby, survived and ten years later won the European Cup with a team built around another survivor, Bobby Charlton.
3. Rocky Marciano (August 31, 1969)
Rocky Marciano retired as heavyweight champion of the world in 1956 with a record of 49 fights and 49 wins, a perfect record that still defines him. He died when a small private plane crashed into a field in Iowa at night, the day before his 46th birthday.
4. Roberto Clemente (December 31, 1972)
Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder from Puerto Rico, had recorded his 3,000th hit that September. When an earthquake hit Managua, Nicaragua, in December, he organised relief flights and boarded one himself on New Year’s Eve after hearing that supplies were being stolen. The overloaded plane crashed into the sea just after take-off. His body was never found. The Baseball Hall of Fame waived its five-year waiting period and inducted him the following year.
5. The Zambia national team (April 27, 1993)
Zambia’s team was flying to Senegal for a World Cup qualifier when their military plane crashed into the sea off Libreville, Gabon, shortly after a refuelling stop. All thirty people on board died, including eighteen players. The captain, Kalusha Bwalya, was not on the plane because he was travelling from his club in the Netherlands. Nineteen years later, Zambia won the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations final in Libreville, the city off whose coast the team had died, and the players visited the shore to lay flowers before the match.
6. Chapecoense (November 28, 2016)
The Brazilian club Chapecoense was on its way to the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final in Medellín when its charter plane ran out of fuel and crashed into a mountain outside the city. Seventy-one of the 77 people on board died. Three players survived. Their opponents, Atlético Nacional, asked for the title to be awarded to Chapecoense, and it was.
7. Emiliano Sala (January 21, 2019)
Emiliano Sala had just signed for Cardiff City from Nantes, for a club record fee, when the small plane taking him to Wales disappeared over the English Channel. His body was recovered from the wreckage weeks later. The pilot was never found. The man who arranged the flight was later jailed for endangering the safety of an aircraft.
8. Kobe Bryant (January 26, 2020)
Kobe Bryant, who won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers, died when his helicopter crashed into a hillside in fog near Calabasas, California. His 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven other people died with him. They were on their way to a youth basketball game. Investigators blamed the pilot’s decision to keep flying into cloud.
Torino were handed the 1949 title weeks after Superga, Manchester United were European champions ten years after Munich, and Zambia were African champions nineteen years after Gabon. Only Zambia did it in the city where its team had died.