Barnsley’s Poya Asbaghi: ‘I still think about the people that died. It was just chance’

Poya Asbaghi was at Zurich airport waiting for a connecting flight to Stockholm from Barcelona when the then assistant manager of Dalkurd, a team founded by the Kurdish diaspora in the Swedish county of Dalarna, received a panicked call from the chairman. “He asked: ‘Where are you?’” says Asbaghi, now the head coach of Barnsley. “I told him I was in Switzerland and he said: ‘One of those planes from Barcelona has crashed.’ I didn’t know which plane but, of course, you start doing the maths. I understood that there was a bigger chance that some of our players were on that flight than not. We didn’t get to speak more before we had to go on our next flight. We were sitting on that flight just thinking about which players might have died, basically.”

It was March 2015 and 29 players and staff were heading home from Spain after a training camp. There were four possible routes back, with varying stopovers. They were split across three flights, ignoring the cheapest option to avoid a 10-hour wait in Düsseldorf. Germanwings flight 4U9525 never made it that far, crashing into the French Alps and killing all 150 on board. “I was checking in with the Dutch schoolchildren in front of me and saw their happy faces – they were clapping hands with each other and playing – and a couple of hours later I heard that those people had died,” Asbaghi says. “It was not until we landed in Stockholm that we saw the whole team gathered and understood that we had survived. You almost felt ashamed to be alive.”

It is a tale that will always provide Asbaghi with a dose of perspective. He also speaks eloquently about why his family fled Iran to avoid political persecution in the 1980s and openly about everything from quitting playing football as a