Former Cardiff City defender Sol Bamba has died, aged 39. He was reported to have overcome cancer while at Cardiff in 2021, before taking on a coaching role. Most recently he was coaching at Turkish club Adanaspor. A club statement said he fell ill before a match, “was taken to hospital and unfortunately lost his battle for life there”.
I regularly photographed Sol at Cardiff. ‘Legend’ and ‘fan-favourite’ are among today’s most popular tributes. There are many others more personal tributes from those who knew him best. He glowed with an urgent charisma that made great images, and expressed himself with brilliant transparency: the glory, the agony, the frustration and anger. No emotion was suppressed or contained. And that dazzling, disarming grin was never far away. Or so it appeared through the barrel of a long lens. I last saw Sol in a coffee shop in Cardiff Bay a year or two ago, wearing a Cardiff City tracksuit and seemingly in typically animated conversation. In some ways, he was the polar opposite of his more restrained teammate Peter Whittingham, who also died tragically young in 2020.
Appointed as Head Coach of Adanaspor several months ago, the statement announcing his death titled him Technical Director. An Instagram feed contains training ground images of a thinner looking Bamba, suggesting he had some awareness of his limited time and dwindling powers, but he still wanted to work, still wanted to keep going. Which is perhaps understandable for anyone in what would usually be their middle age. It also seems typical of his indomitable momentum and will to keep pushing, onto the next game: an endless and addictive rhythm that football can drum into you, sometimes against your better judgement.
Of course his death also seems shocking and unfair, insulting and incomprehensible. That a personality of such presence could expire so early. I felt such despair after learning of the death of a child I’d photographed at a local hospice a couple of times. Another huge personality with a big voice. Surely he was faking the illness. Then the next year he was gone. How was that possible?
And still you find yourself walking once again through the park in the suffocating cigarette slipstream of an oblivious old person and their yappy little dog. You sense they will never give up smoking and they will live to a reasonably old age. Human biology can be maddening and offensive in its lack of reason. We all live at its mercy.
(I believe the photographer to whom I paid tribute a couple of months ago also died in Turkey, in his mid-30s, with a pre-existing condition. An eyebrow might be raised in the direction of its healthcare system.)
In Sol’s final Instagram post, he paid tribute to former England manager Sven Goran-Eriksson, who died from cancer a week ago, aged 76. Sol said Sven was the best coach he had played for. A new Amazon Prime documentary about Sven, largely produced after his terminal cancer diagnosis, highlights how highly the Swede was prized for his man-management, for how he made his players feel valued and trusted as individuals. With necessary time and luck, perhaps Sol’s version of man-management could have been equally effective. Two very different people with a similar natural human warmth.
Bamba’s coaching career was ultimately a short one. But the response to his death shows the powerful impression he left, and the number of people he touched across the world.