Cardiff City’s players returned to training on Wednesday for the first time since the news broke that Emiliano Sala, their club-record signing, was on board a plane that disappeared near the Channel Islands on Monday evening.

The session that took place at their Vale of Glamorgan base was described as flat and subdued as staff and players were consumed by thoughts of Sala and the realisation that he should have been out on the pitch training alongside them.

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Later in the day Guernsey police announced they had called off their search after failing to find any trace of the aircraft in which Sala had been travelling when he set off from Nantes for Cardiff. The police statement went on to say a decision about whether to recommence the search, which has already covered 280sq miles of the channel, will be taken early on Thursday.

Sala had met some of his Cardiff teammates on Friday, when he underwent a medical before completing his £13m transfer, and was due to train with them for the first time on Tuesday. That session was cancelled and, understandably, the mood around the club remained sombre 24 hours later, when staff and players convened at the training ground. Mehmet Dalman, Cardiff’s chairman, said that Neil Warnock, the manager, was in a “state of shock”.

Players found themselves looking up at the television screens in the canteen after training and seeing updates on a story that is hard for them to come to terms with and, most devastatingly of all, seems all but certain to end with the worst possible news.

Cardiff are not in action in the FA Cup this weekend, having been knocked out by Gillingham in their third-round tie earlier this month, but Dalman said that he expects their Premier League fixture away against Arsenal on Tuesday, when Sala should have been making his debut for the club, to go ahead as planned. Not that anyone at Cardiff is giving much thought to that game right now.