The entire Torino football team (except for two players who did not take the trip: Sauro Tomà, due to an injury and Renato Gandolfi, because of coach request) is killed in a plane crash.

Torino Football Club, colloquially referred to as Toro, is an Italian professional football club based in Turin, Piedmont that currently plays in the Serie A, the highest football league of Italy. Founded in 1906 as Foot-Ball Club Torino, they are historically among the most successful clubs in the nation with seven league titles, many of which coming from the Grande Torino era in the 1940s. Their most recent Serie A title was won in 1976. Torino have won the Coppa Italia five times, and have won one international, now-defunct tournament—the Mitropa Cup—in 1991.

The Superga air disaster occurred on 4 May 1949, when a Fiat G.212 of Avio Linee Italiane, carrying the entire Torino football team, crashed into the retaining wall at the back of the Basilica of Superga, which stands on a hill on the outskirts of Turin. All thirty-one people on the flight were killed.