Football and brain damage

The ever-increasing number of ex footballers coming forward to reveal they have dementia must be unnerving for just about everyone who has played the game at some point. I’m hoping that my total inability to win a heading duel throughout my somewhat less than stellar footballing career on the parks of Bristol may save me from the worst dementia can offer, but who knows? None of the teams I played for did heading practice, or practice at anything else for that matter, but better ones did. In fact, many started heading a ball as very young children. It’s a worry and today the family of the great Gordon McQueen revealed he too has dementia.

My first experience of watching football was at Victory Park in Brislington in the late 1960s, early 1970s. The players seemed so much older than players do today and they were so much harder. The pitches were often a quagmire and the football was not exactly tiki-taka. I particularly remember the sound of the ball when it was kicked or headed. These balls were heavy, leather affairs, with a great big lace running through it. Worse than that, they absorbed any available moisture. Soon, it would be like heading a medicine ball. I remember heading one at half-time when we ran on the pitch to play with a proper net. I was seeing stars and, looking back, I may have been slightly concussed. I was not in a hurry to repeat the experience. I would leave that to the harder lads. It never occurred to anyone that heading a football might smash your brain up.

Now stories of footballers being brain-damaged are manifold. Many of the 1966 world cup winners have been diagnosed. Football simply must have something, maybe everything, to do with it.

McQueen is 68 now, but his family say he has been showing symptoms since his mid 60s. Jesus. That’s nearly me. Imagine that happening when you’re looking forward to retirement? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet actually, it does.

Men I watched in that Brislington team died from or with dementia, something I learned some many years later when I read their obituaries in the local newspaper. And my mind went back to these hefty great men putting their heads through this lead weight of an object. Now I can see what I couldn’t see then: that heading a football too often, or even at all, causes brain damage.

The powers-that-be need to not to just follow the science but submit to it. Investigations between heading a ball and dementia need to begin with players playing today. We can’t ban heading the ball without sound evidence, but if evidence emerges, then so be it.

We’ve seen what happens to rugby players who suffer constant head trauma and we know for an absolute fact the damage done to boxers whose first aim, let’s face it, is to render the opponent unconscious. In 100 years, I suspect we will wonder how on earth we allowed such a sport as boxing to exist at all. Or why we allowed people to head a football.

Through my family life and my working life, I have come across dementia and if you think it’s bad, trust me when I say it’s much, much worse than bad. We owe it to the players from yesterday and the players of tomorrow to establish clear facts and begin to end tragedies the likes of Gordon McQueen are living through today.