Shame on £650,000 PFA boss who seems more interested in a cushy new Italian job than the ex-pros battling dementia
The pursuit of help from the Professional Footballers’ Association still seems a bleak prospect for the families of players who gave joy to so many of us and are now living with dementia.
The family of Chris Nicholl had found the process desperately tough before he died last month. The daughter of Tony Parkes has given up asking the union for help. The daughter of Mick Lyons was informed there would be no help if she brought him home from Australia to live near her, on his beloved Merseyside.
The former Manchester United player David May last week described a member of one of his WhatsApp groups having to sell their home to fund dementia care for a former player. Another is being moved to a different care home because his family cannot afford the costs.
None of these families want a fuss. They are too busy getting on with the unremitting daily struggle that a dementia diagnosis brings. I’ll never forget Rob Stiles, the son of Nobby, detailing to me the devastating indignity of his mother’s search for help from the PFA — then calling me a day later to ask that certain facts be excluded, to avoid causing offence. What incredible dignity.
In these circumstances, the latest role taken up by Maheta Molango, the
PFA chief executive, is unfortunate to say y the least. Molango is to join the board of Sampdoria, though h you would need to o follow the Italian n club’s media or obscure e corners of the Italian n press to know it.
This news, announced d by the club last week, k, comes four months h after the PFA said it was giving Molango a £150,000 backdated pay-rise, taking his salary to £650,000-a-year, because of the cost of living crisis.
It has been impossible to extract a sense from Italy of how much Molango will earn in his new role and answers to that question are loaded with talk about second-tier Sampdoria not being wealthy and Molango joining because he was a boyhood fan. The PFA say it is a ‘light touch’ non-executive role from which he will earn ‘basic costs and expenses’.
But the salary is not the point. This highly remunerated union boss, whose PFA post has also seen him join the board of the global players’ union FIFPRO,
becomes part of the executive function at a club whose players he supposedly represents.
Molango’s PFA predecessor Gordon Taylor certainly had his faults, including a grotesque £2million annual salary, but it is fair to say he would have been annihilated for taking a boardroom role at any club.
The PFA say Molango ‘consulted the PFA’s operational board before taking the role’ and that if any conflict of interest presented itself, he would recuse himself. But it’s not a good look on the back of that salary hike and the union’s current need to show that their every working minute is being committed to making up for how dementia amongam their members wasw scandalously ignored forfo so long.
The PFA are six months intoin the administration ofo a £1million fund for formerfo footballers living with illness, to which theyh have committed £250,000, and that cash iss actually making a difference.d The involvement of Dawn Astle, the brilliant campaigner who brought the link between football and dementia out into the light, was shrewd.
The new pot of money meansm families are being helped in a way they were not before. Occupational therapists sent out to assess the needs of former players will find, in some cases, they need more support than they are actually requesting.
But this is no mere operational job. Scores of families describe to me their confusion about what they might be entitled to, disappointment that, in their minds, there might be no help for them and anger over the detailed picture they are asked to provide of their finances.
This is a huge communication challenge, requiring immense leadership. We’ve heard little from Molango on any of it, beyond an interview a few years back in which he said he had learned from others on this subject and had committed to donating his brain for research.
Perhaps he might speak to some of these families. People like Francesca Lyons, daughter of Mick, who flew to Australia last year to bring the legendary former everton player home for ‘one last time’, as she puts it.
The trip, paid for by the late Bill Kenwright, took Mike back to old familiar places, including his beloved Goodison Park. ‘It changed him,’ she tells me. ‘he was more himself again.’ And that made her regret, all the more, that there was no way football could help her bring him back for good. ‘It made me think, “What if?”,’ she says.
The difficult last years for Parkes, the much-loved former Blackburn assistant manager, is told in a beautiful biography by journalist Suzanne Geldard. his daughter, Natalie, describes ‘just going around in circles with the PFA’, an organisation she actually found more supportive when Taylor, a former Rovers player, was at the helm.
‘You used to be able to make him laugh, but now you can’t,’ Natalie said of her father. ‘The illness, however it manifests, has done that.’
The testimonies are heartbreaking. They reveal to Molango, and anyone who cares to listen, that this challenge is a full-time job, with monumental work still needed for these legends, while we still have them with us.