PFA ‘ignored’ doctor’s warning over brain damage in 1993
Players’ chief Taylor failed to act on a series of demands for research, claims NHS director
A leading doctor has claimed that football may have missed the chance to save players from irreversible brain damage after the Professional Footballers’ Association failed to act on his repeated suggestions for research more than two decades ago.
Dr Mike Sadler said that he tried to raise the issue in letters to PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor between 1993 and 1997 but that he received no help or encouragement and what he described as a “quite dismissive” response.
It intensifies the pressure on Taylor following anger over his £2.29million salary and there were fresh calls last night from the Jeff Astle Foundation, a charity set up to support the families of former footballers with dementia, both for him to stand down and for a parliamentary inquiry into an issue that it says has been “swept under the carpet”.
Sadler, who was then a consultant in public health medicine and is now clinical director at the Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, had become concerned after noticing how many former players appeared to be developing premature neurological disease.
This was reinforced when he met former Liverpool manager Bob Paisley, who himself had Alzheimer’s, and in conversations with then Southampton captain Kevin Moore, who would subsequently be diagnosed with dementia in his 40s and die in 2013, aged just 55.
Sadler was concerned about both heading and collisions and, in a letter written in 1997, told Taylor the issue “deserves attention” and “it may be that those players who are vulnerable could be identified before any serious issue is caused”.
Moore had informed Sadler that he suffered multiple head trauma during games and his family have told The Daily Telegraph that they believe he was killed by football. He is the first known Premier League player to have died from dementia.
The Football Association and PFA did launch limited research shortly before Astle died in 2002 of what a neuropathologist attributed to the type of dementia – chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – that is caused by repeated head trauma. That study was published in 2015 but ultimately disowned by the FA and deemed inconclusive by the PFA. It was then only this year, following a Telegraph campaign, that new comprehensive research has begun. Results are not expected until at least 2020, a wait of more than 25 years since Sadler first approached the PFA.
“I am glad this matter is being investigated now, but believe it should have been investigated much earlier, which may have enabled us to save some footballers from brain injury in the succeeding years,” said Sadler. “I initially wrote to Gordon Taylor directly, in late 1993 or early 1994, suggesting a study comparing former players, with goalkeepers as a comparative subset of footballers who didn’t routinely head the ball, with the general population.
“I received a fairly dismissive reply, saying that the PFA didn’t keep records that would enable this study, but offering no other thoughts or encouragement. Through Kevin, I asked Iain Dowie, then Saints’ PFA rep, to take a letter to the next PFA meeting, which he did, but again without positive response.”
In 1995, and as also revealed by The Telegraph, Baroness Elaine Murphy warned the FA following a study about football and dementia in the medical journal she was then editing. She says the FA “were very short and refuted any such association could exist”.
Sadler’s concerns deepened in 1997 when The Lancet published research of Finnish footballers that showed brain lesions, thought to be due to repeated head trauma. “So I wrote to Gordon Taylor again, but without response,” he said.
The PFA did commit £100,000 to new research into an international head injury project last year, as well as committing to the FA/PFA football study, and Taylor yesterday said that funding on this issue would be more than £500,000.
Taylor also said that the PFA’S work in the area pre-dated Astle’s death and that they had been “closely involved and represented on the FA Medical Committee” since the 1990s on all health and safety issues, including dementia and concussion. He also pointed to the new “if in doubt, sit them out” concussion protocol that was lobbied for by the PFA and introduced in 2015, as well as the research since 2002 that the PFA has helped fund.
Taylor has denied ignoring the issue. “We are aware of the literally dozens of research projects throughout the world on this issue,” he said. “No causal link has yet been established between heading the ball and various neurological problems such as dementia and CTE.”
Although the specific impact of heading has not been proved, there is now growing research – to go with the Astle autopsy – that is making a direct link between dementia and football.
Dr Bennet Omalu, who first discovered CTE in American footballers, says that it is “obvious” that there is a “higher prevalence in retired soccer players”.
Taylor did not respond to Sadler’s account of his attempts to raise the issue with him during the 1990s but is adamant that issues and the points he raised were being acted upon.