Just why is football still ignoring all the evidence?
15 years after Jeff Astle died from ‘industrial disease’, two years after FA chairman’s apology for failing in their promise of research, and three months after we revealed heading a ball damages your brain...
TWO years ago, FA chairman Greg Dyke apologised to Jeff Astle’s family after The Mail on Sunday exposed the football authorities’ failure to deliver life-saving research into a possible link between head injuries and dementia.
More than 14 years ago, South Staffordshire coroner Andrew Haigh found that Astle’s death in 2002 at the age of 59 had been from ‘industrial disease’ caused by repeatedly heading footballs.
Three years ago, the former West Bromwich Albion and England striker became the first confirmed case in Britain of an ex-professional footballer dying from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Last week, three months after The Mail on Sunday revealed details of a ground-breaking Stirling University study which demonstrated how heading footballs causes profound memory loss, another study was published identifying the little understood disease CTE in six former professional footballers.
For many, including the families of Astle and countless other former professionals suffering early onset dementia potentially caused by CTE, including four members of the 1966 World Cup winning team, this was not news.
For the umpteenth time, evidence linking head injuries with CTE — or punch-drunk syndrome as it was originally termed when first identified in boxers by New Jersey pathologist Harrison Martland in 1928 — was greeted with mealy-mouthed words from senior figures within the FA and Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA).
Some, incredibly, still acted as if they were surprised.
PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor, a man paid £3.4million a year and who has previously invested in excess of £4million of his organisation’s funds on four Lowry paintings to adorn the player’s union’s office walls, said he welcomed the latest research.
Then, on Thursday, UEFA, European football’s governing body, stated they would be launching a study on Friday ‘to help establish the risk posed to young players during matches and training sessions’.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. For decades now, sports governing bodies have been aware of a potential link between repeated blows to the head and serious neurological problems later in life.
For decades, there has been obfuscation, delaying tactics and downright lies employed on an epic scale in an attempt to play down the risks and deny the evidence: that repeatedly bashing your head can be very bad for you indeed. Four years ago, following decades of denial, the richest governing body of a single sport’s competition, the National Football League, agreed a settlement worth more than $1billion (£800m) to former gridiron stars suffering life-changing neurological conditions linked to multiple concussions sustained during their careers. Most chose to ignore it.
But slowly, inexorably, as the layers were peeled away, every sport where contact with the head is commonplace realised they were potentially in the line of fire. Punchdrunk syndrome is absolutely not the sole preserve of boxing.
Some, as in rugby union’s case, have acted decisively by implementing strict protocols, law changes and education programmes in an attempt to protect its players and limit longer term risks. But football has buried its collective head in the sand, deluded in its belief that head injuries were not its problem. Tell that to Hull City defender Ryan Mason, who continues his recovery from the fractured skull he suffered in a clash of heads with Chelsea’s Gary Cahill only last month.
Tell that to Jeff Astle’s family. Tell that to Martin Peters’ family, Nobby Stiles’, Ray Wilson’s and the countless hundreds of former player players suffering early on-set dementia as a direct result of their time spent doing their job. Playing football. They have all been betrayed.
Why is the percentage of exprofessional footballers suffering from dementia apparently so much higher than the wider population? Is dementia an occupational hazard? If it is, professional athletes playing contact sports should have informed choice about whether they participate.
To this day, not one single meaningful piece of research on this issue has been published by anyone involved in football, nor any other sport for that matter. No one has grasped the nettle. Not the PFA, the FA or UEFA, whose announcement last week was cynical and worthless. History suggests it will come to nothing.
‘There is an obfuscation of the facts,’ said Boston University Professor Ann McKee, one of the world’s leading neuropathologists whose testimony in court contributed to the NFL settlement with more than 4,500 former players in 2013. ‘We are still arguing over whether CTE exists when it clearly does exist. It is an unacceptable outcome of sports. It’s time to stop arguing about it and try to identify the extent of the risk and solutions.
‘People are dying. We see it every day. I guess it’s a question of when will enough be enough?’
As former players continue to suffer, many of them forced to sell their homes to pay for expensive dementia care, before dying slow, undignified deaths, football’s authorities plod listlessly along as if the world did not change on August 29, 2013 when the NFL agreed to settle.
Last year, the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation — funded by racing’s Godolphin breeding stable and the NFL — was launched with great fanfare and a huge PR drive. Sold as the most wide-ranging research project into concussion ever launched, it is jointly run by Professor Paul McCrory and Dr Michael Turner — who have both denied the existence of CTE.
In 2013 former British horseracing medical director Turner made a presentation to an RFU con- cussion forum, which many in the room believed trivialised and seriously underplayed both the significance and risk of repetitive head trauma.
‘There’s still huge resistance,’ says Boston University Professor Bob Cantu, a man considered by many to be the world’s leading expert on head injuries.
‘World Rugby is enlightened — way ahead of FIFA, international ice hockey, equestrianism, FIFA, ahead of the International Olympic Association and their views of repetitive head trauma.
‘There is still tremendous resistance within sports. No question FIFA has got its feet dug in. It’s going to come slower at international level but the problem really is that there are tremendous amounts of liability here so we’re talking millions if not billions of dollars across these sports. It’s a situation where change will come but it will come, unfortunately, with people kicking and screaming.
‘All of our data is telling us you can play a certain collision sport like (American) football for a certain period of time without heightened risk [of CTE]. But play it for more than a certain period of time and there appears to be a heightened risk.’
The FA’s response has been frankly pathetic. Two years after then chairman Dyke admitted his organisation had ‘badly let down’ Astle’s family by failing to carry out promised research, the sport’s governing body are no further down the line in commissioning any serious research.
‘We will be taking some research questions to FIFA imminently,’ said the FA’s chief medical officer Ian Beasley in April 2016.
Last week, they were at it again. The FA’s head of medicine, Dr Charlotte Cowie, said: ‘ We welcome this research. The FA takes the concerns around concussion and head injuries extremely seriously. In 2015 we established an Expert Concussion Panel which led to the publication of The FA Concussion Guidelines.
‘The expert panel further agreed that research is particularly required into the issue of whether degenerative brain disease is more common in ex-footballers. The FA is determined to support this research and is also committed to ensuring that any research process is independent, robust and thorough.’ Groundhog Day. Until the research is taken out of the hands of football — or indeed sport — professional athletes will continue to receive inaccurate and potentially dangerous guidance.
Dr Cantu added: ‘I don’t think you’re going to get the right answers if you’re essentially asking the very sport which is financially at risk for monetary backlash if things are found to be negative, to be funding the research.’
The findings of the fifth International Conference on Concussion in Sport — a shadowy organisation controlled by men such as McCrory and Turner whose salaries are paid by professional sport — are expected later this month. Do not hold your breath.
Perhaps the most scathing criticism should be left for PFA boss Taylor. Take a look in the mirror, Gordon. Or better still, dig out that cabinet of files on former players suffering dementia believed to be linked to heading footballs which you shared with my friend and colleague on the Sunday Express Jim Holden more than a decade ago.
People are dying. We see it every day. I guess it’s a question of when will enough be enough