Football authorities must use their head over risks

A landmark study into brain disease among former players must prompt action, writes Martyn Mclaughlin

It should have been commissioned years, if not decades ago, but it has been gratifying to see the widespread interest in the publication of a new, landmark study into the links between football and brain disease.

While headlines focused on the study’s most arresting conclusion – former professional players are three-and-a-half times more likely to die from dementia than the general population – its other findings were no less disturbing.

Ex-footballers, it pointed out, face a range of other risks, from a fivefold increase in Alzheimer’s disease, a four-fold increase in motor neurone disease, and a two-fold increase in Parkinson’s disease.

After years of speculation, anguish, and confusion, this pioneering work has produced at least one indisputable fact: to embark on a career as a professional footballer is to accept a heightened risk of contracting a neurodegenerative disease.

There are important caveats to note in the study, which was commissioned by the Football Association and the Professional Footballers’ Association amid growing anger from the family of Jeff Astle, the former England striker.

Astle died in 2002, and a coroner recorded a verdict of “death by industrial disease”, with a neurological expert pointing to “considerable evidence of trauma” to his brain, similar to that experienced by a boxer.

The new study, however, does not draw any definitive causal link between the higher levels of brain disease in former players and repeated concussions, or the heading of older leather footballs.

Neither does it point to any significant difference in the deaths among ex-goalkeepers and outfield players from neurodegenerative diseases.

These are crucial qualifications to consider alongside the study’s primary findings, and ones which render responses to it problematic.

For some, nothing less than an outright ban on heading the ball, beginning with youth players, will suffice.

Bennet Omalu, the prominent neuropathologist who blazed a trail with his discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in American football players, believes there should be a ban on heading the ball for players under the age of 18.

“It is not intelligent for a human being to use his head to stop or deflect a ball travelling at a high velocity,” he reasons. “As a society we should evolve.”

Such calls have been echoed by the widow of the late Dundee United star Frank Kopel, who died of dementia in 2014 aged 65.

Amanda Kopel said the Scottish Football Association (SFA) should put in place “stringent rules” all the way down to the grassroots to ensure “none of these youngsters are getting balls thrown at them in training”.

She added: “It is up to the SFA to come up with a law and say, ‘You must follow these guidelines’. It has to be followed through.”

It is difficult not to sympathise with such calls, particularly when they come from those who have been forced to watch their loved ones endure a slow and painful decline. Families such as the Kopels have been ignored for too long, and their voices must be prominent in the debate to come.

But in light of the new study, led by Dr Willie Stewart, a consultant neuropathologist and an honorary clinical associate professor at the University of Glasgow, it would seem essential to conduct more