‘500 players’ afflicted by brain disease
THE organisation leading the fight to understand a link between football and brain disease know of at least 500 former players who have been affected, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The Jeff Astle Foundation believe the number may represent a fraction of the total, with the families of many struggling on alone. It emerged yesterday that six of the 11 players who won the title for Burnley in 1959/60 have died with dementia while a seventh, Jimmy Robson, is also now struggling with it.
One of the Burnley six was the legendary Jimmy McIlroy, whose daughter Anne yesterday joined 81-year-old Robson’s daughter Dany in claiming she had not received the support she had expected from the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA).
Robson’s daughter told Sky News that when she contacted the PFA, they ‘just sent me a leaflet with general help for things like hip replacements. I gave them my name and number but there was never any follow-up, so I got in contact with the Alzheimer’s Society instead and they were excellent.’
Dawn Astle, daughter of Jeff, said: ‘We have been in touch with several hundred families, who have looked to us for advice and someone to talk to, because they feel we are people they can trust. They’ve told us about many more and we know of around 500. A duty of confidentiality for many former players’ associations have mean we haven’t been able to reach families.’
The high percentage of players afflicted in some teams — at least five of the England’s 1966 World Cup-winning side have either died or are living with the illness — supports research which has shown the incidence of neurodegeneration is higher than in the general community.
The full scale of the problem is emerging seven years after a Mail on Sunday investigation revealed how research the PFA and Football Association said they were undertaking had been quietly discontinued, without the Astle family being told.
The Mail on Sunday’s Sam Peters put the family in contact with Dr Willie Stewart, a leading neuro pathologist, who arranged for an analysis of Jeff Astle’s brain and established he had been suffering the same degenerative condition that afflicted many NFL players before they died.
That scientific breakthrough paved the way to the research, led by Dr Stewart, which established last year that footballers are 3.5 times more likely to have a neurodegenerative disease than the general population and five times more likely to die with Alzheimer’s.
‘Without Sam’s work we would never have started out on this journey,’ said Ms Astle. ‘We didn’t imagine the scale of the problem we would be looking at.’
Dr Stewart’s findings have led to an attempt to get football and brain injuries designated an industrial disease.
The Astle Foundation believe that new rules allowing permanent substitutions when a player suffers a head injury — even if all replacements have already been used — are a vital way of helping protect footballers. But it emerged yesterday that the Premier League and FA will not make them mandatory until next season, despite trials likely to take place in January.
Brain injury charity Headway voiced concern about this potential delay. Deputy chief executive Luke Griggs told the BBC: ‘I can understand why these things need to be trialled in order to get the infrastructure around it complete. But there has been meeting after meeting and proposal after proposal about head injury substitutions for so many years and still nothing has happened.’
The PFA said it was doing all it could to help players, paying for care and pledging £500,000 to a Trust which provides sheltered accommodation for retired sportspeople fallen on hard times.