Telegraph campaign forced game’s authorities to take action

The date was January 2016 and, amid the first 50th anniversary gathering for England’s 1966 World Cup-winning heroes, the overriding memory was not celebratory but startlingly sad.

Nobby Stiles and Ray Wilson were too ill to attend. Both had been diagnosed with dementia many years earlier.

There was also no sign of Jack Charlton, who had been suffering with memory loss. Martin Peters was there but not able to recall much of that historic day. His family would later confirm he had also been diagnosed with dementia. Roger Hunt and Sir Bobby Charlton were absent, leaving only Sir Geoff Hurst and George Cohen among the outfield players to share any sort of detailed recollections.

The sense that something was seriously wrong was compounded by looking through other great teams of that era and discovering strikingly similar stories.

Calls to Dawn Astle, whose father Jeff died from dementia in 2002, relatives of the 1966 World Cup winners, the Professional Footballers’ Association, the Football Association and esteemed neurologists were also instructive. The most obvious question was: What proportion of former players have dementia compared to the general population? But PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor could not even say how many families of affected players had been in touch.

Dawn had kept a tally of the hundreds of families who had contacted her and agreed that establishing the relative scale of the problem needed to be the starting point. In May 2016, we launched our campaign with a specific suggestion: “The Telegraph calls on the football authorities to commission independent research that answers the question, ‘Does playing football increase your risk of dementia and other degenerative brain diseases?’ and to work collaboratively to help researchers study a large sample of former professional players and compare their findings to the wider population.” Within two years – and after numerous interviews with affected families and medical experts, calls for Taylor to resign and revelations of how both the FA and PFA were warned of a potential dementia link in the 1990s – research was finally commissioned.

Almost 18 years since a coroner ruled Jeff Astle’s job had killed him, Dr Willie Stewart’s team have delivered their answer.