Heading in football must now be on borrowed time
Hheightened vulnerability to devastating impact of dementia cannot be seen as just an occupational hazard
Why, Denis Law would often wonder of late, did his friends keep dying? First there was John Fitzpatrick, to whom he felt forever bonded at Manchester United, after watching his fellow Scot replace him in 1965 as the club’s first league substitute. Then came Nobby Stiles, an Old Trafford legend whose feats for club and country never earned the man his due.
Within 48 hours of Stiles’s passing, Law learnt that Sir Bobby Charlton, alongside him with George Best in United’s holy trinity, was being robbed of his memories. The cause of decline was identical in every case: dementia.
It is an unbearable cruelty that the same disease to assail his team-mates should now afflict Law himself. Behind his sanguine acceptance of what awaits him, Law seeks answers for why this is repeatedly happening to players of his generation. Last December, as he mourned the loss of Les Massie, a Huddersfield Town contemporary who also suffered with dementia, he insisted football “owed it” to them to keep studying the apparent connection between heading and neurological decline in later life.
Law did not sugar the pill when describing the impact of skull on leather in the Sixties. He harboured such dread of those soggy puddings falling from the sky, more akin to medicine balls than footballs when they absorbed water, that he would avoid any heading practice. The evidence is not only anecdotal. Research at the University of Glasgow concludes that ex-professionals in outfield positions are at four times greater risk of developing dementia than the general population, a finding that stands as a stark warning of the cost of doing nothing.
There can be a misconception that these concerns are symptomatic of a health-and-safety obsession, of a misplaced desire to inhabit a world without risk. Even some players today rail against suggestions of a ban, claiming that it would emasculate the game, reducing it to glorified
five-a-side. Troy Deeney, Watford’s captain, declared recently: “I believe that modern footballs are safer to head than old-school balls.” But this is no more than blind faith.
While the latest synthetic balls might not absorb water in the same way, they travel faster and recent research – that included players from the 1990s – has found no decline in dementia rates.
Alarm about heading arises not from cultural sensitivities, but from the litany of horrors staring football in the face. Law, whether through his tirelessness as a player or his stoicism at being told he had prostate cancer, is not a man given to lamenting his lot. But the more he watched his colleagues deteriorate, the more he worried that headers lay at the root of it. He would describe how dementia cases seemed disproportionately skewed towards centre-halves and strikers: namely, those required to head the most.
Now that Law is stricken with the condition he dreaded, football confronts a prospect once unthinkable: that heading, tolerated since the 1860s, could be outlawed. John Coleman, Accrington’s manager, predicts it could happen within a decade. That looks optimistic, given the glacial pace at which global governing bodies move. But the agitation for change is approaching a critical mass, fuelled by the idea that existing reforms do not go far enough.
Take the rule, introduced this summer, that professionals in England should be limited to 10 “higher-force” headers a week. On the surface, this is a laudable move, unmatched by any other country. But it is no more than guidance, and it still equates to 400 headers a season. Just one header is defined by scientists at the University of
Texas as a “minor subconcussive blow”: on its own, insufficient to inflict major trauma, but when repeated thousands of times over a career, a recipe for trouble.
The warnings have been hiding in plain sight. Take an article in the British Medical Journal 49 years ago, highlighting “classical migraine, including incapacitating visual field defects, in five young men after blows to the head playing football”. The issue is settling on a solution, with a ban on headers still widely deemed too drastic, too inimical to football’s essence.
Other sports do not agonise so long over this equation. Formula One, ignoring any cavils about aesthetics, mandated the halo in its cars out of a conviction that drivers were unacceptably exposed to head injury. In three years, the innovation has been credited with saving lives. Cricket, likewise, is far more receptive to change, even if it means reinventing such fundamentals as the length of an innings or the number of deliveries per over. Granted, the introduction of headgear ensures many batsmen are no longer quite so skilful at fending off short-pitched bowling, but in any reasonable balance of risk and reward, this is a price worth paying.
Football, whether it likes it or not, is being led by science towards a profound reckoning. The nightmare that has stalked Law and his brethren cannot be allowed to continue. At what point does the health of the practitioner override the entertainment of the punter? In what world can a heightened vulnerability to the devastating impact of dementia be passed off as a mere occupational hazard?
The game faces a defining battle to put not just its priorities in order, but its ethics, too.