Yesterday’s news about Big Billy McNeill was as sad as it was unsurprising.
Most of us who’ve come across Billy at close quarters over the last few years have had an inkling of something like this.
The family’s decision to go public is courageous and timely; football has never been this awash in riches or experts in health and wellness, it has never been more capable of getting to the bottom of the hugely complex issue as to whether the game has long term effects.
This is a subject I’ve been asked to write about before, but for various reasons I haven’t been able to.
First, dementia is a scary subject. I worked for a brief time in a dementia unit but I don’t know enough about the physiological side of it, or the progression, to do the matter justice. I knew I would have to research it thoroughly.
I don’t mind research, and I’ve looked into scary subjects before – I’m writing a novel right now about bioterrorism and that’s about as scary as it gets – but dementia gives me the creeps as it’s the worst thing I can ever personally imagine suffering.
Without that research I would be scrambling, and it’s not a subject I would want to write on without it.
I did some tentative looking a year ago, though, and I was surprised by what I found.
There is scientific evidence in abundance which is highly suggestive of a link between heading the ball and an increased risk of a condition such as this.
The people who’ve asked me to take this on previously deserved someone who could handle the subject right, and I didn’t feel like I could. I still don’t, but I can write about it in the context of the health risks posed by the sport.
My heart goes out to Billy and his people, but they are strong folks who’ve been living with this for a long time.
That they’re willing to share their story to raise awareness is something we should all be grateful for, and it suggests they’re dealing with it well.
As I said a moment ago, football has never been so awash in money and clubs haven’t spent all of it on transfer fees and salaries; enormous sums have gone into nutritionists, medical facilities, analysts and experts who can tell players what the best foods are, what the best times to eat and sleep and train are, how to recover from injuries quicker … the list is endless. But as with most things like that, this stuff is about short to medium term effects.
Studies from other professions show that just about all the work we do has long-term effects on our bodies.
It doesn’t take scientific study to work that out.
Even this one isn’t immune, and if that’s the case it’s not hard to work out how harmful others are.
It’s probably not particularly healthy for me to sit in the same position in this chair day after day, and I’ll catch all kinds of Hell for it later in life unless I start exercising more. I can sometimes feel my fingers tingling during particularly lengthy articles, and on days my hands cramp so badly it’s painful to write anything.
Guys who work in physically demanding jobs – removals, certain heavy industries, on production lines etc – find their bodies breaking down decades earlier than those who don’t.
It’s simple biology.
The body can only take so much.
We look at professional athletes and see super-fit specimens we could never hope to be. It’s easy to imagine that these people are extraordinarily healthy, and yet how many times have you read that a footballer has had to cut short his career because of a seemingly innocuous injury, but one that’s effects would multiply until he could hardly walk? Some of these things you can see in advance. Others approach by stealth.
An entire generation of construction workers in this country were poisoned by asbestos, when the long-term effects of continual exposure weren’t known. Many of them died without their families ever knowing what had killed them.
Every occupation has its hazards; it’ll be forever thus.
We just never think of football as being one of them, because, in part, so many of these guys can retire whilst still in their 30’s.
It would be nice if all of us could have done that.
But in keeping with other sports people, any number of them spend the rest of their lives in pain of one sort or another.
Many spent years taking pain-killing cocktails to get them through games; that stuff has to have an impact on you. American footballers have a high proportion of this because of the extremely physical nature of the game, but our own sport has too.
Dementia is one feature of a more enveloping problem; there’s an emerging link between the sport and motor neurone disease, of which dementia is one possible symptom. The tragic cases of Jimmy Johnstone and Fernando Ricksen, from different eras, shows that even modern medical care hasn’t found a way towards prevention far less cure … this is worrying.
The first links between sport and ALS were identified in 2003, when the English FA said it would undertake a study into the subject.
It’s been fourteen years … has anything actually been done?
Numerous football associations have set up funds for former players who are destitute or who have retired through injury; where is football’s long term investment in examining issues that impact on players twenty or more years after leaving the sport?
There’s no excuse for football not to put money behind such research, and to spend whatever it has to in mitigating the long term impact on players.
Big Billy’s condition may have come from heading those big leather footballs that used to be so common in the sport; nowadays balls are much lighter, the material they are made of is better, but that’s a risk you are never going to mitigate completely. Getting hit in the face with one still hurts. Heading one when you’re not used to it can still make your ears ring for a few minutes.
Dementia spending – at the governmental level – is around £60 million.
How much does sport, with all its TV money and record income, contribute to those costs?
It should be a lot.
It should be funding its own directed research and giving something back to wider society by putting some serious cash behind tackling the bigger issue.
Every one of us loves Billy McNeill. I never got to see him play, but I remember our centenary year when he came in as manager and we won our historic double. I know this is a man who gave a lifetime to this club. I am glad his family has spoken about this issue, and I’m glad I’ve had a chance to write about it, however briefly.
Over the next week we’ll read a lot of fine tributes to one of our greatest servants and a damned fine man. We’ll read a lot about the horrible impact of this condition, not just on Billy but on all those who suffer from it.
Football itself will weigh in, but I suspect not with money.
And if we’re really going to end this, that’s the thing football needs to do most.
The clubs won’t do it unless the league bodies push them to – they are the ones who divide up the payments, after all – so that’s where it ultimately has to start.
Maybe in highlighting the case of this giant of the game. we’ll see some action on that.