WINTER2015
21
SOCCER
AND CONCUSSIONS
T
his fall, the New York Times reported
that Bellini, Brazil's team captain in
the 1958 World Cup, had suffered from
chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.,
before his death in early 2014. C.T.E. is the
degenerative brain disease that has been
associated with former boxers and N.F.L.
players.
In "The Cost of a Header," which appeared in
the New Yorker in October, Sam Knight wrote,
"Bellini was not the first soccer player to have
been identified with C.T.E. Last February,
Patrick Grange, an American semi-professional
player who died in 2012, at the age of twenty-
nine, was also found to have suffered from the
disease."
The sports world has been talking a lot about
concussions. In 2013, the NFL agreed to
pay $765 million to more than 4,500 former
players and their families to settle a lawsuit
over concussion injuries. Are soccer players
also at risk of such injuries?
In his article, Knight, who is English, wrote
about how Jeff Astle, "a legendary striker
for West Bromwich Albion, a club in the
Midlands, died in retirement at the age of
fifty-nine. Astle, a prolific header of the
ball, had received a diagnosis of early-onset
Alzheimer's." After his death, however, a
neuropathologist found that he had indeed
suffered from C.T.E.
That was many years ago, and although
England's Football Association promised a ten-
year study on the effects of young players and
heading soccer balls, "the study fizzled out,
and the story went away."
Around the time of Bellini's death in early
2014, Willie Stewart, a neuropathologist in
Scotland, began studying samples from Astle's
brain. "In terms of head injuries and dementia,
in boxers and others that I have seen, it was
amongst the worst," he told Knight. "It was
quite a remarkably scarred brain."
Jeff Astle's daughter Dawn runs Justice for
Jeff, an organization that raises awareness
of head injuries in soccer and cares for older
players. Knight wrote: "Recently, she received
a letter from John Poole, an eighty-one-year-
old former goalkeeper for Port Vale, a club
in the third tier of English soccer, with the
names of twenty fellow-players whom he knew
had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's.
'Twenty names,' she said. 'From one guy.
From one team.'"
This year's World Cup in Brazil showed billions
of us that no one–not a trainer or a manager
or a physician–can prevent a player from
by Sylvie Green
