“I feel like my parents were robbed of so many good years they had together… you watch someone you love disappear.”
These were the words of Joe Kinnear’s daughter, Russelle, who she and her mother, Bonnie, chose to reveal almost three years ago. Telegram The former Wimbledon manager and Tottenham Hotspur star was about to enter full-time care after being diagnosed with dementia.
Kinnear was 77 when he died Sunday afternoon surrounded by his beloved family. However, he was only 67 years old (less than a year away from his retirement from football) when he started showing symptoms of the disease.
This has become such a tragically familiar story among former players and managers that, beyond the many memories Kinnear brought back and the sadness at his passing, it is difficult not to feel anger.
Anger over a game that still hasn’t come together to fund a full-fledged maintenance. Anger at an ecosystem that has made such limited efforts to investigate how this great sport can evolve to reduce the repetitive, high-force head impacts that we know beyond all reasonable doubt continue to cause this damage.
Anger at the political system making headlines over a recent football governance bill that ignored the issue of player welfare, even after a parliamentary committee found in 2021 that the industry was guilty of “dereliction of duty” in this regard. After all, where are the same politicians or player representatives regarding an industrial disease application that appears to meet all known requirements but has been waiting for a response for over three years?
Anyone doubting the link between dementia and football should think alone about the last few weeks, when we saw Gordon Cowans’ family reveal that Aston Villa’s greatest player had just entered a care facility at the age of 65.
And when we have just paid our respects to men like Stan Bowles and Chris Nicholl, who, like Kinnear, died in their mid-seventies after being robbed of much of the last decade of their lives. There was a similar wave of bad news when Kinnear’s dementia diagnosis was made public in 2021, following Denis Law, Terry McDermott and Gordon McQueen, who died last year at the age of 70.
And there will be many others in the weeks, months and years to come. There are many other families who desperately need financial support at the moment and are wondering whether the average player is actually better protected, even if the FA’s guidance on reducing caps in training and the PFA’s training program are taken into account.
Some people still want you to believe it’s all a coincidence. Or that the link between football and head impacts has not been fully proven.
But a peer-reviewed study has already been done, and the findings are stunning: Former outfielders are four times more likely to die from neurodegenerative diseases than the general population. Experts have not detected any decrease in this rate since football transitioned to the Premier League era.
We see and hear that this continues every year, every month, from former players doing the same job.
The same people will always tell you, as the Kinnears did, that they know similar scary stories from the families of other former players they grew up with and now share the same nightmare with.
When they went public with Kinnerar’s diagnosis, the family also wanted to publicize the stories of the “larger than life” Joe, who lit up every room he entered and was part of the successes as a player and manager who would excel in football. folklore. How he kept the twinkle in his eye and was an amazing grandfather to Russelle’s children, Nick and Dan.
But they wanted to use their platform to create change.
“I was heartbroken to see so many former players struggling with dementia,” said Bonnie, who has been with Joe for nearly 55 years. “This is very bad. There should be enough money in football to help those in need. They need to take more steps to make the game safer for those who play it now and in the future. More needs to be done in both areas. “This isn’t about us, it’s about football as a whole.”
Kinnear’s mentor was Dave Mackay, who died in 2015 after living with dementia later in life. The Kinnears were also close friends with Martin Peters and his wife Kathy. Peters, the 1966 World Cup champion, died in 2019 aged 76, having lived with dementia since his late sixties.
“Common sense tells you that the moment you start heading the ball, the damage starts,” Russelle said. “This is about the education of schools, academies, parents and coaches. It was completely heartbreaking. My mother does not leave his side; He does everything for her. They are so committed to each other, but it’s beyond exhausting. And that is devastating.”
This is a powerful message. The question once again is whether enough people in the football world are listening or actually caring.