A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a price to be paid for everything – even success. Ask the great Kerry footballers of the seventies who could have set up their own group scheme for hip and knee replacements after their careers ended.

They paid the price for being the first GAA team to fully embrace fitness, strength and conditioning in a way that is now standard – but before then wasn’t even a given with professional sports set-ups.

They didn’t all buy into it of course; there was one famous Kerry midfielder who, legend had it, used to cut down on the pints when it came to the business end of the All-Ireland series. With September on the horizon, he’d always head home after eight of them.

Injuries and sport go hand-in-hand, given the combative nature of the competition. But it’s the impact on later life that’s still only coming into focus.

There is a growing awareness of the prevalence of dementia among former footballers that is unquestionably linked to the years they spent heading a heavy leather football.

There was a great night in Dublin’s Vicar Street recently, a fundraiser for the Irish Professional Footballers’ Benevolent Association, the peer-supported group looking after former players who are struggling financially, mentally, physically or emotionally in later life.

The audience enjoyed a wonderful evening of stories with three of Ireland’s greatest ever players, John Giles, Liam Brady and Niall Quinn.

But it was during the interval when John Stiles, son of Nobby – and by co-incidence nephew of Johnny Giles – came out to talk of his late father and how his later years were destroyed by dementia, specifically chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

FIFA and UEFA would prefer to ignore this link because they might be on the hook for compensation, given that this is a debilitating illness that effectively occurred in the workplace.