Headers are a fatal hit in football – but their risks won’t change the game

Much was made this week of the mighty header by Gordon McQueen that helped Scotland beat England at Wembley in 1977 – in the game where Scottish fans broke the crossbar climbing on it and tried to take it home on the tube.

McQueen’s goal was straight from the Roy of the Rovers lexicon of “soaring” headers, of big men jumping “like salmon”, of heroes leaving the earth below. Bobby Robson liked to say that Kevin Beattie could jump so high for Ipswich Town that he could see the town hall clock.

But nostalgia wasn’t the purpose of revisiting McQueen’s Wembley header. A coroner said of his death aged 70 in 2023: “I am satisfied on the balance of probability that repeatedly heading footballs contributed to his developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).”

The “balance of probability” part is in fact legally conclusive. McQueen’s daughter Hayley said: “Dad absolutely loved everything about football, but ultimately it took him in the end.”

The Wembley memory from 49 years ago offered only a small, poignant illustration. The damage to McQueen’s brain will have come from countless repetitions in training and cannonball punts by goalkeepers and weighty crosses into the penalty box.

The clip does the job, however, of focusing attention on the question: can the risks of heading a ball be mitigated, or will football, 10 years from now, be a game played only from the neck down?

Among sport’s stranger truths is that games use the human head as a tool or even a weapon. A boxer’s skull is there to be punched. A rugby player’s head is part of the armoury that blasts a hole or stops an opponent in the tackle. The footballer’s forehead is rammed into a high velocity ball to score or stop a goal.

We don’t dwell on this. It’s so much part of the spectacle that the imagination can’t stretch to it no longer happening.

Sport is ignorant no more about the dangers, but also no closer to knowing what to do about them.

Early medical research tended to deal in risk and possibility. Without hard proof, it stopped short of saying that heading footballs has killed people. The senior coroner in McQueen’s case came as close as one could to stating it as fact.

People may say 70 is a reasonable age to reach. But in this context McQueen made it only to 60. It was then that his brain health began deteriorating and his behaviour started to worry his family.

In rugby, tackle heights have been lowered and head contacts more strictly governed. Deliberate heading in much of youth football has become punishable by a free-kick as the Football Association and International Football Association Board (IFAB) trial header-free football for under-11s.

It’s not easy. In awarding free-kicks for kids, a referee must consider “the player’s intent, movement and control of the head towards the ball”. To ban heading in all football would make it a different sport. The skills that lead up to headers would be altered: the winger’s dribble and cross into the box, ball-clearing options for defenders, the beloved “aerial duels”.

Foot-ball is also air-ball: less so since the sky wars of the 1980s and 90s, but still undeniably so. Where would Arsenal be now, for example, without goals from corner kicks, many of them headed in?

When CTE was in the news following Sir Bobby Charlton’s death with dementia, I asked another former England star whether today’s players might start shying away from headers.

He was nonplussed. “Not a chance,” he said. “It won’t cross their minds.” Would the steepling ball from a goalkeeper’s clearance not strike fear into the centre-back watching it drop? Apparently not.

Strangely, given the scale of brain injuries and dementia, outright abolition in adult football isn’t yet a bandwagon. The charity Head for Change campaigns not for prohibition but “a world where sport is as good for your brain as it is for your body”.

McQueen isn’t the first player whose death has been attributed to heading. In 2002 a coroner recorded a verdict of “death by industrial injury” on West Brom and England’s Jeff Astle, whose daughter Dawn Astle said that “the game he lived for has killed him”.

Nobby Stiles was one of six members of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning side to die with dementia (the manager Sir Alf Ramsey was also afflicted). A mistake would be to pin these deaths on the heavy leather ball of the 20th century. Scientists say that modern lighter balls travel faster and can be just as harmful.

Underwriting sport at every level is an acceptance that risk is part of the unspoken contract. The problem starts when risk far outweighs reward. Class actions by hundreds of rugby union and league players with brain injuries are based on the assertion that the sport should have known – and protected its participants.

If heading is doomed, football would adapt, as F1, for example, had to after Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994. Maybe strict risk mitigation and more brain scans will avoid the need for abolition. If not, duty of care would need to prevail. There is no divine right to watch others invite brain injuries in the name of entertainment.

Photograph by Julian Finney/Getty Images