Dementia crisis: John Aldridge has ‘problems’ after undergoing tests
Liverpool legend John Aldridge has disclosed his worries about football’s dementia crisis, admitting to experiencing “some problems” and having undergone tests.
The 65-year-old striker, who played for Liverpool during the late 1980s, estimates around three-quarters of the club’s greats from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s suffered neurological disease and said the “damage has been done” for a player of his generation.
“I headed the ball as much as anyone else, I just used to love heading the ball, practising every day,” Aldridge said. “We trained with the heavier balls and we’d stay behind after training and head it 50 or 60 times. I’ve had some problems myself and I had some tests. But I’m not worried about myself as much as worried about my family because we’ve all seen what these illnesses do to the people around you who suffer more.”
Liverpool greats whose dementia diagnosis has been made public include Tommy Smith, Ron Yeats, Geoff Strong, Bob Paisley and Terry McDermott but it is a pattern that is being repeated at clubs across the country.
Gary Pallister, another leading player of the 80s and 90s, told Telegraph Sport he saw himself as “a prime candidate for dementia” after suffering dreadful migraines between matches.
Before his death three years ago, Liverpool striker Ian St John said that virtually every big player “from the 1950s and 1960s are suffering from memory lapse or dementia in varying degrees” and called for urgent help.
Research by the University of Glasgow, which was commissioned following the Telegraph’s ‘Tackle Football’s Dementia Scandal’ campaign, found that former professional footballers were five times more likely to die of Alzheimer’s disease than the wider population. That ratio was highest in outfield players in positions that most headed the ball and there was no change in that ratio according to playing eras.
Although the old leather footballs could become heavier when wet, the modern synthetic balls move more quickly and campaigners are increasingly now hearing of problems among players from the 1980s and even the Premier League era.
“The damage has been done,” said Aldridge, who last month helped launch the LFC Memories app, part-funded by the LFC Foundation, which uses sights and sounds from the club’s history to help fans living with dementia.
Aldridge is also chairman of the former players’ association Forever Reds, which raised £75,000 for ex-footballers and local good causes with a Christmas dinner attended by 500 guests at Anfield last month. “We help our ex-players in any way we can,” Aldridge said. “It seems some of the lads that have passed away from the 50s, 60s and some 70s who were my heroes, 70 to 80 per cent had dementia or Alzheimer’s problems as well as the illness that took them.
“We’ve got four ex-players and proper Liverpool legends who have problems with it now. These are people who made Liverpool great and why we are where we are.”
On Tuesday, a legal action was launched in the High Court by a group of around 20 claimants against the Football Association, the English Football League, the Football Association of Wales and the International Football Association Board. The claimants include three former Premier League players, as well as the family of England World Cup winner Nobby Stiles, who died in 2020 from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a type of dementia linked specifically to repeated head impacts.
“We believe that many hundreds, if not thousands, of sportsmen and women currently have some level of neurological impairment from heading footballs or playing other sports, with many more having died from it over the last few centuries,” a statement from the footballers and their families said.
“We demand that the football governing bodies conduct an urgent review of the risks of brain injuries in the game and make substantive changes to minimise those risks. There is also a complete lack of financial help for the widows and families of football victims, in particular for those with CTE/dementia who are struggling with high care costs.”
The FA introduced guidance for heading limits in training following the Glasgow research and was among those who pushed for Ifab’s introduction of an additional concussion substitute. Campaigners, however, have consistently pushed for the sort of temporary substitute that exists in rugby and allows a player to be replaced mid-match while they are medically assessed away from the field of play.
