“When he died, it was a relief. He was lying in bed, couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat, laid there with a nappy on. No-one would want to live like that, and I didn’t want him to live like that.”
Sue Bird’s final years married to former Mansfield Town defender Kevin Bird were marred by grief and violence.
Her loving husband’s personality was decimated by dementia and he was finally sectioned in 2020. He never came home and died in February 2023.
Like the Bird family, Tina White began to worry about her husband Goff – a one-time semi-professional footballer who played for Ryde, Waterlooville and Basingstoke – when he developed an erratic temper that led him to behave with uncharacteristic aggression.
“His whole personality changed. Before, he had empathy. He was a very loving and passionate man towards me. But he became a totally different person, a person that I didn’t like. One day he got really aggressive and said he wanted to kill me.
“He wasn’t Goff – we lost Goff a long time ago.”
Sue and Tina believe repeatedly heading footballs killed their husbands.
CTE & football – the brief background
The Bird and White families are part of a group whose footballer relatives were diagnosed with neurological conditions caused by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
CTE is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. However, a definitive diagnosis can only be given after death, as it requires analysis of the brain.
On Friday, a group of families – also including 1966 World Cup winner Nobby Stiles’ son John – will present medical submissions to the High Court in London in the latest stage of a legal challenge being brought against the Football Association, its Welsh counterpart and international football’s lawmakers Ifab. They are taking action over what they say are brain injuries caused by repeated impacts between head and ball.
Some of the families have also written to the government to request all British sportspeople’s brains be tested for CTE after death to “force sports to adopt better protocols in respect of brain welfare” and “provide greater awareness of the risk of brain injuries for sports participants”.
BBC Sport spoke to the widows of ex-footballers about their experiences of dealing with CTE, which they say is also “an issue for the youth of today” not just “an old person’s disease”.
