Football without headers is unthinkable – or is it? | Football

Rugby’s reckoning with dementia seems to have arrived in a rush; in football, it has been a slower burner. As a West Brom fan, I have been aware of the issue longer than most. One of our greatest players, Jeff Astle, was famed as a brilliant header of the ball. When he retired from the game, he set up a window-cleaning business with the slogan “Jeff never misses the corners”. He died 19 years ago, at the age of 59, from a degenerative brain disease. The coroner recorded a verdict of death by industrial injury.

Ever since then, Jeff’s family, led by his daughter Dawn, have campaigned to get the medical risks of heading the ball recognised. It has been a long struggle. I can’t say I have been a lot of help. I am ashamed to say that one reason for this might be that, as a presenter of football on ITV and the BBC, I was reliant on the game for my livelihood. Though no one ever told me to pipe down on the subject, I think I kept quiet for fear of biting the hands that fed me. Even as the evidence piled up, I kept shtum. I realise now that if I was self-censoring, then surely countless others were, too.

There was a bigger reason for my scepticism, though, that was unconnected with the emerging medical evidence: given that you could never take heading out of the game of football, what was the point of banging on about it? Yes, you could limit heading in lower-age-group football, but as long it was a skill required in the adult game, it would have to be practised. This was my view until last week when, not for the first time, I was telling someone how essential it is to the game when a question popped into my head: is it really? Who says? What is the evidence?

I assumed that, somewhere on planet football, the authorities had trialled header-less adult football to see how it looked. I am willing to be corrected, but as far as I have been able to ascertain, no such trial has taken place. This seems to be dilatory on the part of the authorities, which have relentlessly pressed Dawn and any number of medics for concrete evidence on the harms of heading. It seems unfair that football’s governing bodies have never presented any concrete evidence that you cannot play the game without it.

Surely the time has come to demand that evidence. For all we know, outlawing heading might even improve the game. It is, after all, axiomatic that “keeping the ball on the deck” is what you need to do to make the beautiful game beautiful. As the legendary manager Brian Clough said: “If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there.”

It may not sound like it, but I have an open mind on this. I can see the challenges for referees. Arguments over what constitutes intentional or unintentional handball are tedious enough; imagine opening up another, similar can of worms. Also, what are you supposed to do if you are in a wall for a free-kick that is fired at head height? Duck, and watch it fly into the net? If it just can’t work, then so be it. But until it is tried out properly, and the evidence presented, we cannot carry on regarding as heretical the very notion of banning heading.

As for rugby, and the news that Steve Thompson, part of England’s World Cup-winning team in 2003, has been diagnosed with early onset dementia and is joining former players in a potentially landmark legal action for the sport, I have only this insight: last week, before the revelations, I bumped into Sonja McLaughlin, a colleague from BBC Sport. She looked shocked. On her Rugby Union Weekly podcast, Thompson’s fellow World Cup winner Matt Dawson had just told her he wouldn’t want his sons to play professional rugby.

“I just think there are so many other great sports to be doing that don’t put the body and mind at risk,” said Dawson. It is a crying shame it is coming to this in rugby; football could yet go the same way.

• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist