Revealed: FA tried to prevent inquest into football’s role in player’s death

The Football Association has been accused of “wasting” a coroner’s time after claiming that it was not in the public interest for him to investigate whether football killed a former professional player with dementia.

The former Middlesbrough defender Bill Gates died last October, aged 79, after living with a degenerative brain disease since his mid-sixties which left him unable to speak, walk or care for himself. An autopsy revealed that he was suffering from severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition linked to repeated head impacts and increasingly being discovered in former footballers including Jeff Astle, Nobby Stiles and Joe Kinnear.

Senior coroner Jeremy Chipperfield said that he intended to investigate the extent to which Gates’ death was caused by trauma and, if so, whether that trauma was caused by his occupation as a footballer for Middlesbrough, where he played under Jack Charlton and became Britain’s first £50-a-week player.

Telegraph Sport, however, was among those in attendance at the pre-hearing inquest and can reveal that the FA then suggested that the investigation be dramatically curtailed.

“It is not in the public interest to extend the scope of this inquest to consider the matters that were being suggested in the family’s submissions,” said Roger Harris, the FA’s barrister. “To expand it to the course of the occupation as a footballer is neither desirable, nor proportionate nor necessary.”

There have been an increasing number of inquests into former professional footballers with dementia in recent years which, following submissions about their life and the evidence of experts, have concluded that they were killed by their jobs. In making its argument, the FA highlighted separate civil proceedings in the High Court by the families of former footballers and said that this would “inevitably delve rather more deeply” into the same “generic” issues around football, CTE and dementia.

The Gates family, however, are not part of that action and, had the FA succeeded with its argument, there are fears that a precedent could have been set which restricted future inquests from investigating other dementia-in-football deaths and thus the possibility of further industrial disease verdicts.

Michael Rawlinson KC, who was acting for the Gates family, accused the FA of wasting the coroner’s time with an irrelevant argument and confirmed that they were happy with his proposed remit. Judith Gates, the widow of Bill Gates, said: “Our family made the emotional and difficult decision to donate Bill’s brain for an autopsy. Our motivation is a commitment to evidence-based truth about Bill’s cause of death followed by the use of that truth to educate, safeguard and protect all players in the future. We naturally hoped that the FA would share our constructive perspective.”

In a statement, the FA said: “We were sad to hear of the death of Bill Gates and we wish to express our sympathy to his family. It would not be appropriate to comment on the coroner’s ongoing investigation.”

‘Promise me you will do all in your power to protect players from this dreadful disease’

By Jeremy Wilson

When the former Middlesbrough defender Bill Gates first received the devastating diagnosis of degenerative brain injury, there was enough clarity still to understand the heartbreaking inevitability of what would follow.

“Promise me that you will do all in your power to protect players of today and tomorrow from this dreadful disease,” he told his wife Judith. “No other player, no other family, should suffer as we are suffering.”

A decade on and, following Bill’s death last year, the desire to keep that promise took Judith and their son, Nick, to the market town of Crook for a pre-inquest hearing at the offices of Durham County Council. Such events are tragically not uncommon for families of former footballers, with increasing numbers now giving over their loved one’s brains to further understanding of a problem that has been staring the national game in the face for years.

The autopsy of Gates’s brain would find the highest possible level of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a vicious neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated head impacts which culminated in dementia.

You might presume that the Football Association would also want to know absolutely every possible detail about landmark cases like Gates, a brilliant man in business and charity as well as football, who spent the last years of his life confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak or care for himself.

Well, they were represented at Gates’s pre-inquest hearing but it soon became evident that they were there to argue that it was not in the “public interest” for the coroner to investigate whether playing football killed him.

“You wouldn’t ordinarily [in a dementia case] ... look at all the conceivable causes, whether it be diet or lifestyle or genes,” said Roger Harris, the solicitor working under the instruction of the FA.

Addressing Jeremy Chipperfield, the senior coroner for Durham, Harris added: “You have sufficient on the basis of the conclusions that are reached in the original medical certificate ... to answer the basic [inquest] requirements. To expand it to the course of the occupation as a footballer is neither desirable, nor proportionate nor necessary.

“Ultimately we say it is not really in the public interest in a case such as this potentially to have multiple cases proceeding in the coroner’s court – all of which will be attempting to answer the same question.”

This is not the first inquest to deal with the issue of football and dementia caused by CTE – and there have been industrial disease verdicts – but it is believed to be the first time that the FA has staged such an intervention. To say that it did not go down well inside the Crook Civic Centre would be an understatement.

“My objective is to have an investigation ... if I am to conduct an investigation, it seems to me that I have to ask some questions and answer questions – unless you are saying that I should leave it all to the High Court and abandon the investigation,” Chipperfield told Harris.

Chipperfield repeatedly said that the issues he intended to look into were Gates’s medical cause of death, the extent to which that was caused by trauma and, if so, the extent to which that trauma arose in his occupation as a footballer or other factors.

Highlighting the vast potential importance of the case, Chipperfield also noted that “it may well be there will be consideration of future death reports made at the end of this investigation”. This is in relation to how, when an ongoing risk of death has been revealed, a coroner can recommend changes that bodies like the FA should make.

As revealed by Telegraph Sport, the coroner at the inquest earlier this year of the former Cardiff City player Howard Sheppeard is already considering one such report after hearing that modern-day players may be at greater risk because of the increased speed of footballs.

Michael Rawlinson KC, who was speaking on behalf of the Gates family, expressed “regret that the FA has come to waste your time with shadow boxing”, describing their ‘public interest’ argument as “frankly brave”. In this, Harris had highlighted the proceedings that have been taken by a group of football families alleging that the FA has been negligent and, citing expense, argued that the issue of football’s dementia link should instead be dealt with in the High Court. The Gates family, however, are not part of that civil action; a factor which prompted Rawlinson to denounce the argument as an “irrelevance”.

‘The evidence is clear’

It is surely also an ongoing accumulation of knowledge from heart-breaking individual cases like Gates that will ultimately best inform the “generic” understanding of football’s association with devastating neurological diseases.

Whereas others – such as American football’s NFL – have eventually accepted the link between their sport and CTE, it was also very striking to hear the FA’s barrister repeatedly cast doubt on the scientific consensus.

“They are highly contentious issues,” said Harris, before pointing to what he claimed were unresolved questions like, “whether or not there is any causative link between concussive and non-concussive incidents in the development of long-term neurological injury” or “whether CTE has any relationship with sport” and “the extent if any, to which, scientific evidence establishes that neurodegenerative disease occurs as a result of long-term consequences of sports participation or traumatic brain injury”.

It was an interesting statement given that the FA itself jointly commissioned what became by far the most extensive study in this area – and one which found that former outfield players are almost four times more likely to suffer neurodegenerative disease than the rest of the population. And those most at risk were the very people who played for longest in positions – notably defenders – where you most often head the ball.

“The evidence is clear that the standout risk factor for neurodegenerative disease in football is exposure to head injury and head impacts,” concluded Prof Willie Stewart, the Glasgow neuropathologist who the FA itself had appointed to undertake that research.

‘A protracted death sentence’

As the Gates family made a dignified exit from the council offices in Crook – having earlier visited the woodland burial near Durham where Bill has been laid to rest – you were also reminded what really matters in all this. “Bill was well known in his community, loyal to his club, a very human man,” says Judith, of the person she first met aged only 15 and would spend the next 60 years with.

“He is representative of the majority of those players destroyed by dementia caused by CTE. It is a protracted death sentence that slowly, but inexorably, takes away every facet that made a person who they were, reducing them to a shell of their former self.

“We have spent the last 14 years, first of all seeking to save Bill, second to care for him and now our third responsibility is to ensure that the truth is spoken about his death. The remit which the coroner expressed did exactly what the family want.”

A search for the truth. It is a sentiment that you would think all sides could agree upon.