Caring for Former Athletes living with Neurodegeneration
Jane Rowley, Tom Dening and Karen Harrison-Dening
Our Charity Manager Dr Jane Rowley worked with the team at Nottingham Trent University and talked with family carers of former professional athletes affected by Dementia and CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy). Our Chair Prof Tom Dening and Trustee Dr Karen Harrison-Dening worked to develop this work as members of the steering group.
As the links between sport, brain injuries and various neurodegeneration continue to be established, there is an increasing focus on the lives of those living with the consequences of their sporting careers. NTU’s Caring for Former Athletes who live with Neurodegeneration project seeks to explore the lives of those people and their families as a means of further our understanding of how they might be supported. This work builds on existing work being conducting at NTU within the SHAPE research centre. It draws together colleagues from across the institution, to work with academics at The University of Nottingham, Loughborough University, Sheffield University and Manchester Metropolitan University, community partners including Dementia UK, Forget Me Notts, Trent Dementia, and members of the public whose lives have been affected by a career in sport. They also produced the Sports and Brain Health booklet.
The forgotten workers of capitalist sport: caring for former professional footballers living with neurodegeneration
We recently published a paper looking into the topic of former athletes living with neurodegeneration. In 2002, a coroner’s court ruled Jeff Astle had died due to an industrial disease. If, as this case and ongoing litigation appears to suggest, the brain health of former footballers is connected to their sporting careers, there are dramatic consequences for the lives of sportspersons upon which the capitalist model of sport was built, and its current profits are maintained.
It is within such a context, that we were drawn to explore the experiences of the wives and adult children of former professional footballers. Our ten participants had caring responsibilities for their husband/father who lived with or had died from neurodegeneration. We discovered powerful, emotional and oftentimes quite traumatic accounts of their worlds.
Rowley, J., Hardwicke, J., Malcolm, D., & Matthews, C. R. (2026). The forgotten workers of capitalist sport: caring for former professional footballers living with neurodegeneration. Sport in Society, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2026.2648519