I saw today Bove of Fiorentina collapsed mid-game and is in intensive care.
This seems to be becoming a familiar thing. Nowadays, we have better medical support pitch side than 50 years ago so people like Christian Eriksen don’t join the list of five professional onfield fatalities (excluding lightning strikes and rocket attacks) already this year.
There was that Bolton player and the lad in Italy who, like Ericksen, survived cardiac arrests mid-match, whereas the likes of well-known players such as Tiote, O’Donnell, Serginho and Foe did not.
All of them plus numerous others both well known (not to me but seemingly to others as they all have their own Wikipedia pages) died too on field in the last few decades as well as many other lessers knowns from overseas or lower divisions whose legacies don’t include Wikipedia pages.
The reason I mention this is because I don’t recall this being common when I was younger, so I did some research and found FIFA published details of fatalities.
In the early days (before World War 2), most deaths resulted from injuries causing infections that proved fatal. With antibiotics, such deaths are virtually eliminated. But cardiac events are on the rise.
If we go to comparatively recent times and the 1970s, by which time major leagues as we know them today were well established globally, during that decade, 9 professional players worldwide died while playing.
In 2024, with a month to spare, we have sadly matched that total. And it’s not an aberration. In 2021, there were 18 on-field deaths of which 16 were non-injury related (a couple of fatal head injuries); the rest proven or assumed to be cardiac related.
We keep hearing about players being over-played. Look at what has happened to Man City with one star man injured? But the pace and speed of the game seems to be literally killing over-worked players.
I heard Robbie Mustoe slagging off Villa players for not trying hard enough today, hot on the heels of the same guys having a taxing midweek game vs Juventus. Obviously Villa can’t rotate as they don’t have the depth of Liverpool or Man City.
And so you take a team like Everton, with barely 16 half-decent players, many of whom play international football too, and you have to ask, if by some miracle, we made Europe, how dangerous would it be to the players’ long-term health? We’d have no choice but to roll out the same 11 or so every few days.
I know someone is thinking “This lot of wasters are far from working themselves into a sweat — much less death!” But, jokes aside, the stats show players are dying now on an almost monthly basis globally despite all our medical advances.
It’s just madness driven by greedy owners and corporations like FIFA squeezing every ounce out of people that they can.