The forgotten workers of capitalist sport: caring for former professional footballers 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. Drawing on classic critical sociological accounts of sport and framed by Mills’ outlining of private troubles and public issues, we provide empirical glimpses into the outcome of exploitative athletic labour and the lack of institutional support associated with the ‘forgotten workers’ of professional football. These insights represent the first social scientific accounts of such experiences in this sample. Based on our findings we conclude by arguing that scholars who are committed to doing genuinely critical research on performance sports should keep attending to the capitalist structuring of such social worlds.