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The Football Association’s failure to reveal how much it spends on head-injury research left MPs “lost for words” during a parliamentary hearing.
FA chief medic Charlotte Cowie said she did not know the figure during a department of culture media and sport session into head injuries in sport.
However, DCMS chair Julian Knight criticised Cowie’s failure to provide a figure.
“I am absolutely appalled. I think you’re too embarrassed,” Knight said.
In responding to questions about the level of FA funding into head injury research, Cowie said there was “no funding limit but we want it to be the best in answer to our research questions.”
Knight responded by saying: “I am staggered and I think this committee is staggered you have not come here today furnished with the information in terms of how much money you are spending on research in the last year.”
Conservative MP Heather Wheeler told Cowie: “I don’t know if I could do your job, love. I’m lost for words.”
Later in the session, the chief executive of the Rugby Football Union Bill Sweeney said that it spent £350,000 on injuries, of which head injuries were a large part, and committed “millions” of pounds to ongoing research.
By comparison, the FA commits a six-figure sum, but finances are understood to be only one element to getting other research off the ground. Cowie said involving the right participants was one issue it had to contend with.
The session also heard criticisms of football’s approach to brain injuries from former Blackburn forward Chris Sutton and campaigner Dawn Astle, whose father former West Brom striker Jeff, was ruled to have died of a brain condition normally linked to boxers.
Cowie stated that the FA had contributed to the 2019 FIELD study into neurodegenerative brain diseases.
That research found that former footballers were between two and five times more likely than the general population to die from degenerative brain diseases.
The governing body has proposed further research into the cause of increased risk of brain injuries in footballers and has ensured heading is reduced in training for under-18s. Players in those age ranges will head the ball a maximum 10 times in training during a single week.
Cowie told the committee: “They really are the most stringent heading guidelines that exist in a football governing body in the world at the moment and we are moving to heading guidelines in the professional game.”
She said introducing similar measures into professional football would depend on the results of a survey looking at the effectiveness of the youth football guidelines. Further work, she said, will also involve using specialist mouthguards that can help to measure the force and impact of different types of headers.
Cowie was also quizzed on why football had chosen permanent substitutions over temporary ones used in rugby, saying: “The overwhelming view of the doctors who worked in football was this would work best as our model.”
But Sutton, whose father died of dementia last year having played professional football, said the new substitutions laws “don’t have the players’ welfare and health at heart”.
He also estimated he had headed the ball 72,000 times in his career and called for clubs to limit heading in training to a maximum of 20 per session and allow a minimum of 48 hours between those sessions.
“We don’t need to keep having meetings about meetings about this, this needs to happen immediately,” he said.
“Hundreds if not thousands of players have died from dementia and if we don’t get on top of this now, hundreds or thousands more will die.
“It’s really important the government take ownership of this, because the FA and the PFA haven’t done anywhere near enough.”
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