The forgotten workers of capitalist sport: caring for former professional footballers living with neurodegeneration

Rowley, J, Hardwicke, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1152-0920, Malcolm, D and Matthews, CR ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8561-2863, 2026. The forgotten workers of capitalist sport: caring for former professional footballers living with neurodegeneration. Sport in Society. ISSN 1743-0437

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Sport in Society
Creators:	Rowley, J., Hardwicke, J., Malcolm, D. and Matthews, C.R.
Publisher:	Informa UK Limited
Date:	28 March 2026
ISSN:	1743-0437
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/17430437.2026.2648519 DOI 2601181 Other
Rights:	© 2026 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Jeremy Silvester
Date Added:	08 Apr 2026 08:02
Last Modified:	08 Apr 2026 08:02
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/55503

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