Heading football ‘likely’ contributed to Scottish player’s brain injury, coroner finds

A coroner found that football heading likely contributed to brain injury that was a factor in Gordon McQueen’s death, an inquest in North Yorkshire heard.

McQueen, capped for Scotland 30 times between 1974 and 1981 and a former Manchester United and Leeds player in a 16-year career, died at his home in North Yorkshire in June 2023, aged 70.

The cause of death was pneumonia after months of frailty.

Coroner Jon Heath said that frailty was due to a combination of vascular dementia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disorder linked to repeated head impacts.

Heath said: “It is likely that repetitive head impacts sustained by heading the ball while playing football contributed to the CTE.”

McQueen’s daughter, TV presenter Hayley McQueen, was in court to hear the findings.

When giving evidence, she was asked by her barrister, Michael Rawlinson KC, if her father had discussed whether anything in his past was behind his dementia.

She recalled: “He said: ‘Heading a football for all those years probably hasn’t helped.'”

She said her father was relatively injury-free during his career but did sustain some concussions, adding: “They would just head back out and play.”

She also recalled how, when she was young, he would come home from training with Manchester United and lie down in a darkened room with a headache.

McQueen came to prominence in England following his move to Leeds from St Mirren in 1972, helping the Yorkshire club to the league title in 1973-74 and playing a key role in their run to the European Cup final in 1975.

He then joined Leeds’s arch-rivals Manchester United in 1978 and went on to win the FA Cup in 1983.

Injury deprived him of a World Cup appearance in 1978 after he had been included in Scotland’s squad, having made his senior international debut in 1974 against Belgium.

After retiring as a player, McQueen had a brief spell as Airdrie manager and coach at former club St Mirren, and spent five years as coach at Middlesbrough under Bryan Robson until 2001.

He later became a pundit on Scottish TV and on Sky Sports.

The inquest was told that, after his death, McQueen’s family donated his brain to prof Willie Stewart, a consultant neuropathologist at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, who has researched brain injury in footballers and rugby players.

Stewart told the inquest that he found evidence of CTE and vascular dementia.

Stewart agreed with Rawlinson, for the McQueen family, when asked whether the CTE “more than minimally, negligibly or trivially” contributed to the death and that “heading the ball” contributed to the CTE.

The professor said that the only evidence available was McQueen’s “high exposure” to heading a football.