Except most of the names on the list never had covid.
German article on the recent occurrence of cardiac issues in football
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Except most of the names on the list never had covid.
Ah, so more gibberish. Where does racism come into it?
Well then don't ask me to explain your own feels to you. It was a racially motivated mass murder, is where. If that isn't what you're feeling, then go ahead and explain why else you have no problem stating what you think is the probable explanation for footballers collapsing, but do have a problem stating what the probable explanation for the parade attack is.
We're talking about footballers collapsing, you lunatic. Not the parade thing.
In any case, I'll indulge your demented ramblings. Read what I said about the parade attack. It's not that hard to find and work out. If you want my personal opinion on what might have happened, based on the information we have, then ask nicely and I might tell you. It's nothing to do with sensitivity of the subject, but rather time elapsed and available information. People have been collapsing on the pitch more regularly over the past 20 years and we've all witnessed it over that time. The parade attack happened just a couple of days ago.
But I don't particularly have any issue discussing matters of race. Do you even know where I stand on this, or what my ethnicity is?
No, I don't care what your race is, I have a vague recollection that you're black from some other thread. So then, I did not offer an explanation for the parade attack 5 minutes after I happened. I waited, a day, until sufficient details emerged, and his social media posts emerged. Then my brain got to work and came to the most obvious and probable conclusion.
Yet you criticised me, for doing exactly what you would do, except it takes you longer because your brain isn't as powerful and needs more information than mine does. Do you see my issue with your criticism?
Yet you criticised me, for doing exactly what you would do, except it takes you longer because your brain isn't as powerful and needs more information than mine does. Do you see my issue with your criticism?
So what are we saying, because you're all mentally retarded and take a long time to determine things, that I, the most intelligent thing the universe, should slow down and wait for you to catch up? Get the fuck out. If you didn't criticise me, then I would explain and discuss my reasoning, like in a physics thread. But you act like bitches, so I do to and will happily point out how poor your brain is and how laughably wrong it's conclusions are and that's it.
I'm mixed race, but yeah...
No, I, and others, have an issue (amongst other things, I'm sure) with how people like you present your viewpoint. I think it was probably a racially-motivated attack based on the sketchy things I said in that thread. But I don't come across as a "I told you so" bellend, because that's a good way to get people to stop listening to you and have them think you're the resident psycho. If you want to have decent discussion with people (you'll say you don't care, but you obviously do because you post on here every day) then talk to people with respect and try to find common ground, even when you disagree. There's hardly any of that in the world now, and it's what's polarising people and exacerbating the world's problems. Which is what my original point in the fucking Rittenhouse thread was.
No, I, and others, have an issue (amongst other things, I'm sure) with how people like you present your viewpoint. I think it was probably a racially-motivated attack based on the sketchy things I said in that thread. But I don't come across as a "I told you so" bellend, because that's a good way to get people to stop listening to you and have them think you're the resident psycho. If you want to have decent discussion with people (you'll say you don't care, but you obviously do because you post on here every day) then talk to people with respect and try to find common ground, even when you disagree. There's hardly any of that in the world now, and it's what's polarising people and exacerbating the world's problems. Which is what my original point in the fucking Rittenhouse thread was.
Looks like the Dantes bot forgot to change forum_thread_id argument on his task schedule and now leaking all over football forum.
Can someone pls fix the bot code or maybe assign an isolation scope for the stupid bot code so it’s limited to = [“Trump”,”Covid”,”China”,”India”,”ProudBoys”]
Thank you
Can someone pls fix the bot code or maybe assign an isolation scope for the stupid bot code so it’s limited to = [“Trump”,”Covid”,”China”,”India”,”ProudBoys”]
Thank you
and Trump? And Socialism? and china?
DO YOU REALIZE DANTE'S BRAIN IS BIGGER THAN YOURS?
Which you spent five odd years insulting me about. That's fine when you genuinely disagree with me, and when I post graphs to explain that you're wrong, it's because you were wrong and I was right. That is fine, I'm not a tyrannical dictator. What isn't fine, is after the fact when you were wrong about Trump, about blood clots, about x, y and z, the insults continue by saying I was "obsessed with trump" and so forth. Like no, I was right, you were wrong, you don't like that being inarguable now, so then mischaracterise me as a trump fan boy. So at that point there is nothing to discuss with you apart from to laugh at your feeble brains getting anything and everything else comically wrong.
Are you ok man?
We never did 'graph' encounters - that was with other people (admission - I never bothered following those debates, they bored me silly ... I prefer graphs for other discussions, not a virus that depresses me).
I don't think I called you a 'trump fan boy' - but my memory isn't as amazing as yours.
But back to my original point, are you ok?
I'm fine. Everyone is replying to me like I'm not. Fact check: I was right, everyone else was wrong, my brain is working as well as ever. I'm questioning your brains, because they arrived at conclusions that are beyond belief, I want to know how you can be that stupid, so I can understand the doom awaiting the world better, that's it. It's obviously insulting to those people but that ain't my fault. You're either genuinely stupid, which sorry I guess, or you're being wilfully stupid because you don't like me and want to argue, in which case lol how'd that work out moron.
Are you ok?
What conclusions are you talking about? I've stayed away from subjects you love because I have no interest or patience to debate them on this site.
I may be genuinely stupid (don't know) and I don't think I have an issue with you, or any other poster on this site. So no I'm not looking to debate, I just have no fucking clue what you're talking about as it seems you're mixing up various topics ... but yes, lol, it worked out great.
Hope you're ok man -
But not five times the normal rate
No. As Woland said, it could be covid. It could be the vaccine. It could be both. It could be doping. It could be the extensive, exhaustive demands placed on professional athletes these days. It could be all of the above. It could be climate change...
Farkmaster: adamant trump was responsible for the covid deaths, treated me like a cunt for trying to correct his view, now proven wrong, resorted to silence as biden's death toll has surpassed trump's
Whaddapie: adamant i was a cunt for calling biden a paedophile when he hit on that girl in the audience, proven wrong with his daughter diary and one of the girls he groped on camera saying what he did, now proven wrong, resorting to silence and making out that replying to me is some herculean emotionally taxing life event for him
Sanchez: can't be arsed, moron
Literally everyone: accusing me of stupidity thinking trump was a good president, now proven wrong
Frogfish: adamant the blood clots were not caused by the vaccines, dismissed my explanation of how probabilities work, usual routine insulting me as conspiracy theorist, proven wrong, but rather than remain silent he explained his reasoning and I understand the source of his stupidity on that well enough
Ruban: adamant rittenhouse was out to murder people, proven wrong by the evidence, insults me and ignores the evidence replacing it with his own fantasy, his stupidity also makes some sense to me so it's not a total waste of time
Lippy: saying the mass murderer was more likely to be escaping some incident, utterly ridiculous, refused to explain his reasoning, proven wrong, then silence, makes out that replying to me causes him emotional distress in order to justify silence
So on and so forth, memory doesn't serve. Oh yes StevieM thinking the us border crisis was the continuation of a normal trend. People blaming afghanistan on trump, inflation, the vaccine issues, these are all horribly bad conclusions, you have to be so clueless about the most basic principles of cause and effect to arrive at such retarded opinions. If you could all start being right again about things that'd be good, I would happily discuss the things with people who could be right (such as trump for five years, despite the insults), otherwise the only thing worth learning about is the source of your collective stupidities.
Why do you care about people you don't respect or know face to face?
If it was your friends, I'd say ok but why do you care?
But all this stuff should be in the general chat forum - you don't need to talk about it in every thread.
You are indeed stupid and no amount of random postings won’t help convince anyone other wise but don’t be so sensitive about it.
It’s funny how personal you have taken this and level of personal grudge you are holding. I never resorted to calling you any names or call your new poster boy Ritten a murderer but them problem is in your head you straight away make various conclusions without any evidence.
Normally it’s not nice to see such a meltdown on non GF forum but in your case, Hmmm.
Get some help...
Oh yes, I forgot something.
Rubans: making a list of 20 odd things to show trump is a racist, being told that 19 of them are not racist and the other 1 was not proven, cue silence, followed by whining about me mentioning trump to him, how tiring it is for him to keep hearing about trump etc etc, and then denies holding any opinion about the matter anyway, that was a classicly awful example of trying to deflect from the actual issue of biden being racist, by activating full tds clown brain
You can say as many words to me as you like, but you'll never ever catch me applying such horrifically bad reasoning skills, it won't happen. If it did happen, then I'd be melting down, but sorry, don't hold your breath.
DOJ said Trump's policy was racist, go and take it up them if you have the balls but all you do is sit on this forum virtual signal, pure woke indeed you seem to be.
You are having a public melt down, it's all a bit embarrassing and even more than usual but still funny.
Fleck tested positive for Covid in June. Related or not, nobody knows yet why he collapsed yesterday, but thankfully the initial tests are all ok according to their chairman.
I pity the two bellends on here trying to score some points in the Covid debate, which has now found it way like a virus itself into the Football forum, and use everything they can to front their obsession.
I pity the two bellends on here trying to score some points in the Covid debate, which has now found it way like a virus itself into the Football forum, and use everything they can to front their obsession.
Hansern logic - two people I know got Covid. One was double vaccinated and ended up really sick in hospital. The other was unvaccinated and only had mild symptoms.
Thank god for the vaccine.
Brain-dead cunt
A man collapses on a football pitch once every four days. Is the threat of cardiac arrest getting worse?
Daniel Taylor Nov 19, 2021
108
“I remember it as a normal day until we had scored. Until the goal, there were no signs that anything was different. I felt really good in the match and the warm-up. After we had scored, everything was pretty black.”
Emil Palsson is reliving the moments when he became the latest professional footballer to need life-saving treatment on a pitch.
It was the 12th minute of Sogndal’s game against Stjordals-Blink in Norway’s second division. Palsson, a 28-year-old midfielder with one Iceland cap, was on loan at Sogndal from Sarpsborg 08. His team-mate, Steffen Skalevik, had opened the scoring in the seventh minute. It was just a normal match, on a normal day.
And then everything, as Palsson says, went dark.
“I just thought he had received a bang,” says Skalevik. “Then the medical staff started to take over. I could see that he was fighting for his life and, after that, we were in a state of shock.”
For four minutes, Palsson was technically dead. His heart had stopped. But the medics refused to give up and managed to bring him back to consciousness before the helicopter arrived to fly him to hospital.
“There were similarities with Christian Eriksen,” says Axel Kryger, another Sogndal player. “I was thinking, ‘This is not going to happen here’. Suddenly a good friend is lying there, completely lifeless.”
Everyone, of course, knows what happened to Eriksen because there has never been another incident like it, in front of a live television audience, during a major international tournament.
There are photographs of the medics working to revive Palsson while the players stand around and, again, there is utter despair on their faces. But there are not the television pictures that flashed around the world after Erikssen collapsed in Denmark’s first game of Euro 2020. What happened to Palsson was still terrifying but it had only a small fraction of the coverage.
Perhaps you might not be familiar either with the story of Rune Coghe, an 18-year-old who suffered a suspected heart attack while playing for the Belgian club Eendracht Hooglede in August.
That same month, there was the trauma of Jente Van Genechten, a Belgian player, going into cardiac arrest during a game with Lanaken. “Suddenly the lights went out for a while,” he said after waking in hospital. “That’s all I remember.“
In September, a 27-year-old amateur footballer by the name of Jens De Smet died after collapsing during another game in Belgium.
But there have also been other incidents, at all levels of the sport, even before we take into account the threat to Sergio Aguero’s career since the Barcelona striker, formerly of Manchester City, was taken off in a game against Alaves on October 30 with what turned out to be a potentially life-changing heart problem.
When the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung put together a list of recent cases in Europe it found 23 incidents of footballers, coaches or match officials collapsing with suspected heart issues from July 11 to October 15.
That works out, on average, around one incident every four days. Four had resulted in deaths, including the tragedy of 17-year-old Dylan Rich, who collapsed in an FA Youth Cup tie for the Nottinghamshire side West Bridgford Colts in September.
The obvious question here is whether the numbers are abnormal. If so, what are the reasons for this spike?
It is a complex, difficult subject and there are also some challenging issues to address when there is plainly a level of concern among many professional footballers that the COVID-19 vaccinations might be linked to what, on the face of it, seems like an increase in heart issues.
“A lot of players are refusing to be vaccinated,” Professor Sanjay Sharma, one of the world’s leading cardiologists, told The Athletic this week. “They are worried that this vaccine is causing trouble. And they don’t want to run into trouble.
“We have some very, very eminent players in the Premier League who are point-blank refusing the vaccine. I had a call from a very eminent professional athlete this week saying he didn’t want to have it, that they were trying to force him, and wondering what my view was.”
Sharma is the head of research and professor of sports cardiology for St George’s University in London and has an international reputation for his award-winning work.
He is also the chairman of the Football Association’s expert cardiac committee and in charge of the heart screening programme that has been set up to minimise the risks for footballers in England and Wales. Nobody is better qualified to discuss whether the number of recent cases should be a cause for concern.
“My belief is that it is a statistical cluster,” he says. “I look after the London Marathon (as medical director) and we can go three or four years with nothing. Then, in year five, there are three cardiac arrests. You think, ‘Was there something about this race? Was it the weather? Was it the pollution?’. And yet, it could just be a statistical thing.”
At the same time, Sharma does understand why the numbers can seem alarming to many people who remember the death in 2003 of Marc-Vivien Foe in a game for Cameroon, as well as Fabrice Muamba needing life-saving treatment during an FA Cup tie for Bolton Wanderers at Tottenham Hotspur in 2012.
“There are lots of reasons it looks like it’s going up,” says Sharma. “First, footballers are much more in tune with their cardiac health than they ever were. They have watched the Muamba episode, the Foe episode and the Eriksen episode and many of these players are concerned something like this could happen to them. Many of them have witnessed these cardiac arrests.
Aguero pulls up while playing for Barcelona against Deportivo Alaves last month (Photo: Alex Caparros/Getty Images)
“Players are much more likely now to complain of a cardiac problem than ever before. Aguero, for example. He didn’t have a cardiac arrest but he clearly had a cardiac symptom that caused him to stop playing instead of thinking, ‘Gosh, I don’t know what that is, I will just carry on and see if it goes’.”
The second factor Sharma points out is that it is much easier, in the age of the internet and 24/7 news, to find out about similar incidents in other countries. That, he says, can make them feel increasingly common when, in reality, the numbers might not have changed as drastically as it seems.
But there is another important issue he wants to flag up. “The game has changed. It’s much faster, much more dynamic, and the players are playing far more games than ever before. There are more competitions, more international football, and you wonder for someone vulnerable with a mild predisposition whether all this football takes its toll sometimes.”
Dr Scott Murray is the founder and consultant preventative cardiologist at Venturi Cardiology, a heart clinic in Cheshire that was opened by Muamba earlier this year.
“We’re more aware than we ever have been, with everyone linked up on social media and internet sites, and that’s why we know these days if a lower-division Belgian player has collapsed and died,” says Murray.
“I’ve made the point that this is happening, week in week out, in grassroots and professional football throughout the world and that, unfortunately, there is a certain attrition rate from cardiac abnormalities in young and middle-aged players. I don’t think that has increased dramatically, I just think we are more aware of it.”
Medical analysis has concentrated on looking at male footballers and also found that cardiac issues are more common in black players. One study, published by the New England School of Medicine in 2018, took its data from the screening of 11,168 players (95 per cent of whom were male) in the FA’s system, starting at the age of 16, from 1996 to 2016.
Researchers calculated that the number of sudden cardiac deaths was one per 15,000 whereas it was previously thought to be, at most, one in 100,000.
But there are also cases that are genuinely shocking for even the experts in this field. Eriksen, for example, was routinely screened for heart issues while he was at Tottenham Hotspur, something Professor Sharma knows all about since he was the cardiologist involved. Eriksen, he says, was checked annually and reported “normal” results.
“We knew about his cardiac health, or at least we thought we did,” Sharma says. “This came out of the blue. We don’t know what went wrong that day, whether he was carrying something, whether he’d had a virus recently. Had he had COVID? Had he been vaccinated? We’re still not clear.
“In this pandemic, there are so many people thinking, ‘Is COVID causing some clinical influence in the hearts that has resulted in two or three of these episodes?’.”
The last available data from the Premier League, published on October 19, showed that almost a third of footballers in England’s top division were not fully vaccinated. It is understood that at three clubs, less then 25 per cent of players were double-jabbed. In the English Football League, only 49 per cent of players had been fully vaccinated as of September. A quarter of EFL players had indicated they intend to remain vaccine-free.
“We are still in new territory, but it’s true to say that some males have had inflammation of the heart muscle after the second dose,” says Sharma. “It’s still very early days. If you look at the statistics from America, they reckon one in about 20 million young men who have been vaccinated have run into trouble. The sporting community is much smaller — it would take quite a few of these cardiac arrests before we link them to the vaccine.”
Sharma has several roles within some of the UK’s biggest sporting organisations and, with that, there is a level of responsibility. He chooses his words carefully.
“For me to say the vaccine could be implicated would be the most irresponsible thing in the world,“ he says. “All that happens then is the biggest stars would say, ‘I don’t want this vaccine’. These are role models for thousands and thousands and thousands of young people who would then be saying, ‘If he’s not having it, why should we?’ Then, of course, these guys spread it to the 80-year-olds and we are not containing the pandemic anymore.”
Anyone who has looked this up online or monitored the news will know it is a divisive subject. “The weird thing about the internet is you can’t shut it up,” says Dr Murray. “If you want to look hard enough, you will find enough evidence for one thing. And you could also find enough evidence for the exact opposite.
“That breeds this bewildering theatre where no one can make sense of anything and it leads to apathy. It leads to people switching off — ‘Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore’ — and that allows nonsensical information to be in traction and experts to be belittled. It’s a very strange time.”
All that can be said for certain is that it is shocking, deeply shocking, when a high-achieving athlete in any sport is left so vulnerable to suspected heart issues.
Denmark players formed a shield around Eriksen while he received treatment (Photo: Friedmann Vogel/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The story, for instance, of Giuseppe Perrino, once on the books of Parma, who died in June playing in a memorial match for his brother, Rocco, who had suffered a fatal heart attack while cycling in 2018. Or the times, post-Eriksen, when it was easy to fear something terrible might be happening again.
There was the panic and confusion of Dimitri Lienard collapsing in Strasbourg’s game against Lyon in September (a false alarm, fortunately, and merely a case of severe fatigue). The previous month, it was the Congo international Fabrice Nsakala who had to be taken to hospital after collapsing during a Besiktas game in Turkey’s Super Lig.
Both have played since. It is still unnerving, however, to witness that now-familiar scene: the footballers from both sides standing around helplessly while medics work on a player who, shortly before, was running about with no apparent problem.
Eriksen, 29, is waiting to discover whether he can play football again and, if so, it will not be with his current club, Inter Milan, since rules in Italy forbid anyone from taking part if they have been fitted with a pacemaker.
Aguero has said he will take expert advice before deciding early next year whether he can play on. He has undergone his own heart procedure and there have been reports in Spain that Manchester City’s all-time record scorer may be advised to retire, aged 33.
As for Palsson, it is too early to say what comes next. “I may not be able to play football anymore, but there are more things than football in life,” he says. “Right now, it’s about living a good life. I try to think about it as little as possible and we will see what happens in the future.”
Daniel Taylor Nov 19, 2021
“I remember it as a normal day until we had scored. Until the goal, there were no signs that anything was different. I felt really good in the match and the warm-up. After we had scored, everything was pretty black.”
Emil Palsson is reliving the moments when he became the latest professional footballer to need life-saving treatment on a pitch.
It was the 12th minute of Sogndal’s game against Stjordals-Blink in Norway’s second division. Palsson, a 28-year-old midfielder with one Iceland cap, was on loan at Sogndal from Sarpsborg 08. His team-mate, Steffen Skalevik, had opened the scoring in the seventh minute. It was just a normal match, on a normal day.
And then everything, as Palsson says, went dark.
“I just thought he had received a bang,” says Skalevik. “Then the medical staff started to take over. I could see that he was fighting for his life and, after that, we were in a state of shock.”
For four minutes, Palsson was technically dead. His heart had stopped. But the medics refused to give up and managed to bring him back to consciousness before the helicopter arrived to fly him to hospital.
“There were similarities with Christian Eriksen,” says Axel Kryger, another Sogndal player. “I was thinking, ‘This is not going to happen here’. Suddenly a good friend is lying there, completely lifeless.”
Everyone, of course, knows what happened to Eriksen because there has never been another incident like it, in front of a live television audience, during a major international tournament.
There are photographs of the medics working to revive Palsson while the players stand around and, again, there is utter despair on their faces. But there are not the television pictures that flashed around the world after Erikssen collapsed in Denmark’s first game of Euro 2020. What happened to Palsson was still terrifying but it had only a small fraction of the coverage.
Perhaps you might not be familiar either with the story of Rune Coghe, an 18-year-old who suffered a suspected heart attack while playing for the Belgian club Eendracht Hooglede in August.
That same month, there was the trauma of Jente Van Genechten, a Belgian player, going into cardiac arrest during a game with Lanaken. “Suddenly the lights went out for a while,” he said after waking in hospital. “That’s all I remember.“
In September, a 27-year-old amateur footballer by the name of Jens De Smet died after collapsing during another game in Belgium.
But there have also been other incidents, at all levels of the sport, even before we take into account the threat to Sergio Aguero’s career since the Barcelona striker, formerly of Manchester City, was taken off in a game against Alaves on October 30 with what turned out to be a potentially life-changing heart problem.
When the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung put together a list of recent cases in Europe it found 23 incidents of footballers, coaches or match officials collapsing with suspected heart issues from July 11 to October 15.
That works out, on average, around one incident every four days. Four had resulted in deaths, including the tragedy of 17-year-old Dylan Rich, who collapsed in an FA Youth Cup tie for the Nottinghamshire side West Bridgford Colts in September.
The obvious question here is whether the numbers are abnormal. If so, what are the reasons for this spike?
It is a complex, difficult subject and there are also some challenging issues to address when there is plainly a level of concern among many professional footballers that the COVID-19 vaccinations might be linked to what, on the face of it, seems like an increase in heart issues.
“A lot of players are refusing to be vaccinated,” Professor Sanjay Sharma, one of the world’s leading cardiologists, told The Athletic this week. “They are worried that this vaccine is causing trouble. And they don’t want to run into trouble.
“We have some very, very eminent players in the Premier League who are point-blank refusing the vaccine. I had a call from a very eminent professional athlete this week saying he didn’t want to have it, that they were trying to force him, and wondering what my view was.”
Sharma is the head of research and professor of sports cardiology for St George’s University in London and has an international reputation for his award-winning work.
He is also the chairman of the Football Association’s expert cardiac committee and in charge of the heart screening programme that has been set up to minimise the risks for footballers in England and Wales. Nobody is better qualified to discuss whether the number of recent cases should be a cause for concern.
“My belief is that it is a statistical cluster,” he says. “I look after the London Marathon (as medical director) and we can go three or four years with nothing. Then, in year five, there are three cardiac arrests. You think, ‘Was there something about this race? Was it the weather? Was it the pollution?’. And yet, it could just be a statistical thing.”
At the same time, Sharma does understand why the numbers can seem alarming to many people who remember the death in 2003 of Marc-Vivien Foe in a game for Cameroon, as well as Fabrice Muamba needing life-saving treatment during an FA Cup tie for Bolton Wanderers at Tottenham Hotspur in 2012.
“There are lots of reasons it looks like it’s going up,” says Sharma. “First, footballers are much more in tune with their cardiac health than they ever were. They have watched the Muamba episode, the Foe episode and the Eriksen episode and many of these players are concerned something like this could happen to them. Many of them have witnessed these cardiac arrests.
Aguero pulls up while playing for Barcelona against Deportivo Alaves last month (Photo: Alex Caparros/Getty Images)
“Players are much more likely now to complain of a cardiac problem than ever before. Aguero, for example. He didn’t have a cardiac arrest but he clearly had a cardiac symptom that caused him to stop playing instead of thinking, ‘Gosh, I don’t know what that is, I will just carry on and see if it goes’.”
The second factor Sharma points out is that it is much easier, in the age of the internet and 24/7 news, to find out about similar incidents in other countries. That, he says, can make them feel increasingly common when, in reality, the numbers might not have changed as drastically as it seems.
But there is another important issue he wants to flag up. “The game has changed. It’s much faster, much more dynamic, and the players are playing far more games than ever before. There are more competitions, more international football, and you wonder for someone vulnerable with a mild predisposition whether all this football takes its toll sometimes.”
Dr Scott Murray is the founder and consultant preventative cardiologist at Venturi Cardiology, a heart clinic in Cheshire that was opened by Muamba earlier this year.
“We’re more aware than we ever have been, with everyone linked up on social media and internet sites, and that’s why we know these days if a lower-division Belgian player has collapsed and died,” says Murray.
“I’ve made the point that this is happening, week in week out, in grassroots and professional football throughout the world and that, unfortunately, there is a certain attrition rate from cardiac abnormalities in young and middle-aged players. I don’t think that has increased dramatically, I just think we are more aware of it.”
Medical analysis has concentrated on looking at male footballers and also found that cardiac issues are more common in black players. One study, published by the New England School of Medicine in 2018, took its data from the screening of 11,168 players (95 per cent of whom were male) in the FA’s system, starting at the age of 16, from 1996 to 2016.
Researchers calculated that the number of sudden cardiac deaths was one per 15,000 whereas it was previously thought to be, at most, one in 100,000.
But there are also cases that are genuinely shocking for even the experts in this field. Eriksen, for example, was routinely screened for heart issues while he was at Tottenham Hotspur, something Professor Sharma knows all about since he was the cardiologist involved. Eriksen, he says, was checked annually and reported “normal” results.
“We knew about his cardiac health, or at least we thought we did,” Sharma says. “This came out of the blue. We don’t know what went wrong that day, whether he was carrying something, whether he’d had a virus recently. Had he had COVID? Had he been vaccinated? We’re still not clear.
“In this pandemic, there are so many people thinking, ‘Is COVID causing some clinical influence in the hearts that has resulted in two or three of these episodes?’.”
The last available data from the Premier League, published on October 19, showed that almost a third of footballers in England’s top division were not fully vaccinated. It is understood that at three clubs, less then 25 per cent of players were double-jabbed. In the English Football League, only 49 per cent of players had been fully vaccinated as of September. A quarter of EFL players had indicated they intend to remain vaccine-free.
“We are still in new territory, but it’s true to say that some males have had inflammation of the heart muscle after the second dose,” says Sharma. “It’s still very early days. If you look at the statistics from America, they reckon one in about 20 million young men who have been vaccinated have run into trouble. The sporting community is much smaller — it would take quite a few of these cardiac arrests before we link them to the vaccine.”
Sharma has several roles within some of the UK’s biggest sporting organisations and, with that, there is a level of responsibility. He chooses his words carefully.
“For me to say the vaccine could be implicated would be the most irresponsible thing in the world,“ he says. “All that happens then is the biggest stars would say, ‘I don’t want this vaccine’. These are role models for thousands and thousands and thousands of young people who would then be saying, ‘If he’s not having it, why should we?’ Then, of course, these guys spread it to the 80-year-olds and we are not containing the pandemic anymore.”
Anyone who has looked this up online or monitored the news will know it is a divisive subject. “The weird thing about the internet is you can’t shut it up,” says Dr Murray. “If you want to look hard enough, you will find enough evidence for one thing. And you could also find enough evidence for the exact opposite.
“That breeds this bewildering theatre where no one can make sense of anything and it leads to apathy. It leads to people switching off — ‘Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore’ — and that allows nonsensical information to be in traction and experts to be belittled. It’s a very strange time.”
All that can be said for certain is that it is shocking, deeply shocking, when a high-achieving athlete in any sport is left so vulnerable to suspected heart issues.
Denmark players formed a shield around Eriksen while he received treatment (Photo: Friedmann Vogel/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
The story, for instance, of Giuseppe Perrino, once on the books of Parma, who died in June playing in a memorial match for his brother, Rocco, who had suffered a fatal heart attack while cycling in 2018. Or the times, post-Eriksen, when it was easy to fear something terrible might be happening again.
There was the panic and confusion of Dimitri Lienard collapsing in Strasbourg’s game against Lyon in September (a false alarm, fortunately, and merely a case of severe fatigue). The previous month, it was the Congo international Fabrice Nsakala who had to be taken to hospital after collapsing during a Besiktas game in Turkey’s Super Lig.
Both have played since. It is still unnerving, however, to witness that now-familiar scene: the footballers from both sides standing around helplessly while medics work on a player who, shortly before, was running about with no apparent problem.
Eriksen, 29, is waiting to discover whether he can play football again and, if so, it will not be with his current club, Inter Milan, since rules in Italy forbid anyone from taking part if they have been fitted with a pacemaker.
Aguero has said he will take expert advice before deciding early next year whether he can play on. He has undergone his own heart procedure and there have been reports in Spain that Manchester City’s all-time record scorer may be advised to retire, aged 33.
As for Palsson, it is too early to say what comes next. “I may not be able to play football anymore, but there are more things than football in life,” he says. “Right now, it’s about living a good life. I try to think about it as little as possible and we will see what happens in the future.”
That's one impressive sample size.
You need help. Creating your own version of events is an indication of insanity.
Yeah, I'd be looking at the betting markets for that one.
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