Cardiovascular Disease in Professional Footballers

 by Felix Roth

In recent times, there is only one issue that has rivalled COVID-19 as the hot topic of health problems amongst Professional athletes and footballers in particular. A problem so dire that it doesn’t just cause your nose to run and lungs to tighten, but your whole body to tire, exhaust itself and even shut down; Cardiovascular disease. A health problem that is seamlessly able to destroy our immortal image of the athletes that we watch battle on the pitch every weekend as they are, in our eyes, reduced to human beings who too suffer from health problems.

Many football fans will remember the date of the 25th May 2021. Not because it is an embodiment of an event as 9/11 is , but because of the image of a man temporarily being stripped of life in front of 15,000 people and millions more on television. That man is of course Christen Eriksen, who suffered from a cardiac arrest in the 42nd minute of Denmark’s group stage game against Finland at EURO 2020. The game understandably caused distress to a multitude of people as they witnessed the very grim reality of Cardio related illness as they watched a man who had maintained peak fitness for 29 years stricken by an infirmity akin to those that senile citizens face. As a result of his cardiac arrest, Eriksen was fitted with an Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator and forced into retirement. Eriksen will be able to look back on his career with fond memories as he made a name for himself with Ajax then became a staple of the Tottenham Hotspur’s team before finishing his career with Inter Milan in the top flight of Italian football.

A memory that Eriksen may look back on with the most fondness is the 2019 Champions league quarter final in which he assisted Son Heung Min to dispatch Manchester City and help Spurs reach their first European Cup semi-final in over 50 years. Sergio Aguero, a man on the other side of the pitch will look back on the event with different memories as he scored 1 goal and assisted in Manchester City’s loss.  But he will forever be remembered for his goal scoring heroics in the premier league and assistance of City’s title winning prowess. More recently however, Aguero has been at the forefront of cardiovascular related disease as he left the field 2 months ago after reportedly feeling “chest discomfort”. When speaking on the matter on twitter he said this; “Given the rumours, I tell them that I am following the indications of the club's doctors, doing tests and treatment and seeing my progress within 90 days. Always positive”. Whilst this may be true the outlook is ultimately worrying for Aguero as he faces the very real possibility of being forced into an early retirement.

Fabrice Maumba, former Bolton Wanderer, will unfortunately never have a legacy on the ball that rivals that of Sergio Aguero’s, however the legacy that his health created will as he suffered cardiac arrest on the 12th March 2012 in an FA Cup match against Tottenham Hotspurs. As a result of his cardiac arrest, his heart was stopped for 78 minutes and was kept under intensive care for the following days. Following the cardiac arrest, Maumba was fitted with an Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator and forced to retire from professional football. It was later concluded that Maumba’s cardiac arrest was due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. A form of cardiovascular disease in which the muscles of the heart are unusually thick, disrupting flood flow in the heart and potentially causing cardiac arrest as was such in Maumba’s case. When looked at under a microscope, patients with HCM are found to have irregular heart muscle patterns, disrupting the beat of the heart. Furthermore, Afro Caribbean athletes such as Maumba are found to be at higher risk of HCM death than any other ethnicity. 

Whilst cardiovascular disease encompasses nearly every ailment pertaining to that of the heart, cardiovascular diseases in the general public such as Coronary heart disease are nearly non-existent in professional footballers, men who are operating as close to the pinnacle of human fitness as possibly imaginable. As a result of this nearly all professional footballers are screened for cardiac related diseases in the UK and in Italy, screening is mandatory in order to play. For this reason, the cardiovascular diseases that they are stricken with are so rare and lack the necessary research that many scientists doubt whether Christen Eriken will ever know the cause of his Cardiac Arrest. 

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