This is the first non-League player to die from heading a football

The 12-year-old boy pictured with his school football team in 1965 was full of the uncomplicated optimism of youth and love of a sport for which he had an unmistakable talent.

The classrooms of Oak Park School at West Leigh, Hampshire, were not the natural domain of Godfrey White — ‘Goff’ as they all knew him, even then — but its sports fields were.

He was a strong, fast, fearless goalscorer, briefly on Bournemouth and Portsmouth’s books. And though he didn’t make it at professional level, a career at the Hampshire non-league club Waterlooville — now Havant and Waterlooville of the sixth-tier National League South — brought precious moments. An FA Cup tie at Newport County always lived with him.

Goff’s was no ordinary life. Away from football, he was a senior project engineer at the Aldermaston weapons establishment, responsible for dealing with million-pound nuclear development projects. But he was struggling when his wife, Tina, contacted me three years ago.

I had just contributed to a series of reports about former professional players living with neurodegenerative illness, after football careers which had brought repeated blows to the head and concussion injuries.

Tina wanted to relate that Goff — five years into what they had hoped would be a long and happy retirement — was experiencing similar distress. Amateur players were not immune, she patiently explained. She put me in touch with her friend, Ann Robson, whose husband John, a Waterlooville team-mate of Goff’s, had played for St Johnstone and the British Army XI and was living with the same illness.

The challenges for these gentle and uncomplaining people did not relent or recede after we spoke. Goff developed the same symptoms of extreme paranoia and irrational behaviour that several afflicted old pro footballers’ families have described to me.

To the devastation of his family, he was briefly sectioned in April last year, before spending a year on an adult mental health ward at a hospital in Basingstoke, where he and Tina marked their 50th wedding anniversary. He was admitted to a home in February this year and died there on April 23. His old friend John Robson — ‘Robbo’ — died the very next day.

There has not been the kind of embrace and proactive help that you would hope for from the big organisations in the so-called ‘football family’. Tina wrote to the PFA, suggesting they examine how far the problem extended beyond ‘famous professional players’, and asked that her letter be passed to the union’s then newly appointed chief executive Maheta Molango.

There was no word back from Molango, just a reply from way down the food chain, pointing out that the union didn’t help semi-professional players but pointing her towards the FA’s Benevolent Fund. 

The Whites were not looking for financial help. They left it there. Instead, support came from the network of afflicted ex-footballers’ families who have taken it upon themselves to help each other and push for research.

Tina heard some were submitting the brains of former players for post-mortems by Glasgow University neuropathologist Dr Willie Stewart, who has led scientific investigation into links between football and brain injury. 

Her husband said it was what he wanted, too. I can reveal that the results of that process have made Goff the first former amateur footballer to be definitively diagnosed, post-mortem, with CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the type of dementia directly linked to repeated head impacts already found in Jeff Astle, Nobby Stiles, Joe Kinnear and Chris Nicholl.

This is a finding of huge significance, confirming that it is not just the one per cent playing professional football who are at risk from repeated blows to the head. The diagnosis also brings new momentum to families’ fight to be heard, which is far from easy.

Theirs is a grey, complicated, difficult story and amid the fascination with football’s razzle-dazzle, people don’t have time for detail these days, even when the safety of our children is at stake. ‘I want future amateur players to know that limiting head impact, particularly in training, is the way forward for them, too,’ Tina tells me. ‘Goff would want have wanted that.’

Six members of her husband’s Waterlooville team have died or are suffering from a neurodegenerative disease.

It is striking how many women are leading the struggle to shake football from its lethargy about the game’s risks and dispel the lazy assumption that this problem relates to the old, heavy footballs, when modern footballs of the same weight are struck at greater velocity. Tina White joins Dawn Astle, Judith Gates, Hayley McQueen, Francesca Lyons and Gemma Jordan, among others, who carry this torch.

The Head Safe charity, founded by Judith Gates, now wants to undertake the kind of study that Tina White suggested to the PFA, by collating a list of amateur footballers affected by dementia. If you know anyone affected, do contact them — hello@headsafe is the address.

Tina will be in Cambridge this weekend for Head Safe’s collaboration with the International Neurotrauma Society, which is staging its annual conference there. A ‘Generations Game’ football match, involving scientists and ex-players, will highlight the game’s 1863 rules, current rules and new FA rules for under-nines, limiting heading, which it took families’ campaigns to get in place.

It comforts Tina that the unremitting struggles of the boy who once sat in the front row of the Oak Park school team — and whom she met because he lived across the road from her — have not been for nothing. But her sense of loss remains.

‘I see the images of Goff and those team-mates he loved and feel such sadness,’ she says. ‘They were strong, fit, healthy and capable men, so full of life.’

Is it too much to ask? 

My friend Jocelyn is the kind of fan Manchester United needs right now — loyal, uncomplaining and always looking for the best in her under-performing team.

Aged 81, she was concerned to hear that, for the first time, the only way to get to the Old Trafford games this season is by scanning a QR code on the Manchester United app.

She worried her mobile phone would not be up to the task, so trooped to Curry’s to buy a smart phone. She worried about her lack of familiarity with technology when she got to the turnstile for the opening game against Fulham.

When she pointed it where instructed, there was no green light, no familiar click of the turnstile and no one able to help. Eventually, a steward went the extra mile to assist and she made it in just before kick-off. 

Would it really be too much for this club of vast wealth to make paper tickets available for those who don’t belong to the smart phone generation?