For football fans, the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship felt like a breath of fresh air. Due to the pandemic, games were postponed well into Summer 2021, and it felt like a cloud had lifted after a year of strict lockdowns. But the celebrations were short-lived as Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed on the field.
Eriksen suffered from a heart attack. And although he survived, his collapse was the first of many strange occurrences that have come to grace the beloved sport over the next year.
As noted by sports journalist Chris Wheeler for the Daily Mail, “barely a week goes by at the moment without news of another cardiac-related incident in the game.” The article comes in the wake of Sergio Aguero’s forced retirement at the young age of 33 after the Manchester City legend was diagnosed with arrhythmia. His departure from the game comes just a week after Manchester United’s Victor Lindelof equipped a heart monitor after getting out of breath during a game.
As detailed by the Daily Mail, Sheffield United’s Charlie Wyke went into cardiac arrest during practice in November, and Adama Traore of Sheriff Tiraspol collapsed and died for four minutes during a Champions League match. Fortunately, medics were able to revive him.
In every instance, the players were in their early 20s to early 30s.
Football players, who are among some of the most
athletic individuals on the planet, have never had better access to better medical technology and sports science. So why are they collapsing on the field? Moreover, most of their issues appear to be heart-related – strange, especially in the wake of the pandemic and possibly even the vaccines created to deal with COVID-19, as some have suggested.
Myocarditis is a rare but possible side-effect of certain vaccines that affects a small number of people – a fact that has led many to question whether the health issues footballers are dealing with could be in some way related to the vaccines.
According to Professor Sanjay Sharma, a leading sports cardiologist who spoke to the Daily Mail, this isn’t the case.
“We’ve had this blitz in 2021,” said Sharma, who is the professor of sports cardiology for St George’s University in London. “I can see where you’re coming from. It’s worrying that there is suddenly a whole load of young men who are supposed to epitomise the healthier segment of our society suddenly crashing with cardiac problems.”
“Is there an issue? Are these people being tested properly? Is the game doing it? Is there something in the air to cause an increase? I’m keeping an open mind. My feeling is that this is probably a statistical cluster rather than something on the rise,” he added.
“Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that it is Covid-related or, even worse, that vaccine-related myocarditis may be responsible for this spate of cardiac issues that we are seeing in football players,” said Sharma. “I can tell you now that Eriksen’s arrest was nothing to do with Covid or the vaccine, nor was Aguero’s cardiac scare, nor were Fleck’s problems or Wyke’s.”
The professor says that he looked at some of these players, with whom he has direct access, and said that he didn’t think it was football-related, “just bad luck,” adding that he thinks the Premier League players simply didn’t have enough rest because they trained through the lockdown.
The reasons the doctor provides are legion, with him going so far as to suggest that the growth of the internet and social media had caused reports of footballers having cardiac episodes to spread more quickly than ever before – noting that a similar episode occurred in 2012 when Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field.
Possible reasons and excuses aside, the issue may become as damaging to football as brain injuries are to American football in the coming years. It only took the NFL decades and billions in lawsuits for the organization to acknowledge chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in players.
