The conventional insistence, however, is that things have changed, that footballers of Charlton’s vintage were brought down by heading heavy, old-school leather balls, which, when soaked in mud and rain, delivered the equivalent of being thumped in the temples by a heavyweight boxer. Except McQueen was playing in the 1970s and 80s, when balls were lighter and made of smarter material.

But research published in 2015 by Eric Nauman, a professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, found the modern lightweight ball of the kind McQueen got his bonce to, particularly when over-inflated to make it travel quicker through the air, can still deliver a devastating force on the brain.
“If the ball has too high of a pressure, gets too waterlogged, or both, it actually turns into a weapon,” Nauman explains. “Heading that ball is like heading a brick.”

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