Professional male English footballers of the 20th century had lower death rates than the general population.

Abstract

Elite athlete cohorts in most sports outlive the general population. We aimed to assess the standardised mortality ratios (SMR) of male professional footballers in England from the 20th Century compared to the general population in England. We included players born between 1900-1972 who had played for the best performing 25 clubs in the English Football League in the 20th Century. We chose these years of birth meaning debut after the First World War (when football records became more reliable) and debut before the start of the Premier League (when teams became composed of a high number of non-British players). We used Wikidata as our primary source of publicly available data for players in our chosen cohort, supplemented by additional databases. Expected deaths (between 1963-2022) were calculated using English deaths by year and age from the Human Mortality Database and The Office of National Statistics. We identified 7620 eligible players from the 25 clubs as our cohort. By the end of 2022, 4049 players were still alive and 3571 had died. Expected number of deaths was 4242. The SMR for English professional footballers was 0.84 (95% confidence interval 0.81-0.88). We conclude that male professional footballers of the 20th Century had lower mortality rates than the age-matched general male population in England.