Global, La Liga

As the off-pitch focus is on major club foreign takeovers, corruption and increased player autonomy, football needs to look at a new threat: heart failure.

All football fans know the game Football Manager. You can sit for hours and sign Kaka for Sunderland, or play gung-ho for 90 minutes and win 6-0. I know the majority of my school years were devoted to coming back when the 3.30pm bell went, running home, not even putting my bag on the floor, but jumping straight into the study room, knocking over my father’s ornaments at the same time, and switching on that computer in anticipation for a seven hour marathon buying and selling superstars, or pretending I was Arsene Wenger and buying youth players and turning them into superstars!

I cannot lie and say I knew much of Antonio Puerta. Yes, the Guardian writes, ‘Left wing back, fast, young, Sevilla local boy, family orientated, club darling’. I had watched him occasionally whilst Sevilla were playing, but their main left back was the Brazilian Adriano. What I do know of him is that I used to sign him on Football Manager. Unfortunately, that is a fantasy game and fantasy games are there for one to imagine the unimaginable, like winning the Champions League with Accrington Stanley.

Well, recently, the unimaginable happened. Antonio Puerta, aged 22, collapsed. At the time, nobody on the pitch had recognised the initial problem. Sevilla goalkeeper Andreas Palop ran over to Puerta, quickly calling the medics, and then applying pressure to his tongue to stop him swallowing it. Sevilla continued playing their game, beating Getafe beautifully 4-1, in their customary free-flowing style. Two days later, Puerta’s death was announced. The football world was in shock. Not least La Liga. Questions began to be asked: How did this happen? Was he ill? Is this the first time? What for the future of football?

Puerta was taken to hospital where he received cardiopulmonary resuscitation. His conditioned deteriorated as the day went on. In the end he had suffered multiple organ failure and irreversible brain damage as a result of multiple prolonged cardiac arrests, due to incurable, hereditary heart disease known as arrhytymogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy. Of course, this sounds far too technical for the common man, but what Puerta had effectively experienced was a heart attack.

Not much has been said of Puerta’s death. Neither was there any official word on whether Puerta had been equipped with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator. In the past, Nigerian international Kanu had this device implanted in him whilst he was at Inter Milan, meaning he missed half of the season - but it saved his life and he went on to have a great career in the Premier League with Arsenal, and now Portsmouth.

In Africa or the slums of Rio, a child has to chose to play football or joining militias and gangs. Some of these children have heart conditions but must continue playing

Surprisingly, Puerta’s death is not the first time that such an incident has occurred. Football fans will remember the sad death of West Ham and Cameroon international Marc Vivien Foe during the 2002 Confederations match against Colombia. Foe’s death was much publicized in France and at Manchester City where he was out on loan. However, one should not distinguish these deaths as two special cases. In the week Puerta died, a Zambian international, Chaswe Nsofwa, died during a training match in Israel. Furthermore, Clive Clarke of Leicester City collapsed with the same condition - heart failure again. However, he was stabilised and remains in hospital. In 2004, Miklos Feher died after collapsing during a Benfica match. He again, like Puerta and the others, experienced hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

There is no link with these players apart from the fact that they all had the same condition that caused their deaths.

This is football’s new enemy. Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal supremo, has suggested that all players, either before joining clubs or when there, should have to undergo uniformed heart medical checks. Wenger believes that players continue to play despite knowing they have these problems. This is a serious issue.

Most serious is heart failure in geographic areas of football whereby you either live by the ‘gun’, or the ‘ball’. In Africa or the slums of Rio, a child has to chose to play football or continue joining militias and gangs. Some of these children do not even know that they have these heart conditions, yet still continue playing just to avoid the plights of local gang warfare.

At present there is not much that can be done. Kanu has in fact opened up a hospital for heart conditions in Nigeria, but he is one of only a few. The awareness of this problem needs to be bought into the mainstream. If football should continue to have the riches associated with its global game, then one must acknowledge that deep within this fantastic sport, there is a new enemy, right within the soul.

The world of Football Manager may be a game of fantasy, but heart failure is a reality becoming more and more common.

This article is dedicated to the players who have lost their life whilst on the pitch through heart failure:
Miklos Feher
Antonio Puerta
Catalin Hildan
Chaswe Msofwa
Samuel Okwaraji
Paulo Sergio de Oliveira Silva
Marc Vivien Foe.

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