Mixing Business with Leisure? The Football Club Doctor, Sports Medicine and the Voluntary Tradition

Abstract

The football club doctor has traditionally been a role fulfilled by a local general practitioner on a casual basis over a long period. Since the 1990s, due to football's accelerated commercialization, a number of clubs have appointed full-time doctors with specialist sports medicine knowledge. This article explores the origins and development of this role in its wider social context since the late nineteenth century and argues that initially club doctors were part of a voluntary tradition. In addition, the development of the role has reflected the nature of sports medicine in Britain and more particularly football, as well as highlighting the changing demands and pressures of the job in light of growing commercial demands.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the Wellcome Trust for funding a three-year research project on the history of sports medicine of which this paper is a product.

Notes

1. The basis for this statement is largely impressionistic as well as based on other accounts. For example, John Crane, ‘Association Football: The Team doctor’ in Simon D.W. Payne, ed., Medicine, sport and the law (London, 1990), p. 331; Stuart Carne, ‘General practitioner to a football club’, British Medical Journal (BMJ), 283 (19 Sept. 1981), pp. 766–7. In their study of football club doctors, Waddington et al. found that 75 per cent were GPs: Ivan Waddington, Martin Roderick and Graham Parker, Managing injuries in professional football: A study of the roles of the club doctor and physiotherapist (Leicester, 1999), p. 9.

2. One exception is F. McKenna and D. Pickersgill, eds, GP's guide to professional work outside the NHS (Oxford, 1995).

3. Waddington et al., Managing injuries; I. Waddington, M. Roderick and R. Naik, ‘Methods of appointment and qualifications of club doctors and physiotherapists in English professional football: Some problems and issues’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 35 (1) (2001), p. 48; Ivan Waddington, ‘Jobs for the boys: A study of the employment of club doctors and physiotherapists in English professional football’, Soccer and Society, 3 (3) (2002), pp. 51–64; Martin Roderick, The work of professional football: A labour of love? (London, 2006).

4. See in particular Waddington, ‘Jobs for the boys’.

5. Dominic Malcolm, ‘Sports medicine: A very peculiar practice? Doctors and physiotherapists in elite English rugby union’, in Sigmund Loland, Berit Skirstad and Ivan Waddington, eds, Pain and injury in sport: Social and ethical analysis (London, 2006), pp. 165–81.

6. See John Welshman, ‘Only connect: The history of sport, medicine and society’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 15 (1) (1998), pp. 1–21.

7. Mike Cronin, ‘Not taking the medicine: Sportsmen and doctors in late nineteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Sport History, 34 (1) (2007), pp. 24–5.

8. Vanessa Heggie, ‘“Only the British appear to be making a fuss”: The science of success and the myth of amateurism at the Mexico Olympiad, 1968’, Sport in History, 28 (2) (2008), pp. 213–35.

9. In spring 1987 the Journal of Sport History was devoted to ‘Sport, exercise and American medicine’ and in spring 2007 the same journal's forum was on sports medicine. See also Jack Berryman and Roberta Park, eds, Sport and exercise science: Essays in the history of sports medicine (Chicago, 1992); Roberta Park, ‘A decade of the body: Researching and writing about the history of health, fitness, exercise and sport, 1983–1993’, Journal of Sport History, 21 (1) (1994), pp. 59–82.

10. For example, Patricia Vertinsky, ‘Exercise, physical capability, and the eternally wounded woman in late nineteenth-century North America’ in Berryman and Park, eds, Sport and Exercise Science, pp. 183–211; ‘The Social Construction of the Gendered Body: Exercise and the Exercise of Power’, IJHS, 11 (2) (1994), pp. 147–71; Paul Atkinson, ‘Strong Minds and Weak Bodies: Sports, Gymnastics and the Medicalization of Women's Education, British Journal of Sports History, 2 (1) (1985), pp. 62–71.

11. For example, John Hoberman, Mortal engines: The science of performance and the dehumanization of sport (New York, 1992); Paul Dimeo, A history of drug use in sport 1876–1976: Beyond good and evil (London, 2007).

12. This particular role, though, should perhaps be put into context. While for the most part of the century there have been approximately 100 professional football clubs, in 1914 there were nearly 45,000 registered medical practitioners. Anne Hardy, Health and medicine in Britain since 1860 (London, 2001), p. 17.

13. Frank Honigsbaum, The division in British medicine: A history of the separation of general practice from hospital care 1911–1968 (London, 1979); Irvine Loudon, John Horder and Charles Webster, eds, General practice under the National Health Service 1948–1997 (Oxford, 1998); Mike Saks, Orthodox and alternative medicine: Politics, professionalization and health care (London, 2003).

14. Irvine Loudon, Medical care and the general practitioner 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1986); Anne Digby, The evolution of British general practice 1850–1948 (Oxford, 1999); Making a medical living: Doctors and patients in the English market for medicine, 1720–1911 (Cambridge, 1994); Hilary Marland, Medicine and society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1987).

15. The Times, 30 April 1901, p. 10.

16. Matthew Taylor, The Leaguers: The making of professional football in England, 1900–1939 (Liverpool, 2005), pp. 147–62; Steve Sturdy, ‘The industrial body’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone, eds, Medicine in the twentieth century (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 224–7.

17. Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, Rules for players 1914–1915.

18. Wray Vamplew, Pay up and play the game: Professional sport in Britain 1875–1914 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 52–68; Tony Mason, Association Football and English society 1863–1915 (Brighton, 1980), ch. 2; Matthew Taylor, The association game: A history of British football (London, 2007), pp. 70–5.

19. For a detailed case study of the socio-economic and cultural status of football club directorates, see David Kennedy, ‘The split of Everton Football Club, 1892: The creation of distinct patterns of boardroom formation at Everton and Liverpool Football Club companies’, Sport in History, 23 (1) (2003), pp. 1–26.

20. See Neil Carter, The football manager: A history (London, 2006), chs 1 and 8.

21. Richard Holt, ‘The amateur body and the middle-class man: Work, health and style in Victorian Britain’, Sport in History, 26 (3) (2006), pp. 358–62.

22. These included IOC member Kevin O'Flannagan, an Irish rugby international who also played for Arsenal in the 1940s: Guardian, 22 June 2006. James Marshall played for Glasgow Rangers between 1925 and 1935 when he moved to West Ham. He also won three England caps.

23. For a definition of voluntarism see Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, state and social welfare in Britain 1830–1990 (Oxford, 1994), p. 6 n20.

24. For a wider discussion of the history of voluntarism and its role in shaping political culture see Robert J. Morris, ‘Clubs, societies and associations’, in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge social history of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 3: Social agencies and institutions (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 395–43; Peter Clark, British clubs and societies 1580–1800: The origins of an associational world (Oxford, 2000), pp. 470–91; Peter Borsay, A history of leisure: The British experience since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2006); Rob Colls, ‘Englishness and the political culture’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Englishness: Politics and culture 1880–1920 (Beckenham, 1986); Maria Brenton, The voluntary sector in British social services (London, 1985); Frank Prochaska, The voluntary impulse: Philanthropy in modern Britain (London, 1988). For a study of working-class associational life see Alan Metcalfe, Leisure and recreation in a Victorian mining community: The social economy of leisure in north-east England, 1820–1914 (London, 2006).

25. Ross McKibbin, Classes and cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 84–105; John Tosh, ‘What should historians do with masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century’, History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994), pp. 179–201.

26. McKibbin, Classes and cultures, pp. 84–90.

27. See John Stobart, ‘Building an urban identity. Cultural space and civic boosterism in a “new” industrial town: Burslem 1761–1911’, Social History, 29 (4) (2004), pp. 485–98; Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The rise and fall of the Victorian city (London, 2004); Alan Kidd and David Nicholls, eds, The making of the British middle class? Studies of regional and cultural diversity since the eighteenth century (Stroud, 1998).

28. John Garrard and Vivienne Parrott, ‘Craft, professional and middle-class identity: Solicitors and gas engineers’, in Alan Kidd and David Nicholls, eds, The making of the British middle class? Studies of regional and cultural diversity since the eighteenth century (Stroud, 1998), p. 166.

29. For a broader discussion of the middle classes and sport see Mike Huggins, ‘Second-class citizens? English middle-class culture and sport, 1850–1910: A reconsideration’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 17 (1) (2000), pp. 1–6.

30. Jose Harris, Private lives, public spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (London, 1993), p. 56.

31. Saks, Orthodox and alternative medicine, ch. 2

32. Deborah Brunton, ‘The emergence of a modern profession’, in Deborah Brunton, ed, Medicine transformed: Health, disease and society in Europe, 1800–1930 (Manchester, 2004), pp. 92–117, 146–7.

33. Keir Waddington, ‘Mayhem and medical students: Image, conduct and control in Victorian and Edwardian London teaching hospitals’, Social History of Medicine, 15 (1) (2002), pp. 45–65.

34. Digby, Making a medical living, p. 170; Loudon, Medical care, pp. 282–301. In the 1840s, there had been an unsuccessful attempt to establish a College of General Practitioners.

35. Loudon, Medical care, p. 205.

36. R. Woods, ‘Physician, heal thyself: The health and mortality of Victorian doctors’, Social History of Medicine, 9 (1) (1996), pp. 1–30.

37. Digby Making a medical living, pp. 6–7.

38. Digby, Evolution of British general practice, p. 110.

39. Digby, Evolution of British general practice, p. 261.

40. Marland, Medicine and society, p. 275.

41. William Bynum, Science and the practice of medicine in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 198–9; Steven Cherry, Medical services and the hospitals in Britain, 1860–1939 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 41–2.

42. Digby, Evolution of British general practice, p. 261.

43. Digby, Making a medical living, p. 169.

44. David Wilkin, Lesley Hallam, Ralph Leavey and David Metcalfe, Anatomy of urban general practice (London, 1987), pp. 70–2.

45. These results are indicative rather then conclusive. The survey covered the years, first, between 1960 and 2000, selecting editions every five years i.e. 1965, 1970, 1975 and so on. Over the period 2004 to 2007 editions were selected from each year. The obituaries in the first edition of January and June were consulted each time. In total, 200 obituaries were examined. It was calculated that 67 were GPs, 85 consultants/specialists while 48 came under the category of ‘other’, which included public health medical officers, administrators and researchers. Male doctors made up 89 per cent of the obituaries. Those doctors who had sporting interests i.e. as participants or officials, were 53; 77 had invested their time in voluntary organizations. Two had an interest in sports medicine. Of course, there are certain biases within these results. There are more obituaries for specialists than GPs when in reality there are far more GPs working in medicine. In addition, the content of the obituary is dependent on a number of factors: who wrote it and when it was written can reflect contemporary literary tastes. For example, the more recent obituaries the more they seem to include more personal information, including sport.

46. BMJ, 5 June 1965, p. 1501.

47. BMJ, 2 June 1990, p. 1462.

48. Simon Inglis, League football and the men who made it (London, 1988), p. 391.

49. BMJ, 8 March 1969, pp. 648–9.

50. BMJ, 25 March 1961, pp. 909–10, 27 June 1970, p. 800.

51. West Bromwich Albion FC, Minutes of Directors’ Meetings, 1895–1923, passim. I am grateful to John Rowlands for this information.

52. Another doctor, William Barnie-Adshead, briefly played for the club in 1920. Barrie Smith, Doc: Jottings of a football club doctor (Birmingham, 2003), pp. 8–9.

53. Interview with Neil Phillips, 21 June 2005.

54. Smith, Doc, pp. 6–7.

55. Interview with John Crane, 2005.

56. Carne, ‘General practitioner’, pp. 766–7.

57. Ellen Welch and Sara Kelly, ‘Premier league doctor’, Student British Medical Journal, 12 (2004), pp. 265–308. See also Waddington, ‘Jobs for the boys’, for further discussion on the appointments procedure, or lack of one, for football club doctors.

58. Interview with John Rowlands, 17 Feb. 2005.

59. FA Minutes, Report on the Regional Conferences of Club Doctors, May 1962.

60. West Bromwich Albion FC Minutes, 7 Oct. 1907, Annual General Meeting.

61. Interview with Ian Adams, 22 Aug. 2005.

62. Interview with Neil Phillips.

63. Personal records of Neil Phillips, in possession of the author.

64. Interview with Neil Phillips.

65. This and other unattributed statements and quotes are the result of a survey of football club doctors and former professional footballers undertaken by the author between 2004 and 2006. An assurance of confidentiality was a condition of their participation.

66. Interview with John Crane.

67. BASEM Today, 7 (2005), p. 19.

68. Waddington, ‘Jobs for the boys’, p. 54.

69. BASEM Today, 6 (2005), pp. 14–15.

70. Steve Stride, Stride inside the Villa (Warley, 1997), p. 136.

71. Local businessmen – ‘industrialist-merchant/‘proprietors and employers’ – were the largest group. This is estimated on the studies by Mason, Association Football, p. 43; Steven Tischler, Footballers and businessmen: The origins of professional soccer in England (London, 1981) pp. 72–3; Vamplew, Pay up, pp. 160–73. For a study of rugby league, see Tony Collins, Rugby League in twentieth century Britain: A social and cultural history (London, 2006), ch. 9, p. 203.

72. Carter, The football manager. chapter 1.

73. FA Minutes, Report on the Regional Conferences of Club Doctors, May 1962.

74. Football Association Bulletin, Feb. 1955, p. 352.

75. Inglis, League football, 391; FA News, Nov. 1970, p. 4.

76. Sunday People, 13 Nov. 1983, pp. 36–7.

77. Doctor, 2 Dec. 1982, p. 72.

78. Football Association, The blueprint for the future of football (London, June 1991), pp. 87–97.

79. Michael Bevan, ‘Family and vocation: Career choice and the life histories of general practitioners’, in Joanna Bornat, Robert Perks, Paul Thompson and Jan Wamsley, eds, Oral history, health and welfare (London, 2000), pp. 21_47; Brian Abel-Smith in Honigsbaum, The division in British Medicine, pp. Xiii–xvi.

80. Wilkin, Anatomy of urban general practice, pp 1_6; Virginia Berridge, Health and Society in Britain since 1939 (Cambridge, 1999) pp. 41–3; J.P. Horder and G. Swift, ‘The history of vocational training for general practice’, Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 29 (1979), pp. 24–32; N. Bosanuet and C. Salisbury, ‘The practice’ in Loudon et al., General practice, pp. 45–64; I. Tait and S. Graham-Jones, ‘General practice, its patients, and the public’, in Loudon et al., General practice, pp. 226–40.

81. BASEM Today, 5 (2005), p. 5.

82. Peter Sperryn, ‘BASM and the recognition of ‘sports medicine’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 28 (3), 1994, p. 147.

83. See Neil Carter, ‘The rise and fall of the magic sponge’, Social History of Medicine (forthcoming).

84. Royal Society, Harold W. Thompson papers (HWT), E149, Coaching scheme reports, Report: Re-structuring of the Football Association Coaching Scheme, Charles Hughes, 1976, p. 6.

85. W.G.S. Pepper, A. T. Tripp and W. E. Tanner, ‘Injuries to the professional association footballer’, Practitioner, 164 (982) (1950), pp. 298–305. Neil Phillips, ‘The medical aspects of professional association football’, Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 19 (1970), pp. 349–52.

86. Smith, Doc, p. 7; Interview with Stuart Carne, 13 Aug. 2008.

87. Crane, ‘Association Football’, p. 331. The doctor may have also had responsibility for the crowd.

88. Gary Kerr, Stewart Wilkie and Crawford McGuffie, ‘Medical cover at Scottish football matches: Have the recommendations of the Gibson Report been met?’ British Journal of Sports Medicine, 33 (1999), pp. 274–5; M. Crawford et al., ‘An analysis of consultations with the crowd doctors at Glasgow Celtic football, season 1999–2000’, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 35 (2001), pp. 245–50.

89. Interview with Alan Hodson, 31 Aug. 2005.

90. It was renamed the Centre of Medicine and Exercise Science in 2000.

91. Interview with Alan Hodson.

92. West Bromwich Albion FC Minutes, 1895–1920.

93. Survey of football club doctors.

94. Carne, ‘General practitioner’, pp. 765–6.

95. Interview with Ian Adams.

96. Smith, Doc, p. 16.

97. Welch and Kelly, ‘Premier league doctor’, p. 265.

98. Survey of football club doctors.

99. Marland, Medicine and society, p. 279.

100. Survey of club doctors; Carne, ‘Sports medicine’, p. 86.

101. Interview with Alan Hodson.

102. All doctors, though, whether or not a GP, had been trained in most aspects of general practice.

103. Smith, Doc, pp. 16–18.

104. Dimeo, A history of drug use, pp. 44–6.

105. Survey of professional footballers. Liverpool and Everton players were sent to local hospitals for the jab.

106. Carne, ‘General practitioner’, p. 766. Drug testing itself had commenced on a voluntary basis by the FA in 1978. It is currently undertaken by FA-approved drug testing teams: Smith, Doc, pp. 42–5.

107. Survey of football club doctors.

108. Smith, Doc, pp. 36–41.

109. Times, 9 Nov. 1971, p. 2; Interview with Ian Adams. Hartford still made 731 Football League appearances.

110. Carne, ‘General practitioner’, p. 766.

111. Interview with John Rowlands, 17 Feb. 2005.

112. Carter, The football manager.

113. Interview with Ian Adams.

114. Middlesbrough Football Club Minutes, 19 April 1900.

115. Denis Law, The King: My autobiography (London, 2003), pp. 216–18.

116. Welch and Kelly, ‘Premier league doctor’, p. 265.

117. Guardian, 24 May 2006.

118. John Pickstone, ‘Production, community and consumption: The political economy of twentieth-century medicine’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone, eds, Medicine in the twentieth century (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 1–19.

119. Welch and Kelly, ‘Premier league doctor’, p. 265.

120. For example, Sheffield Wednesday: Waddington et al., Managing injuries, pp. 56–7.

121. In 2006, the average salary for a general practitioner was £100,000: Guardian, 5 May 2006.

122. Interview with Ian Adams.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neil Carter

Neil Carter, De Montfort University