SEEMS I upset a few people, but only a few, by stating last week that I will no longer cover or even watch professional boxing as I have concluded that the deliberate infliction of head injuries is no longer sustainable or justifiable, if it ever was. I have had many more people congratulate me on my decision, which came in the wake of the death of boxer Patrick Day four days after he was knocked out in a fight with Charles Conwell in Chicago.

As a former boxing correspondent, I know how defensive people are about the sport and I get the argument that if boxing is not regulated it will simply go underground and more people will die. That’s why I did not call for it to be banned, but there must certainly be an inquiry into the real medical damage that boxing does.

My own grandfather, John Caulfield, was an amateur boxer who really did fight Benny Lynch and who really did lose count of the number of bouts he had – definitely in the hundreds, he would say. In his early sixties he was diagnosed with Parkinsonism, the disease that was also contracted by Muhammad Ali – though I believe my grandfather may have actually had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated injuries to the head.

It is only in the last week that we have finally had proof that footballers are at a greater risk of brain disease because of heading the ball. The landmark study by Glasgow University researchers conclusively proved that footballers in the 20th century were 3.5 times more likely than others to die with dementia and other serious neurological diseases.

READ MORE: Study links football to increased risk of dementia and MND

The research was funded by the Football Association and the Professional Footballers’ Association and confirmed the fears of many people, like myself who have long suspected that there was a direct relation between brain injuries and the repeated heading of a ball, particularly those old sodden leather balls that were more like a brick than a football.

The National:

The Glasgow study found there was a five-fold increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s, a four-fold increase in Motor Neurone disease and a two-fold increase in Parkinson’s.

The bit of research that stunned me was that former footballers were almost five times more likely to have been prescribed dementia drugs. The reason why that is shocking is that many families of victims had contended that dementia can be under-reported on death certificates – often dementia is not seen as the final cause of death.

Dr Willie Stewart, the Glasgow University honorary clinical associate professor led what was the largest ever study into the incidence of neurodegenerative disease in any sport.

He said: “I think we can say now that head injuries and head impacts are something that would be top of the list for research pursuit and top of the list for a change in football.”

That’ll do for me, Willie, and the football authorities must act NOW on what he has said. The trouble is that many in the sport are terrified of legal redress being sought by afflicted former players and their families. Hard-pressed club directors fear that court actions will cripple and even close clubs.

To them I say, tough. Just get out your cheque books and prepare to pay compensation to your former employees. Better still, because players didn’t always play for one club and no-one knows which impacts with the ball sparked their brain injuries, why not have a national or even international scheme that could pay compensation to people who really need it. Why not take a small cut of transfer fees and pay it into a global scheme to redress this egregious wrong?

I suspect it will be a wintry day in hell before that happens, but there is something which football can do now which can at last show the sport is serious about tackling the problem to ensure that the current generation of players does not have to worry about developing CTE, for example, in future years.

Rugby Union in recent years has become hugely aware of the problem of concussion and while I am still not satisfied that enough is being done about this danger, during the Rugby World Cup we saw several examples of the actions that have been taken by the authorities.

The red cards shown to players for their infliction of blows to the head were all totally justified, in my opinion, and even more important was the use of the Head Injury Assessment scheme to check on players that had been showing signs of possible neurological damage – concussion in the main.

If the football authorities are really serious about dealing with concussion they must introduce Head Injury Assessments ASAP. Not to do so would be criminal.