What should we make of the passing of Cheick Tioté

The passing of Ivory Coast midfielder Cheick Tioté is the latest in the tale of unfortunate footballers who have literally fallen on the field. Even if the reasons for his demise are yet to be established, many who have gone like him have succumbed to heart complications.

Samuel Okwaraji, Marc-Vivien Foe, Amir Angwe, Endurance Idahor, Hedi Berkissa all collapsed under the strain of what clever people call cardiovascular stress. In simple terms, it is what happens when the heart and its support systems are loaded with more than they can handle.

Now this could be because one inherits a system that wouldn’t need a lot of prompting to fail. Alternatively, it could be that the physicality of the game over-burdens even those with a healthy heart. And since football can’t really do much about nature, or ask every talent to attach their family genetic map to a video of their top 50 goals, let us look at the stress factor.

I think there is so much football being played and I attribute that to the commoditisation of the game. We could blame the clubs, television, and Football governing bodies, who all conspire to invent competition after competition, but that is because there is a ready market for their product, which makes us the fans, accomplices in a way. So, what we see are the effects of unchecked supply-driven demand.

Footballers, especially professionals are very fit individuals. But the game is very strenuous these days. In a single season, even the least competitive teams will play 4,000 minutes of high octane football. And I haven’t even accounted for training or national team duty. Now consider that the average span of a football career is 10 years, and you start to see how strenuous that must be, even to the healthiest of players.

Still, it could be argued that the number of footballers succumbing is only a fraction of those who play. True. Sport science has come a long way and your average football club these days boasts of people employed to anticipate and stem such incidents.

And that brings me back home, and I am afraid the interventions that saved Fabrice Muamba in 2008 wouldn’t apply to us.

Despite tremendous progress, our game hasn’t yet attained the professional standards I describe above. As such, we don’t perform regular checks on the players, and therefore have no medical records or biodata. Most of what we see as team doctors are long serving physios and masseuses. And if ambulances were in place at all, they wouldn’t make it to Mulago on time, in the west bound traffic from Namboole, for instance.

People don’t really collapse on the field only because they are age cheats or unfit. In fact, collapsing should not always lead to death, if first aid facilities were readily available. But I tell you what, these are going to be minimum requirements, if we are going to professionalize our game and that should be our lesson from the passing of Tiote and all those before him.