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In February of 1998, a football match in Burkina Faso stopped before it started so a stadium could hold a silence for Pierre Ndaye Mulamba. He was not dead. He was living in two rooms outside Cape Town, and he found out he had died the way you find out about weather.

This is a book about the distance between those two facts. Not the goals. The goals are on video and you can watch them any time you like. What you cannot watch is the fifty years afterward, the part with no cameras in it, where a man who was once the best in the world at something has to work out what he is for now.

Seventy-odd footballers, from Pele and George Best to Lily Parr, Socrates, Bert Trautmann and Diogo Jota. Some became doctors and mayors and priests. Some lost everything inside five years and could not tell you how. Some are being cared for now by wives who married footballers and ended up nursing strangers, because the game took their memory a piece at a time.

Three coroners have now put a footballer’s dementia on the record as an industrial disease. That finding runs underneath this whole book.