The true story of a footballer who paid the ultimate price
What happens when the world's favourite game quietly injures the organ that makes you you?
No-Brainer is powerful sports nonfiction: a true football memoir, a family love story, and an urgent investigation into concussion, heading and long¿term brain injury in sport.
At its heart is Bill Gates - a tough, talented professional footballer from the North East of England - and the woman who refuses to let his decline be ignored. As Bill's health unravels under the shadow of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) and dementia, his wife, Dr Judith Gates, transforms heartbreak into action, helping push the conversation about repetitive head impacts, "playing on," and player welfare into the public eye.
With the pace of frontline journalism and the compassion of lived experience, Mike Amos follows a journey that stretches from old-school dressing rooms and training¿ground heading drills to hospital corridors, care decisions, and a campaign that challenges the sport to change. It's the story of what football can give you - identity, community, pride - and what it can take away when the brain is battered for years, and the symptoms arrive decades later.
You'll step into the era when being "hard" was celebrated and pain was something to laugh off. You'll see how a career can be marked by collisions and "minor" blows that were never recorded as concussions. You'll also see the fuller life behind the player: family, work, ambition, and a marriage built over decades - until memory, language and independence begin to slip away.
No-Brainer doesn't preach from the sidelines. It listens. It asks uncomfortable questions. And it connects the dots between science, policy and real human lives - so players, parents, coaches and fans can make informed choices.
Inside you'll find:A deeply personal account of football-related neurodegenerative disease, told with honesty and empathy
Clear explanations of CTE, concussion, dementia and why repetitive head impacts matter even when there's "no knock¿out"
Real voices from former players, families, clinicians and researchers at the centre of today's debate
A behind-the-scenes look at how tradition, money, institutions and uncertainty shape decisions about safety in football (soccer) and other contact sports
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Foreword
1. ‘It was many years before I could properly enjoy a gin and tonic’
2. ‘I want to tell them there’s a ticking time bomb. As you are, once was Bill’
3. ‘A rugged centre half who wouldn’t flinch at a head-on meeting with Cassius Clay, if he was wearing a No 9 shirt’
4. ‘There are lots of opportunities in life. Some people take them and some people don’t’
5. ‘The authorities don’t seem prepared to admit the scale of the problem. People like my dad loved football, and it’s killing them’
6. 'When it all comes out, what has happened in football will be seen as a scandal worse than Savile, worse than Grenfell Tower, worse than Windrush'
7. ‘My mum knows nothing about football but she is the most dangerous woman in the game’
8. ‘Judith’s formidable, that’s the word. She’s driven, and she’s not going to let it go now’
9. ‘I knew there wouldn’t be conversations, I’d no illusions about that, but in many ways he wasn’t my dad’
10. ‘He didn’t need much persuading. I think the quid pro quo was a small box of Milk Tray’
11. ‘I spent the night in Middlesbrough hospital. It went on like that for two days and they had me training again on the third’
12. ‘This disease tests your kindness. It tests your patience. It tests your family. It tests everything except your love. But the more you love, the more your heart breaks’
13. ‘The brutal truth is that there aren’t enough people suffering from MND to make research a good investment for drug companies’
14. ‘If you got a bad concussion, stumbling around a bit, it was regarded as a joke and played afterwards on the videotape, so everyone could have a good laugh'
15. ‘My dad was always very supportive of the PFA, but I think they’ve failed families and football participants in general’
16. ‘People would cross the road to avoid you, even in Middlesbrough’
17. ‘I’ve been in board rooms full of people from Oxford and Cambridge and always had the advantage of them, because I was from Co Durham’
18. ‘I really care about finding the answer, but I don’t want to come across as a saint’
19. ‘I remember (down the pit) they used to call the daft lads the heedybaals. A bit late, but it all starts to make sense’
20. ‘It very much reminds me of the smoking debate. Everyone knows that it’s wrong, unwise, but no one seems to do much’
21. ‘The Concussion in Sport Group has controlled the narrative for 20 years, and it has come to this’
22. ‘How pathetic that 30 former footballers are to sue the Football Association over negligence. . . . ’
23. ‘If this was the shipyards, I’m talking about asbestos, the trade unions would be calling them out because of the risk to their health’
24. ‘We would have expected the Football Association to have been publicly hounded by the Professional Footballers’ Association. . . ’
25. ‘I truly believe that this is the beginning of the end. It’s exciting to think that we will soon have life-saving treatments to tackle this disease’
26. ‘Various failings over a prolonged period of time’
27. ‘Certainly there seems to be recent history between Head for Change and the PFA'
28. ‘We’ve had the agitations and the obsessions. Now he’s happy and safe. That’s such a relief to us all’
29. ‘The conversations they’re having in rugby they were having in boxing 100 years ago’
30. ‘It’s a space where we can say what we want without judgement. We don’t have to be good girls being brave’
31. ‘It’s so sad that football was his passion and is now the cause of his demise’
32. ‘There is a fundamental issue if players, unions and leagues feel that lawmakers are holding them back from what they collectively agree to protect the safety of players’
33. ‘Head for Change is doing what the wealthy Players’ Foundation refuses to do’
34. ‘There is a remarkable consistency of symptoms across all these contact sports, and it is very grim’
35. ‘We appreciate the invitation to take part in the book, however we would politely have to decline on this occasion’
36. ‘After years of political wrangling, England’s football authorities are close to agreeing a deal to establish a Dementia Care Fund to help former players’
37. ‘He wanted no one else from Ferryhill, from Spennymoor, from the whole world to suffer as he was suffering’
38. ‘Another cliché –sorry — we can only play the hand we’re dealt’
39. ‘We are a charity for everyone — all ages, genders, players at every level’
40. 'It’s hard to envisage our authorities allowing our sportsmen and women play what seems designed to hasten the onset of dementia’
