They are freezing the cells taken from the umbilical cord blood of their babies as a possible future cure for cartilage and ligament problems. Stem cells can be used to regenerate damaged organs and tissue because they are the earliest form of cells.

One Premier League footballer, playing in the northwest of England, said: “We decided to store our new baby’s stem cells for possible future therapeutic reasons, both for our children and possibly for myself.”

The player, who declined to be named, added: “As a footballer, if you’re prone to injury it can mean the end of your career, so having your stem cells — a repair kit if you like — on hand makes sense.”

He is one of five professional footballers who have frozen their children’s stem cells with Liverpool-based CryoGenesis International (CGI), one of about seven commercial stem cell “banks” in Britain.

In the past five years more than 11,000 British parents have paid up to £1,500 to store their babies’ stem cells in the banks in order to grow tissue, should their children become ill.

Paul Griffiths, managing director of CGI, predicts that stem cell technology will become sufficiently advanced for footballers and sportsmen to benefit.

“This has been carried out experimentally,” he said. “The stem cells are injected directly into the knee and because they have the same genetic code they start rebuilding.”

Smart Cells, based in central London, has frozen stem cells for three Premier League footballers in the past year. Shamshad Ahmed, its managing director, said: “Potentially, stem cells could grow into ligaments.”

The storage of stem cells from a baby’s umbilical cord for use by a parent raises ethical questions about creating babies as “saviour offspring”.

One professional footballer known to have stored stem cells for his children’s future use is Thierry Henry, the Arsenal and France striker. There is no indication that he intends them for his own use.

Thousands of successful umbilical cord blood stem cell transplants have already been carried out to treat children with severe blood conditions or immune disorders.

Professor Colin McGuckin and his team at Newcastle University have grown liver tissue from cord blood stem cells and scientists at Imperial College London have grown cartilage cells in the laboratory using embryonic stem cells.

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