“I shall be in touch with the FA about carrying out this research,” said Ammar Al-Chalabi, a neurologist at King’s College London. “The FA does not seem hostile to the idea.”

Andrin Cooper, a spokesman for the FA, said it had no plans to conduct a “specific MND study” at present. However, he added that the organisation was involved in a 10-year study on how “heading the ball affects the brain” and that its medical committee would be meeting next year to assess the preliminary results.

Five thousand people in Britain suffer from MND, which claimed the life of David Niven, the actor, and has also felled several prominent footballers. They include Jimmy “Jinky” Johnstone, the Celtic forward, who died in 2006, aged 61, and Don Revie, the England and Leeds United manager, also 61 when he died in 1989; and Rob Hindmarch, the former Derby County and Sunderland player, who died in 2002 at the age of 41.

Al-Chalabi was a member of a research team that discovered an apparent “cluster” of three MND sufferers who played for the same amateur football club in Kent. They had another potential risk factor in common, however: all had suffered a big electric shock once in their life.

“They all got the disease at the same time and two died in the same weekend,” he said. “Since then it has emerged that another of their friends has got it.”

Del Deamus, 34, from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, is convinced there is a link between sport and the disease. Diagnosed with MND in February, he had played football for England as a schoolboy and later as an apprentice for Tottenham Hotspur. “I heard that head injuries might be a factor and thought, that’s me – I had lots of head injuries,” he said last week.

“But boxers don’t seem to suffer from it. So maybe it’s something in the grass. We just don’t know.”

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