Longevity and Playing Football: What Does the Evidence Say?

Written by Dr Phil Batty

Whether playing football (soccer) helps you live longer is more than just a pub debate – it’s now a serious epidemiological question. A growing body of work suggests elite athletes tend to outlive the general population, largely due to lower rates of cardiovascular disease and some cancers.¹

I contributed to a recent paper with Maxime Sellers, John Orchard and Jessica Orchard, which researched this question directly in English professional football: Do 20th‑century professional male English footballers live longer than other English men?

Our answer is broadly “yes – but with nuance.”¹

Elite Athletes and Longevity: The Big Picture

Several large cohort studies and meta-analyses have shown that elite athletes, on average, live longer than non-athletes:

Garatachea et al. (2014) reported that top-level athletes had lower all‑cause mortality and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer compared with the general population.²

Kettunen et al. (2015) found former Finnish elite male athletes had five to six years longer life expectancy than men who were already healthy as young adults, again with much of the benefit driven by lower CVD and tobacco‑related cancer mortality.³

These findings underpin the idea that long-term high physical activity, better baseline health and lower smoking rates confer a survival advantage. However, most of these early studies mixed different sports, so football-specific risks and benefits were less clear.

English Professionals in the 20th Century

Study overview

We analysed mortality in 7,620 male professional footballers who played for the 25 best-performing English Football League clubs during the 20th century (Sellers et al. 2025).¹ Eligible players were born between 1900 and 1972, chosen to ensure careers starting after World War I and before the Premier League era.

Key methodological points:

• Data sources: Player birth and death data were primarily obtained from Wikidata, checked against other public databases.
• Follow‑up: Observed deaths between 1963 and 2022 were counted.
• Comparator: Age‑specific and year‑specific mortality rates for English men from the Human Mortality Databaseand the Office for National Statistics.
• Outcome: Standardised Mortality Ratio (SMR) = observed deaths / expected deaths.

By the end of 2022:

• 3,571 players had died.
• 4,049 were still alive.
• Expected deaths in an age‑matched male English population were 4,242.
• Overall SMR = 0.84 (95% CI 0.81–0.88) – meaning a 16% lower death rate in footballers than expected.¹

Age-specific patterns

The age‑stratified analysis is particularly important:

• In almost all age bands, footballers had lower mortality than age‑matched English men.¹
• The exception was the 80–89-year age group, where the SMR was slightly above 1.0, indicating somewhat higher death rates than the general population in those ages¹.

This suggests that the survival advantage is clearly present at younger and middle ages, but it diminishes – and may reverse – in the oldest group, echoing patterns seen in other football cohorts.

Interpretation

We concluded that professional male English footballers of the 20th century did enjoy better longevity overall, but that the benefit is not uniform across the lifespan.¹

Likely contributors include:

• High lifelong physical activity.
• Lower baseline prevalence of smoking and obesity compared with the general population of the time.
• Medical screening and better access to healthcare during and sometimes after their careers.

However, the age‑related attenuation hints that accumulated injuries, possible neurodegenerative disease risk or loss of fitness after retirement may erode advantages later in life.

How Does This Compare With Other Football Cohorts?

Our findings fit into a broader pattern of football‑specific longevity research.

Australian Rules Football

Orchard et al. (2022) examined 9,932 elite Australian Rules footballers (AFL/VFL) from 1971–2020 and found:

• Observed deaths = 3,914 vs 4,955 expected.
• Overall SMR = 0.79 (95% CI 0.76–0.82) – about 21% fewer deaths than expected.⁴
• For players under 50 years, SMR dropped to 0.44, indicating very marked protection in younger age groups.⁴

This is strikingly similar to the English data: strong early advantage, which narrows with age.

French Professional Footballers

Orhant et al. (2022) studied 6,114 male French professional players (1968–2015). They reported:

• Lower all‑cause mortality (SMR < 1).⁵
• Lower mortality from CVD and cancer.⁵
• But higher mortality from dementia‑related causes than the national population.⁵

This highlights an important nuance: it is possible to have an overall longer life while still having an increased risk for specific conditions, particularly neurodegenerative disease.

Position-specific Longevity

Śmigielski et al. (2020) analysed historic international players and found that goalkeepers lived five to eight years longer than outfield players, with mean lifespans in the low 80s compared with mid‑70s for field players⁶.

This suggests that within football, role‑specific physical demands may influence longevity.

Why Might Footballers Live Longer?

The interpretation of our findings is consistent with the broader elite‑athlete literature – football appears to follow the general pattern that elite sport is associated with increased longevity.^1,2,3

Several mechanisms are plausible:

Professional footballers have a great deal of training each week, which provides them with several cardiometabolic benefits. Long‑term high‑intensity intermittent exercise improves cardiorespiratory fitness, blood pressure, lipid profiles and insulin sensitivity, all of which reduce CVD risk.

Players are also typically drawn from fitter adolescents and undergo medical screening (“healthy worker effect”). Historically, they likely smoked less and maintained lower BMI than the general population.

There are also socioeconomic factors at play. Professional football often meant relatively higher income, social status and access to care, which correlate strongly with survival.

The benefits of regular exercise across the lifespan have been well-demonstrated, and many ex‑players remain physically active, prolonging protective effects.

Important Caveats and Risks

The comforting headline “footballers live longer” hides important subtleties.

There was some inherent healthy cohort/selection bias involved with the research. All these studies compare footballers with the general male population, not equally healthy non‑athletes. A substantial part of the observed advantage may reflect this effect¹.

Neurodegenerative disease is also a possible factor. The French cohort shows excess dementia mortality despite lower overall mortality.⁵ Other work has identified a possible increased risk of neurodegenerative disease among elite footballers in Sweden⁷ and internationally.⁸

While our research indicates that footballers generally live longer, the finding is not linear. In fact, the slightly higher SMR in the 80–89 age band suggests that advantages earlier in life may be offset later.¹

We also only studied 20th‑century players. Modern professionals face different loads, travel, nutrition and medical environments, so identical outcomes cannot be assumed

References

1. Sellers M, Orchard JW, Orchard JJ, Batty P. Professional male English footballers of the 20th century had lower death rates than the general population. Science and Medicine in Football. 2025.
2. Garatachea N, Santos‑Lozano A, Sanchis‑Gomar F, et al. Elite athletes live longer than the general population: A meta‑analysis. Mayo Clin Proc. 2014.
3. Kettunen JA, Kujala UM, Kaprio J, et al. All‑cause and disease‑specific mortality among male, former elite athletes. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2015.
4. Orchard JW, Orchard JJ, Semsarian C, La Gerche A, Driscoll T. Reduced death rates of elite Australian Rules footballers compared to age‑matched general population. J Sci Med Sport. 2022.
5. Orhant E, Carling C, Chapellier JF, et al. All‑cause and cause‑specific mortality in French male professional footballers. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2022.
6. Śmigielski W, Gajda R. Goalkeepers live longer than field players. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020.
7. Ueda P, et al. Neurodegenerative disease among male elite football players in Sweden. Lancet Public Health. 2023.
8. Howarth NE, et al. Neurodegenerative disease and association football. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2025.