IAN HERBERT: How PFA boss is lining his pockets with Italian side hustle – while football legends are facing the fight of their lives

Seeking help from the Professional Football Association still seems like a bleak prospect for families of players who have brought joy to so many of us and are now living with dementia.

Chris Nicholl’s family had found the process terribly difficult before he died last month. Tony Parkes’ daughter has given up asking the union for help.

Mike Lyons’ daughter was told there would be no help if she brought him home from Australia to live near her on his beloved Merseyside.

Former Manchester United player David May described last week how a member of one of his WhatsApp groups had to sell his house to fund dementia care for a former player. Another is transferred to another care home because his family cannot afford the costs.

None of these families want a fuss. They are too busy with the relentless daily struggle that a dementia diagnosis brings.

I will never forget Rob Stiles, Nobby’s son, who told me the devastating little indignities of his mother’s search for help from the PFA – and called me a day later to ask that certain facts be ruled out, to avoid that they would be offensive. What incredible dignity.

Under these circumstances, the latest role of Maheta Molango, the CEO of the PFA, is unfortunate to say the least.

Molango is set to join the Sampdoria board, although you’ll have to follow the Italian club’s own media or obscure corners of the Italian sporting press to know that. The news, announced by the club last week, comes four months after the PFA said it would give Molango a retrospective £150,000 pay rise, taking his salary to £650,000, due to the cost of living crisis .

It has been impossible to get an idea from Italy of how much Molango will earn in the new role and the answers to that question have been chock-full of talk about second division Sampdoria not being rich and Molango joining because he is a fan from was his youth. The PFA says it is a ‘light-weight’ non-executive role from which he will earn ‘basic costs and expenses’.

But the salary isn’t the point. The highly regarded union boss, whose position at the PFA has also seen him join the board of global players’ union FIFPRO, will become part of the executive role at a club whose players he ostensibly represents.

Molango’s PFA predecessor Gordon Taylor certainly had his faults, including a grotesque annual salary of £2m, but it’s fair to say he would have been destroyed if he took on a managerial role at any club.

The PFA says Molango ‘consulted the PFA operational board before taking on the role’ and that if a future conflict of interest arose, he would himself reject him.

But that is not a good prospect given the salary increase and the union’s current need to demonstrate that every working minute is being spent on making up for the way dementia among its members has been shamefully ignored for so long.

The PFA is six months into managing a new £1 million fund for former footballers living with illness, to which it has committed £250,000, and at an operational level that money is actually making a difference.

The involvement of Dawn Astle, the campaigner extraordinaire who exposed the link between football and dementia, was clever. The new pot of money means that families are helped in a way that was not possible before. Occupational therapists sent to assess the needs of former players may, in some cases, find that they require more support than they actually ask for.

But this is not merely an operational task. Dozens of families have described to me their confusion about what they might be entitled to, their disappointment that in their own eyes there may be no help for them and their anger at the detailed picture they are being asked to provide of their finances.

This is a huge communications challenge that requires tremendous leadership. We’ve heard little about it from Molango, aside from an interview a few years ago in which he said he’d learned about the subject from others and committed to donating his brain for research.

Maybe he could speak to some of these families. People like Francesca Lyons, daughter of Mike, who flew to Australia last year to bring the legendary former Everton player to Merseyside for ‘one last time’, as she puts it.

The trip, paid for by the late Bill Kenwright, took Mike back to old familiar places, including his beloved Goodison Park. “It changed him,” she tells me. ‘He was more himself again.’ And that made her regret all the more that there was no way football could help her bring him back for good. “It made me think, ‘What if?’ she says.

The difficult final years of Parkes, the beloved former assistant manager of Blackburn Rovers, are told in a beautiful biography by journalist Suzanne Geldard. Parkes’ daughter Natalie describes “just going around in circles with the PFA”, an organization she actually found more supportive of when Taylor, a former Rovers player, was at the helm. “You used to be able to make him laugh, but now you can’t,” Natalie said of her father. “The disease, however it manifests, has done that.”

The testimonies are heartbreaking. They reveal to Molango and anyone who will listen that this challenge is a full-time job, with monumental work to be done for these legends of our sport while we still have them with us.

Boyce brings joy to Cardiff

A day from heaven in Cardiff on Sunday as Wales played bravely for an hour before France triumphed in the Six Nations.

There were men dressed as frogs and Eiffel Towers walking around St Mary’s Street, near the castle. There was my momentary irritation at an advert saying: ‘If delivery matters, it should be Royal Mail’, which flashed around the stadium. An investment of £11 to have my dear mother’s Mother’s Day card specially delivered, and it still hadn’t arrived on time.

And then there was Max Boyce, a legend of these occasions, who highlighted the decision to remove ‘Delilah’ from the stadium canon for politically correct reasons, and made a little sunshine out of the moral panic over two opponents wearing green played and red. Wales vs Ireland, red plays green, which is a problem for the color blind.

No offense was intended. No violation was committed. Proof that if you have humor, charm and the smile he has, you can broach almost any topic without fear of cancellation.

FA introduces ‘applause only’ rule

I hope Christine Benneworth has done a better job than me in adhering to the FA’s recent ‘applause only’ rules.

Her photo here of six-year-old Charles, her great-grandson, whom she loyally supports, is one of many you have submitted.

‘At the age of six he plays every weekend. Man of the match last Sunday’, Christine reports proudly.