A leading doctor has claimed that football may have missed the chance to save players from irreversible brain damage after the Professional Footballers’ Association failed to act on his repeated suggestions for research more than two decades ago.

Dr Mike Sadler said that he tried to raise the issue in letters to PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor between 1993 and 1997 but that he received no help or encouragement and what he describes as a “quite dismissive” response.

It intensifies the pressure on Taylor following anger over his £2.29 million salary and there were fresh calls last night from the Jeff Astle Foundation, a charity set up to support the families of former footballers with dementia, both for him to stand down and for a parliamentary inquiry into an issue that it says has been “swept under the carpet”.

Sadler, who was then a consultant in public health medicine and is now clinical director at the Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, had become concerned after noticing how many former players appeared to be developing premature neurological disease.

This was reinforced when he met ex-Liverpool manager Bob Paisley, who himself had Alzheimer’s, and in conversations with then Southampton captain Kevin Moore, who would subsequently be diagnosed with dementia in his forties and die in 2013 aged just 55.