Sky presenter Hayley McQueen looks back on her father Gordon’s World Cup passion, Steve Bruce hotel incident and his dementia diagnosis.
The noise came from two doors down, and it was loud enough to turn a World Cup memory into a lasting family story.
For Sky Sports presenter Hayley McQueen. her father Gordon’s passion for football was never quiet. even on the international stage.. She remembers how the World Cup in the build-up to Italia 90 reached them long before television coverage dominated every household. starting with her 10th birthday as Gordon was absorbed in the draw’s unfolding details on Teletext news.
Six months later. during the tournament in Florida. the family had the kind of day that becomes a throwaway anecdote until it unexpectedly connects two lives.. Gordon, a Leeds and Manchester United legend who also played for Scotland, was cheering for England to lose.. The next day at Disney World. the McQueens encountered Steve Bruce. then with Manchester United. who was dismayed by England’s performance.
Hayley recalls that Bruce complained about a noisy hotel neighbour whooping for the other team.. The detail mattered only later. when the family returned to their hotel and realised the neighbour was in fact Gordon. staying just two doors away.. “We didn’t think too much of it at the time. ” Hayley says. describing how her father had essentially acknowledged he’d been celebrating with the same volume that had annoyed Bruce.
Those memories are resurfacing as this year’s World Cup becomes Hayley’s first without her father. Gordon died in June 2023 at the age of 70, two and a half years after he was diagnosed with vascular dementia.
“It will be bittersweet,” she says. “But we want to celebrate anniversaries and birthdays now, rather than remembering what it was like when he first passed away.”
June. she adds. forced grief into tight timeframes: an inquest hanging over the family. his birthday. the anniversary of his death and Father’s Day all falling within a 10-day period.. “It was horrible. ” Hayley says. though she is looking ahead to the summer and the fixtures she will now cover rather than share with him in person.
She is set to present Sky’s World Cup Breakfast Show, while making plans with family and friends around the tournament.
Scotland’s progress has made the loss even more poignant.. In November. the Scots clinched qualification for the first time since 1998. beating Denmark 4-2. with memorable goals including Scott McTominay’s overhead kick and Kenny McLean’s strike from the halfway line.. Hayley says she found herself thinking of how her father would have reacted.
“I thought if only Dad was alive to see this,” she says.
She describes Gordon’s enthusiasm as animated and contagious. recalling his exuberant response to James McFadden’s dramatic Euro 2008 effort against France while watching live on Sky.. “That’s how enthusiastic and animated he was when he watched Scotland,” Hayley adds.. “He would have loved to see them at another World Cup.. He would have planned his whole summer around it.”
Like many football families, theirs was sociable and full of people. “Growing up, we always had a very sociable house with tons of people coming and going.”
Her recollections also underline how personal football can become, especially when the story turns to health and what the sport owes those who gave their bodies to it.
Gordon’s own World Cup dreams were cut short.. He went to the 1974 tournament with Scotland without playing.. Four years later. an injury ended his hopes before the competition could really begin; he flew back from Argentina before the tournament started.. “He had a broken foot,” Hayley says.. “So I don’t know how he ever thought he was going to play.”
In that later trip, the family’s focus shifted away from the tournament. Hayley says Gordon took her mother on holiday and did not watch “a single minute” of the World Cup, which she jokes “is probably a good thing from Scotland’s point of view.”
It was. in her telling. a particular kind of heartbreak for a man who “loved the World Cup” and was a “proud Scot”.. Had Scotland not been playing, he would support anyone but England.. Normally the Republic of Ireland. she says. or Portugal. because her family had spent around 20 years holidaying in Portugal and watching multiple tournaments there.
Those tastes even carried humorous confusion inside the household. Hayley remembers her mother wearing an England bikini at a swimming pool one day, prompting a near panic from Gordon. “I don’t know if it was because of Mum in a bikini or because it was an England one,” she says.
There were other moments, too, including a notable Scotland win over England in 1977. Gordon’s most famous goal came with a superb header against England at Wembley in 1977, sparking a pitch invasion as the Tartan Army demolished the Wembley pitch and goalposts.
And nearly 50 years on, the goal is inseparable from the later diagnosis and the inquest.
Hayley says the inquest in January ruled that heading the ball had contributed to the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. which then led to Gordon’s early onset of dementia.. “A lot of people are looking back and angry and worried about what the future holds for lots of footballers who may be sitting with dementia and don’t know it. ” she says.
She is now urging football to change from the past-centred reactions that often follow tragic outcomes. “Football and the governing bodies need to really wake up,” Hayley says. “I’m desperate to campaign for the future generations. It’s more about education than litigation.”
Her argument, she says, is driven by “overwhelming research” pointing towards why heading should be limited in training.
Hayley also wants football’s institutions to do more for players in the present, not just when a story ends badly. She says she wants the FA and the players’ union, the PFA, to contribute to care. “We can’t just keep looking back and blaming,” she adds.
Care costs, she notes, are mounting. “I know people who have sold their homes to pay for care costs.”
She poses a question that sits at the core of her campaign: if more had been known earlier, could things have been different? “You can’t look at that in hindsight but now we do know more and we can change things,” she says. “But are people listening to make that change?”
On the football side, her love for the World Cup never dimmed.. She has even selected an all-time XI featuring figures shaped by the era she grew up watching. naming Iker Casillas; Vogts. Beckenbauer and Cannavaro; and in midfield Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldinho. Zidane. Cruyff and Messi; with Ronaldo and Harry Kane up front.
Hayley ties her picks to personal influences as much as football debates.. She says she is “on the Cristiano Ronaldo side” of the Ronaldo-Messi discussion. mentions German influence through Beckenbauer and Vogts. and points to an affection for Ronaldinho as her “absolute favourite footballer”.. She also notes the way Scotland’s draws in World Cups and qualification campaigns seemed to bring Brazil around repeatedly. forming happy memories of Juninho and the Brazilians who signed for Middlesbrough in the 90s.
Kane earns a spot, she says, because he is “such a perfect role model”.
The family’s identity, she says, has always mixed allegiance and geography: her mother Yvonne was born in Leeds, and their connections to Leeds and England remain strong, even as Gordon’s Scottish pride shaped everything around it.
Now. with Gordon gone and Scotland back in a World Cup for the first time since 1998. Hayley is determined to turn memories into momentum.. This summer she will share the tournament on air. but she is also asking the sport she loves to take dementia and its causes seriously enough to change training and care for those affected.. The World Cup, for her, has always been about more than who wins.. It is about what the game costs, and what it must do next.
World Cup dementia Steve Bruce Scotland Gordon McQueen vascular dementia football heading