– With all the concern about potential brain injury and sport team liability, it seems like soccer/football ‘headers’ would concern people more. Why isn’t this practice frowned upon at a professional level?
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That’s a question of personal motivation, not necessarily objective reasoning.
And your premise isn’t necessarily true. CTE as a result of headers has shown to be a possibility, with significant controversy surrounding it.
However, it’s a much more tenuous link compared to CTE in boxers and American Football players. So if you’re wondering why nobody is making *as* big a deal as in those sports, it’s because the effect is not as apparent.
Does a header even have enough force to cause any trauma?
Edit: the answer is yes, it can https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5723188/
Like other sports, soccer has started to take head injuries more seriously in the last 5-10years. Potential head injuries now require an immediate stop in play, rather than waiting for the ball to go out of play. There has also been discussion of allowing teams to have a temporary substitution to evaluate for concussion — the concern being that have to play with 10 players discourages a thorough process.
However, soccer, like other sports, has focused on more severe injuries, where I think the evidence is pretty clear that the risk is in repeated minor injuries as much as the big concussions from things like clashes of heads. Generally, sports don’t want to change, and there just isn’t enough push to take the repeated impacts seriously because the harm isn’t as obvious as the result of concussions. The only major changed I’ve heard suggested is to not have kids below a certain age head the ball to avoid injuries while their brains are still developing.
People are well aware of the danger. Many youth leagues ban headers for that exact reason.
But, sports in general tend to be conservative when it comes to safety changes, which likely explains the lack of action at the professional level.
The people who run this sport, at a professional level, are ****ing awful. Being in favor of a move that will give the athletes brain damage won’t even break into the Top Ten of Evil Things they’ve done TODAY. (Literally today.) So yes, you are right, it should be frowned upon, and the reason it is not is that the people who should be doing the frowning don’t care if athletes get hurt.
Because it’s an integral part of the game, there’s no viable solution other than helmets, and the risk isn’t deemed to be high enough. Youth levels have banned heading because young brains are still developing and have higher risk of damage
US Youth Soccer (the main governing body over youth soccer in the US) implemented a rule several years ago that heading the ball for kids < 10 is not allowed.
Non-expert opinion – the ball is not “headed” enough in a game for head injuries to accumulate. It isn’t like American football where there will be intense head impacts dozens of times/game.
Of course traumatic head injuries will happen due to collisions, but that happens in all sports (basketball, hockey, etc). Head injuries like CTE, which happen due to high repetition, are more likely to come from practice.
In the UK a group of ex footballers are looking to take legal action – [https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/63594737](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/63594737)
There will be arguments that improvements have already been made. Heading is somewhat less integral than it was back then, and the balls are lighter. There are also supposed to be more rigorous head injury protocols – but those have already been pretty much ignored twice already in the world cup – which should be the flagship.
In the US, the people that play and/or watch American Football LIKE tackling, ask anyone who plays or watches if they would continue if it were stopped.
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