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There is an urban myth that mothers and fathers are moving in masses to have their children play less violent sports, with football being the benefactor of this. The perception is that a sport which revolves mainly around skill is safer than the skill/violence combination of rugby union, league and AFL.
Parents are told it is safer for their children at a young age, and in the future they may not suffer the long-term physical effects associated with the other sports.
But is this true? The simple answer is no.
The impact on the brain caused by football’s header is something which is only beginning to be extensively researched. Sure it’s not boxing, where you may get belted several times a minute, but you would expect the repetitive nature of heading a ball could have an effect, especially on young, developing brains.
A study presented at the Radiological Society of North America showed that “Heading a football is not an impact of a magnitude that will lacerate nerve fibres from the brain,” but that “repetitive heading could set off a cascade of responses that can lead to degeneration of brain cells.”
It also found that the threshold in a career for heading the ball before a significant effect is noted is around 1000 – 1500. This seems like a large number, but if you play 20 games a year for 10 years, it averages out to between five and 7.5 headers per game. And this is not taking into account headers at training or social games.
I am not saying that we should bolt for the gates and stop playing football because we may end up as vegetables, or slightly less functional in our old age. I am simply saying that the myth around football being safer than other sports may not be well founded.
The type of long-term injury sustained from football may be silent; something that could develop over several years. The injuries associated with other codes are more sudden and spectacular. Blown knees, decimated shoulders and dramatic dislocations make the other sports appear more savage and life altering.
I have no doubt they have a more noticeable effect on our bodies later in life, but the genuine gap may not be as large as we first thought.
Concussions and how to stop them are all the rage right now in sport, so I am not surprised this is only been taken as a serious matter now in the world of football.
However, it’s not just football that is in the firing line.
The NFL has currently stamped out helmet-to-helmet contact on defenceless receivers in a bid to stop sickening scenes where players are lined up from 10 yards away and knocked out cold. Whether they have done this for the good of the players or the good of the league’s pockets I am not too sure.
The NHL’s star player, Sydney Crosby, has been struggling through the last few seasons due to the reccurring effects of concussion. At one point he missed 61 consecutive games, at the age of 23! This was a result of poor player management, trying to be tough, and the fact that putting cheap shots on the best players is a regular occurrence and the head is the prime target.
But how do we attack this problem in the world of the round ball? Heading is an integral part of the game. Without it football ceases to exist and will turn into a glorified game of hackey-sack. I have two ideas, which kind of mould together.
The first is similar to what we had when we were young kids playing rugby. In these junior matches, usually around the ages of 5-9 years old, we played touch rugby. Obviously our bodies were not developed enough to handle the rigour of heavy contact, and the two handed touch on the hips got us used to the right tackling position without the physical contact.
Therefore I would eliminate heading in lower age grades, possibly until high school age or a few years prior. This then leads into my next point which will hopefully stop the “kids need to learn heading at a young age” argument.
Light, padded training balls. To eliminate the impact on a child’s head and to help teach them the correct technique for the later years, a lighter padded ball could be used at training when teaching the art of heading. If the ball is of a spongy nature this will also decrease the level of impact on their head, it is basic physics. Force equals mass times acceleration. Acceleration is velocity divided by time.
By having a cushioned heading practice ball you increase the amount of time the ball is in contact with the head, which decreases the rate of deceleration against the head, which then decreases the force exerted on the brain. You weren’t expecting a physics lesson this morning were you?
This may even be happening as I speak, but when I dabbled with football in my younger years (and I am only in my mid-20s) there was nothing like it. Some will say it is soft and that they need to toughen up.
However, I think in this modern era, where we are only just discovering the long term effect of concussions associated with sport, why not take some precautions with the younger players while still teaching the fundamentals.
The more people we can keep in the game for longer periods, the better, I say.
I am not here to cause a hate campaign against football. I like the game and rate watching Liverpool versus Middlesbrough as a sporting highlight. I just think it may miss the boat in terms of brain trauma and how to minimise it in a sport where the forehead is the second most important part of the body.
Let more research be conducted before we start burning people at the stake, but lets not kid ourselves that somehow football is so much less traumatic on our bodies.
Parents, the devil is in the detail.
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