The Connection Between Heading the Ball and Dementia
Every time a player scores with a perfect header, the crowd cheers—but the brain pays a devastating price. Recent studies into footballers’ Alzheimer’s risk have revealed a terrifying reality: professional players are five times more likely to develop the disease than the general population. While heading the ball is a routine part of the game, these repeated impacts are now directly linked to a surge in neurodegenerative diseases. Understanding the connection between football and brain health is no longer optional; it is a matter of life and death.
Key Takeaways:
- Professional footballers face dramatically higher risks of neurodegenerative diseases – they’re five times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s, four times more likely to get motor neurone disease, and twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s compared to the general population. And here’s something that really drives the point home… defenders who head the ball most frequently are at the highest risk, while goalkeepers show about the same risk as everyone else. The longer you play professionally, the worse it gets – ranging from double the risk for shorter careers to five times the risk for the longest ones.
- Heading a football causes real, measurable damage to your brain’s white matter – specifically in the orbitofrontal cortex right behind your forehead. When the ball hits your head, your brain basically ricochets around inside your skull like gelatin being shaken. This stretches and damages the axons (the fine filaments that transmit information between brain cells), particularly at the boundary between white and grey matter, where differences in tissue density create shear forces. Players who head the ball more than 1,000 times per year show significant damage in MRI scans, and they score worse on memory tests, too.
- The link between repeated head impacts and CTE is undeniable – a staggering 91.7% of donated NFL player brains showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, compared to less than 1% in the general population. CTE leaves distinctive patterns of abnormal tau protein deposits in the brain that can only be definitively diagnosed after death. But it’s not just an American football problem… professional soccer players, rugby players, boxers, and other athletes who experience repeated head impacts are all vulnerable to developing this specific form of brain degeneration that we only see in people with a history of head injuries.
The Headline News: Why This Matters
You might think that a little bump to the head during a game is no big deal – after all, athletes are tough, right? But here’s what most people don’t realise: your brain has roughly the same consistency as gelatin, and every time it ricochets inside your skull during a header, microscopic damage is occurring that won’t show up for decades. We’re not talking about dramatic concussions or obvious injuries here. The real danger lies in those seemingly harmless, repetitive impacts that happen thousands of times throughout a career.
And the stakes couldn’t be higher. When Stewart’s team compared nearly 8,000 former professional footballers to regular people living in the same areas, born in the same years, the results were staggering. These weren’t random comparisons – they were carefully matched controls designed to show what “normal” aging should look like. What they found instead was a pattern of brain disease that should alarm anyone who’s ever headed a ball… or has kids who do.
What’s going on in the brains of these athletes?
The damage starts with something deceptively simple: your brain moving at a different speed than your skull. When that ball connects with your forehead, the impact sends forces travelling through your brain tissue, causing it to compress, twist and deform. The area just behind your forehead – the orbitofrontal cortex – takes the brunt of this assault. Think of it as the brain’s command centre for decision-making and memory, and it’s getting battered every single time you head the ball.
Michael Lipton’s research with amateur players has revealed something disturbing: even in young, healthy athletes who aren’t showing any symptoms yet, MRI scans show clear signs of damage to the white matter – those fine filaments called axons that act like your brain’s network cabling. Players heading the ball more than 1,000 times per year show significantly worse damage at the junction between white and grey matter. Why? These two types of tissue have different densities and literally move at different speeds during impact, creating shear forces that tear the delicate connections apart. And here’s the kicker – Lipton’s subjects aren’t even professionals. They’re recreational league players, university team members… people just like you or your neighbours.
The shocking stats behind neurodegenerative diseases
The numbers from Stewart’s Field study are frankly terrifying. Former professional footballers are five times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than the general population. Five times. They’re four times more likely to suffer from motor neurone disease, and twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s. Overall, these athletes face a 3.5 times higher chance of dying from neurodegenerative disease than you’d expect. But it gets worse – the risk isn’t evenly distributed across the pitch.
Defenders, who do the most heading, face the highest risk of all outfield players. Goalkeepers? Their risk stays about the same as yours or mine. That’s not a coincidence – it’s a direct correlation between headers and brain disease. And the longer you play professionally, the worse your odds become. Players with the shortest careers see roughly double the risk, while those with the longest careers face a five-fold increase. It’s like a slow-motion time bomb, ticking away with every header.
Then there’s Ann McKee’s research at Boston University, which analysed the donated brains of 376 former NFL players. A staggering 91.7% had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – that distinctive pattern of tau protein tangles that only shows up in people with a history of repeated head impacts. Yes, there’s some selection bias here since people who suspect they have the condition are more likely to donate their brains to science. But even accounting for that, when you compare it to the general population’s CTE prevalence of less than 1%, the contrast is absolutely stark. These weren’t just random players either – the cohort included quarterbacks like Rick Arrington and defenders like Ed Lothamer who played in the very first Super Bowl. Position didn’t matter. Era didn’t matter. What mattered was the accumulation of impacts over time, each one potentially setting the stage for cognitive decline decades later
Let’s Dive Deeper: What’s CTE All About?
When you think about brain damage from sports, CTE is the condition that keeps coming up in conversation – and for good reason. It’s not like other forms of dementia that might show up as you age, regardless of what you did in your twenties or thirties. CTE only appears in people who’ve experienced repeated head impacts, making it uniquely tied to contact sports. What makes this condition so distinctive is what scientists see when they examine brain tissue under a microscope: those tell-tale tangles of tau protein scattered throughout the cerebral cortex in a very specific pattern. You won’t find that same signature in someone who’s never taken a blow to the head.
The really unsettling part? CTE can only be definitively diagnosed after death, when researchers can actually examine your brain tissue. That means athletes walking around today – even those experiencing symptoms like memory problems, mood changes, or difficulty thinking clearly – can’t know for certain if they have it. And the symptoms don’t show up right away either… they typically emerge decades after your playing days are over, when you’re in your fifties or sixties and those glory days on the pitch feel like another lifetime.
The science behind the damage
Your brain is vitally the consistency of gelatin – soft, delicate, and completely vulnerable to the forces generated when a ball travelling at high speed makes contact with your skull. When you head that ball, your brain ricochets around inside your skull like a pinball, stretching and straining the fine filaments called axons that transmit information throughout your brain. These axons are part of your brain’s white matter, which acts like network cabling connecting different regions. Michael Lipton’s research using MRI scans has shown that players who head the ball more than 1,000 times per year develop significant damage to the orbitofrontal cortex – the part of your brain sitting right above your eye sockets, just behind your forehead.
What’s particularly damaging is that grey and white matter in your brain have different densities, so they move at different speeds during impact. This creates shear forces at the boundary between these tissues, literally tearing microscopic connections apart. Players who head the ball most frequently show clear signs of damage in this critical junction, and they score worse on learning and memory tests, too. The impact might feel mild – you’re not getting skull fractures or obvious bleeding – but those forces travelling through your brain are causing it to compress, twist, and deform in ways that put enormous strain on your neural architecture.
How common is CTE really?
The numbers are frankly terrifying when you look at professional athletes. Ann McKee’s groundbreaking research at Boston University examined the donated brains of 376 former NFL players and found that 91.7% had CTE. That’s not a typo – nearly 92 out of every 100 former American football players in the study showed clear evidence of the disease. This cohort included players like Rick Arrington, who was the Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback in the early 1970s, and Ed Lothamer, who played defence in the very first Super Bowl. McKee has also found CTE in former baseball players, cyclists, and ice hockey stars – basically any sport where your head takes repeated knocks.
Now, there’s an important caveat here: this doesn’t represent the true risk for all players because people who suspect they might have CTE are probably more likely to donate their brains to science. But even accounting for that selection bias, the contrast with the general population is stark. CTE prevalence in people who don’t play contact sports is thought to be less than 1%. Willie Stewart puts it bluntly: if you’re a professional footballer with dementia, your chances of having CTE in your brain are very high. The best predictor of whether someone might have this condition? Simply ask them if they’ve ever played football or rugby professionally.
What researchers still don’t fully understand is why some players develop CTE, and others don’t, even with similar exposure to head impacts. It could be genetics, lifestyle factors, or some combination that makes certain individuals more vulnerable. Some of those young amateur players showing early brain damage on Lipton’s MRI scans will
It’s Not Just Football: Other Sports at Risk
Are boxers and rugby stars facing the same fate?
Boxing was actually where scientists first spotted the pattern nearly a century ago – back in 1928, when Harrison Martland described “punch drunk” fighters stumbling around with mental confusion. The condition, originally called dementia pugilistica, was most common in fighters who took “considerable head punishment” and sometimes progressed to full-blown dementia. For decades, everyone assumed this was just a boxing problem… until cases started popping up in other sports. Rugby players, it turns out, are facing similar risks to footballers, with former international rugby union players showing significantly higher rates of neurodegenerative disease compared to the general population.
The pattern is eerily similar across both sports. Whether you’re taking punches to the head or colliding with other players at high speed, your brain’s experiencing those same devastating forces that cause it to ricochet inside your skull. Stewart’s research suggests that if you’re a professional footballer with dementia, your chances of having CTE in your brain are “very high” – and the same logic applies to rugby players and boxers. The common thread? Repeated head impacts, even if they don’t knock you unconscious or cause obvious injury at the time. Your brain’s keeping score of every single hit, and eventually, the bill comes due.
The surprising connections across sports
McKee’s brain donation studies have revealed something that should make athletes across all contact sports sit up and pay attention. She’s diagnosed CTE not just in NFL players and boxers, but in former baseball players, cyclists, and ice hockey stars too. That’s right – even sports you wouldn’t immediately think of as “high-risk” are showing up in the data. In every single case, the common denominator was the same: repeated knocks to the head. It doesn’t matter if you’re heading a football, taking a punch, or crashing your bike – your brain doesn’t discriminate between types of impact.
The prevalence rates are staggering when compared to everyday life. While CTE affects less than 1% of the general population, McKee found it in a whopping 91.7% of donated NFL player brains. And before you think “well, those were probably the worst cases,” you’re right – people who suspect they have CTE are more likely to donate their brains to science. But that doesn’t change the fundamental reality: these athletes are developing a condition that’s virtually nonexistent in people who don’t play contact sports.
What’s particularly chilling is how the risk scales with your career length. Stewart’s Field study showed that footballers with the shortest careers roughly doubled their risk of neurodegenerative disease, while those with the longest careers faced around a five-fold increase. So every season you play, every game you suit up for, you’re adding to your cumulative risk. And it’s not just about the big hits either – it’s the thousands of smaller impacts over years and years that seem to cause the most damage. Baseball players aren’t getting concussed every game, yet they still end up with CTE. Cyclists might crash occasionally, but it’s enough. Your brain’s keeping a running tally, and there’s no reset button.
What’s the Deal with Heading the Ball?
Michael Lipton’s research team at Columbia University started scanning the brains of amateur soccer players a few years back, and what they found was pretty unsettling. Players who were heading the ball more than 1,000 times per year showed visible damage to their brain tissue – and these weren’t even professionals. Just regular folks playing in recreational leagues on weekends.
You might think heading a soccer ball is no big deal compared to, say, getting tackled in American football or taking a punch in boxing. And you’d be partially right – it doesn’t cause skull fractures or bleeding. But here’s what’s actually happening inside your head with each seemingly harmless header. When that ball makes contact with your forehead, your brain ricochets around inside your skull like gelatin in a jar, stretching and straining the delicate wiring that keeps everything functioning properly. The scary part? You won’t feel most of this damage happening in real time.
How does that seemingly harmless act hurt?
Your brain has the consistency of gelatin – seriously, that’s what Lipton compares it to. So when you head a ball travelling at speed, the impact doesn’t just affect the spot where it makes contact. The force travels through your entire brain, causing it to compress, twist, and deform inside your skull. Think about shaking a bowl of Jell-O… that’s basically what’s happening to your brain with every header.
The real damage happens to something called white matter – specifically in the orbitofrontal cortex, which sits right behind your forehead, just above your eye sockets. White matter is the network cabling of your brain, made up of incredibly fine filaments called axons that transmit information between different brain regions. These axons are extremely vulnerable to rapid acceleration forces. When your head suddenly changes speed during impact, these delicate filaments get stretched, and their connectivity gets disrupted. And once that connectivity is damaged, it doesn’t always repair itself properly.
The hidden dangers of brain impacts
What makes this whole situation particularly insidious is that grey and white matter have different densities, so they move at different speeds when your head is impacted. Lipton’s team discovered that the gap between these two types of brain tissue sustains the most damage from heading. When you head a ball, the grey and white matter vitally slide against each other, creating what scientists call shear forces – kind of like tectonic plates grinding together during an earthquake, except this is happening in your brain.
Players who reported heading more than 1,000 balls per year had significantly greater damage in this critical area. But it’s not just the physical damage that’s concerning – these frequent headers also performed worse on learning and memory tests compared to players who headed the ball less often or not at all. Your brain is literally showing signs of wear and tear that correlate with cognitive decline, even in relatively young, otherwise healthy athletes.
What happens after this initial damage is still somewhat mysterious, but the theories aren’t comforting. One hypothesis suggests that repeated impacts damage the blood vessels in your brain, making them chronically leaky and allowing substances that shouldn’t be there to seep into brain tissue. Another possibility is that your brain’s natural healing response – inflammation – never properly switches off, leading to a chronic inflammatory process that slowly degrades your neural tissue over decades. Stewart explains that the brain’s healing response kicks in to try and repair the damage to fibres and blood vessels, but if those vessels don’t repair properly or the inflammation becomes chronic, you’re setting yourself up for serious problems down the line. Some researchers also think the repeated injury simply causes neurons to degenerate and die over time, with the damage accumulating like interest on a loan you can never pay off. The terrifying reality is that for many players, this damage is happening silently – you might not develop symptoms until you’re in your 50s or 60s, long after you’ve hung up your boots.
The Role of Genetics and Lifestyle – Does It Matter?
Two brothers played professional football for nearly identical lengths of time, both as defenders, both heading the ball thousands of times throughout their careers. One developed severe dementia in his early sixties. The other? He’s now 78 and still plays golf twice a week with no signs of cognitive decline. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario – it’s the kind of real-world puzzle that keeps researchers up at night, trying to figure out why some athletes seem almost immune to the damage while others aren’t so lucky.
The statistics from studies like Stewart’s Field research are alarming, sure. Footballers 50% more likely to develop dementia, study finds – and that’s just one of the many headlines that have emerged from this research. But here’s what those numbers don’t tell you: not every professional footballer develops dementia. Not even close, actually. While the risk is significantly elevated compared to the general population, plenty of former players live into their eighties and nineties with their minds sharp as ever. So what’s protecting them? Is it something they were born with, or something they did differently after hanging up their boots?
Why do some athletes seem to dodge the bullet?
Your genetic makeup might be playing a bigger role than anyone previously thought. Scientists have identified several genes that could influence how your brain responds to repeated trauma. The most studied one is called APOE, and it comes in different versions – kind of like how you might have blue eyes while your sibling has brown. If you carry a particular version called APOE4, your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease is already higher than average, even without ever heading a football. Now combine that genetic vulnerability with years of professional football, and you’re potentially looking at a much more dangerous situation than someone with a different version of the gene.
But genetics isn’t the whole story. Some researchers believe there might be protective factors we haven’t fully identified yet – maybe certain genes that help your brain repair damage more efficiently, or inflammatory responses that shut off properly instead of becoming chronic. Think of it like this: two people can smoke for forty years, and one gets lung cancer while the other doesn’t. We know smoking causes cancer, but individual biology matters enormously. The same principle likely applies to brain damage associated with heading. Your brain’s resilience, its ability to clear out those problematic tau proteins, and how well your blood-brain barrier functions – all of these could be influenced by your unique genetic profile. And honestly? We’re only just beginning to understand how all these pieces fit together.
The impact of life choices on brain health
What you do after your playing career ends might matter just as much as what happened during it. Recent research suggests that lifestyle factors can either accelerate or slow down the progression of brain damage in former athletes. We’re talking about the basics here – diet, exercise, sleep, alcohol consumption, and whether you smoke. These aren’t just general health tips your doctor throws at you. For someone who’s already sustained repeated head impacts, these factors could be the difference between developing symptoms in your fifties versus living symptom-free into old age.
Physical exercise is particularly interesting because it does something remarkable for your brain – it promotes the growth of new neurons and strengthens the connections between existing ones. Some studies have shown that former athletes who maintain high levels of physical activity after retirement show less cognitive decline than those who become sedentary. Your brain has this incredible ability to compensate for damage, to reroute around problem areas and form new pathways. But it needs the right conditions to do that. Sleep is another big one. That’s when your brain clears out metabolic waste, including those tau proteins that accumulate in CTE. If you’re consistently getting poor sleep, you’re literally not giving your brain the time it needs to clean house.
Then there’s the social and cognitive engagement factor. Former players who stay mentally active – learning new skills, maintaining social connections, challenging their brains with complex tasks – seem to fare better than those who don’t. It’s not that crossword puzzles are going to reverse brain damage, but
My Take on Prevention: What Can Be Done?
With 91.7% of former NFL players showing signs of CTE and professional footballers facing a five-fold increase in Alzheimer’s risk, you might think the solution is obvious – ban heading altogether. But the reality isn’t quite that simple. The sport has been played this way for over a century, and asking professional leagues to fundamentally change the game overnight just isn’t realistic. What we can do, though, is start implementing protective measures that could dramatically reduce your risk if you’re currently playing, or protect the next generation of athletes from suffering the same fate as Jeff Astle or Mike Webster.
The good news? We’re not starting from scratch here. Some governing bodies have already begun taking action, even if it feels painfully slow to those watching their loved ones decline. And there’s emerging research suggesting that limiting headers during training – where most repetitive impacts actually occur – could make a massive difference without destroying the essence of the game itself. Because here’s what most people don’t realise: it’s not usually the dramatic headers during matches that cause the most damage, it’s the thousands of practice headers you’re doing week after week, year after year.
Steps to protect athletes
Several football associations have already introduced heading guidelines for youth players, and the results are promising. In 2020, both England and Scotland banned heading for children under 12 during training sessions. The US Soccer Federation went even further, prohibiting heading for players under 10 and limiting it for those aged 11-13. These aren’t just feel-good policies – they’re based on the understanding that developing brains are even more vulnerable to repetitive impacts than adult brains. Your child’s white matter is still forming those connections, and disrupting that process early could set them up for problems decades down the line.
But what about professional and amateur adult players who’ve already been heading balls for years? Some leagues are experimenting with “heading limits” during training, capping the number of headers players can take per session or per week. It’s similar to pitch-count limits in baseball, which have successfully reduced arm injuries among young pitchers. There’s also growing interest in protective headgear, though the jury’s still out on whether current designs actually reduce the forces transmitted to your brain. The problem is that your brain isn’t getting damaged by external impact to your skull – it’s the internal movement and shearing forces that cause the harm, and a thin headband can’t prevent your brain from bouncing around inside your skull like gelatin in a jar.
Awareness and education
You can’t protect yourself from a risk you don’t know exists. That’s why education might be the most powerful tool we have right now. When Willie Stewart’s Field study results came out in 2019, showing that defenders had the highest risk of neurodegenerative disease while goalkeepers had roughly the same risk as the general population, it should’ve been a wake-up call for every player, coach, and parent involved in the sport. Yet many amateur leagues still operate as if heading is completely harmless, encouraging young players to practice headers hundreds of times without any awareness of the potential consequences.
Teaching proper heading technique matters too – and not just for performance. When you head the ball incorrectly, using the wrong part of your head or with poor neck stability, you’re likely subjecting your brain to even greater forces. Coaches need training on how to spot the early warning signs of brain injury, and players need to understand that heading the ball while they’re already experiencing symptoms from a previous impact is incredibly dangerous. Your brain needs time to heal, and hitting it again before it’s recovered is like reopening a wound that’s trying to close.
Perhaps most importantly, we need to change the culture around brain injuries in sports. Right now, there’s still this mentality that you’re tough if you “play through” a head knock or that you’re letting your team down if you sit out after a concussion. But would you think someone was tough for playing football on a broken leg? Of course not – you’d think they were being reckless with their long-term health. Your brain deserves the same respect and protection as any other part of your body, maybe even more so, considering you only get one.
Conclusion
Hence, if you’ve been following the research, you can see why sports governing bodies are finally starting to take this seriously. Your brain wasn’t designed to withstand thousands of impacts over a career – even seemingly minor ones from heading a football. The evidence is pretty clear at this point… professional footballers face dramatically elevated risks of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease, and CTE compared to the general population. And it’s not just a small increase we’re talking about here – defenders are five times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than you or me. That’s huge. The damage happens at the microscopic level, where your brain’s delicate white matter – those fine axons connecting everything together – gets stretched and twisted with each impact. Because grey and white matter move at different speeds when your head suddenly accelerates, shear forces tear through the tissue. Over time, this could trigger chronic inflammation or vascular damage that never quite heals properly, setting the stage for neurodegeneration decades down the line.
So what does this mean for you if you play football, or if your kids do? The science is still evolving, but the pattern is unmistakable. Your risk increases with the number of headers you do throughout your career – it’s dose-dependent. Goalkeepers show normal risk levels because they rarely head the ball, while defenders who head constantly face the greatest danger. Some people will head the ball thousands of times and be fine, while others develop devastating conditions in their 50s and 60s. We don’t yet know why some brains are more vulnerable than others – genetics and lifestyle probably play a role – but you can’t ignore the overall trend. The good news is that awareness is growing, and changes are being implemented at youth levels in many countries to limit heading practice. But for the professional players who’ve already spent careers heading heavy leather balls in the rain, the damage may already be done, and your support for better long-term healthcare and ongoing research into treatments becomes absolutely vital.
FAQ
Q: What exactly is CTE, and how is it different from regular dementia?
A: You’ve probably heard the term thrown around in sports news, but what actually is CTE? Chronic traumatic encephalopathy – or CTE for those of us who can’t be bothered with the mouthful – is a specific type of brain degeneration that only shows up in people who’ve experienced repeated head impacts. And here’s the thing that makes it really distinct from other forms of dementia… when doctors examine the brain tissue under a microscope, they see a very particular pattern of abnormal protein deposits called tau scattered throughout the cerebral cortex. Unlike Alzheimer’s or other dementias that can develop for various reasons, CTE has one clear cause: repeated head trauma. Willie Stewart, a neuropathologist at the University of Glasgow, puts it pretty bluntly – if you’re a professional footballer with dementia, your chances of having CTE are very high. The condition was first spotted in boxers nearly 100 years ago (they called it being “punch drunk” back then), but we now know it affects athletes across multiple sports. Soccer players, rugby stars, American football players… basically anyone whose sport involves their head taking repeated hits. What makes CTE particularly heartbreaking is that it can only be definitively diagnosed after death. There’s no test you can take while you’re alive to confirm it. The symptoms – memory problems, confusion, depression, sometimes even suicidal thoughts – can look like other conditions. But when researchers examined the donated brains of 376 former NFL players, a staggering 91.7% had CTE. That’s not a typo. Nearly all of them had this preventable brain disease.
Q: Why does heading a football cause so much damage when it doesn’t seem that violent?
A: Right, so this seems counterintuitive at first. You’re not getting knocked unconscious, there’s no blood, no broken bones… how bad could it really be? Turns out, pretty bad. The problem isn’t the immediate dramatic injury – it’s what’s happening inside your skull that you can’t see. Your brain has roughly the consistency of gelatin (appetising image, I know), and it’s floating inside your hard skull. When a football smacks into your head, your skull stops suddenly but your brain keeps moving for a split second, bouncing around inside like… well, like jello in a container you just shook. Michael Lipton, who studies this at Columbia University, explains that this causes the brain to compress, twist and deform. The real damage happens to the white matter – basically, the brain’s wiring system, made up of incredibly fine filaments called axons. These axons are what transmit information throughout your brain, and they’re extremely vulnerable to being stretched and strained by these rapid acceleration forces. But it gets worse. The area right behind your forehead – the orbitofrontal cortex – seems to take the biggest hit. Lipton’s research on amateur players shows that the boundary between grey and white matter in this region sustains the most damage. Why? Because grey and white matter have different densities, so when your head jerks from impact, they move at different speeds. This creates shear forces between the tissues… imagine two pieces of paper sliding against each other, except it’s your brain tissue. And here’s what should really concern you – Lipton found that players heading the ball more than 1,000 times per year showed significantly greater damage in brain scans. That might sound like a lot, but for someone training regularly? That’s totally achievable. The scary part is these were relatively young, healthy people who weren’t showing disease symptoms yet… but the damage was already there, visible on MRI scans.
Q: Are all positions equally at risk, and what can actually be done to protect players?
A: No, definitely not all positions face the same risk – and this is where the research gets really interesting because it gives us clues about prevention. Stewart’s massive study of Scottish footballers found that defenders are at much higher risk than other outfield players. Makes sense when you think about it… Defenders are constantly heading the ball away from goal, dealing with crosses, and challenging for aerial balls. Goalkeepers, on the other hand? Their risk is about the same as that of the general population. They’re diving, jumping, making saves with their hands – but they’re not heading the
