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According to the New Yorker article,
the plaintiffs claim that "roughly 50,000
high-school soccer players sustained
concussions in 2010–more players
than in basketball, baseball, softball,
and wrestling combined–and demands
that limits be placed on the number of
times that players under seventeen may
head the ball."
The parents and players are not looking for
financial compensation, "but to change the
rules of the game to make it safe."
Last year, in a study published in the medical
journal Radiology, Michael L. Lipton, MD,
PhD, and a few colleagues studied the brains
of 37 amateur soccer players in New York.
The players averaged eight or ten headers
a week. Those who had headed the ball most
did the worst on a series of standard
cognitive tests.
According to Dr. Lipton, "The question is:
How different are you than you would be if
that had not happened? Or, to make it sound
really horrible, let's say you have a twelve-
year-old child playing competitive soccer and
heading. What is the expected cognitive or
behavioral trajectory of that kid? And
how is that altered or impeded by this
exposure?"
An article in Forbes suggests two remedies.
One is to relax substitution rules so that,
according to writer Dan Diamond, "being
forced to deploy a substitution" is not a
"strategic blow." Diamond's second suggestion
is to employ independent physicians who are
not influenced by either team, as sideline
medical staff seems to be.
We can no longer pretend that soccer is
less affected by head injuries than other
sports, or wonder whether or not heading
a soccer ball affects the brain. Though
watching a soccer game without following the
trajectory of a beautifully headed ball seems
impossible, we must acknowledge the effects
of such a play and decide what we want to do
about them.
