Professional footballers are receiving more and more impacts to the head, according to neurologists at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona who have analyzed the blows received by players from 1974 to 2022. Doctors warn that this trend could cause an increase in neurodegenerative diseases among retired footballers in the future.
The increase in impacts has been observed especially in involuntary collisions, such as collisions between heads or elbows against heads. This type of collision, relatively infrequent, is the one that carries the greatest risk of neurological damage. The authors of the research attribute the increase to the evolution of football towards more intense playing styles.
To a lesser extent, an increase in the number of voluntary headers of the ball, a less traumatic but more frequent type of impact, has been observed. Neurologists suspect that repeatedly hitting the ball with your head may cause long-term damage through the accumulation of micro-injuries in the brain.
Previous studies have shown that professional footballers have a higher risk than the average population of suffering from neurodegenerative diseases after retiring. Among former Scottish League players, the risk of Alzheimer’s is five times higher than that of the general population and that of Parkinson’s is double. Among former Swedish league players, the risk of developing dementia with age is 62% higher than the population average.
But these studies were based on footballers who played in the 20th century, when playing styles and ball designs were different than today, so it was not known if the results were relevant to today’s football. To answer this question, the Hospital Clínic team has studied the evolution of neurological risks in football in recent decades.
Previous studies have detected that former soccer players have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s than the average population
The study has been based on a detailed study of each of the impacts suffered by any player to the head in matches. For the research to be viable, the study was limited to 120 matches, a limited sample but sufficient to detect trends. Matches from the 1974, 1990, 2006 and 2022 World Cups have been chosen to evaluate the evolution of football over half a century. For each World Cup, 30 matches have been randomly selected for analysis.
According to the results presented in The Lancet Neurologythe number of involuntary impacts that players suffer to the head has tripled from 1974 to 2022. If in the 1974 World Cup there were 17 involuntary collisions in 30 matches (approximately one each match), in the 2022 World Cup there were 50 collisions in 30 games (an average of 1.67 per game). Of these 50, 40% were collisions of arms against heads and 22% were collisions between heads. The increase has been progressive over the last five decades, with the number of head collisions increasing worldwide.
The trend is less pronounced for voluntary headbutts to the head. There was an increase of 41% between 1974 and 1990, when the average went from 61 to 87 headers per game, and has remained stable since then. Even so, professional soccer players hit the ball about 2,000 times with their heads throughout their career, the Clínic neurologists point out.
“The increasing frequency of head impacts detected in our study may suggest that the incidence of neurodegenerative diseases will increase over time among elite male professional soccer players,” they conclude in The Lancet Neurologywhich they point out are “worrying observations.”
As prevention measures, they propose increasing the awareness of referees, players, coaches and sports doctors; showing direct red cards when a player deliberately hits another player’s head; and limit the number of games a footballer can play in a season.
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