I'm quite thankful that I never ended up on the team, and think the entire concept of high school football is incredibly stupid given what we know about CTE.
At the same time, a lot of parents (myself included) steered kids to other sports. That had another effect: there was even more pressure on parents who didn't care about CTE (and their kids) to get into football because kiddie leagues and especially high school teams were short of players. This happened to a friend whose two boys were strong hockey players, the coach at their school pushed them to try out for football the following season.
Our science writers at BU have been writing about CTE research for at least that long. Oldest I could find was 2010. We've published a lot on the topic on our main news site and our science publication:
Brink CTE stories: https://www.bu.edu/brink/tag/cte/
BU Today CTE stories going back to 2010: https://www.bu.edu/today/tag/cte/
Some favorites:
This 5 part series: https://www.bu.edu/brink/series/cte-how-bu-is-changing-the-g...
This story about Youth Football: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2018/youth-football-linked-to-ea...
And this video from the Director of the CTE research center talking about how these discoveries impacted her as a huge football fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUsDvKyhtA4
I'm a creative director @ BU and our designers have occasionally helped our editorial teams with story designs for these types of research stories. It's been interesting watching the progression of the research over the years and as a parent as well I would not let my kids play football based on the research. There are other, less risky sports they can enjoy. Skiing, Martial Arts, etc. I don't believe we can or should protect them from all risk, but this CTE research has been a clear enough signal in how football is played for me to be wary of letting them play.
Lift weights and play tennis or baseball.
sure you tear an ACL here and there, but thats nothing modern surgery cant fix.
Somewhere, there's a dude in spandex and legwarmers muttering to himself, "It's my time." [Maniac fades in]
Of course people get hurt in soccer, but that’s out of the ordinary. For football, getting hurt is the ordinary. Most likely people aren’t calling ambulances because getting shaken up and a bit nauseated is par for the course for football.
True, but soccer is also susceptible to CTE. It is becoming increasingly apparent that soccer, particularly headers and on field collisions, also yields plenty of CTE cases. So much so that some soccer organizations are introducing protocols, such as no headers for youth soccer.
I think it's more destructive to control and remove your child from the possibility of risk at the cost of preventing them from learning to navigate the world with the information at hand to do so in way they can manage.
There is something to be said about the socialization of sports. But there is such a thing as negative socialization, regression even. I would say football consistently has one of the most toxic cultures of any sport. It’s improving, very slowly. But there’s more to gain than just lower head injury risk by switching to a different sport.
I played football and yet never drink, have never done drugs, am not and was never homophobic, never got into trouble etc.
Would I let a kid play football now, with all the knowledge of CTE? No. I absolutely even worry about it for myself. But it's a bit odd, to me, to say "football made me a bad person".
I think basically all people who were socialized male have had these experiences at one point or another, whether it be in football, in class, in the military, at sleepovers, in the locker room.
My point is more so that football has a particular “culture”, or it did when I was a kid. And that culture was not necessarily socially productive at a young and impressionable age. When we see certain behaviors in particularly young men, we have to wonder where they come from, and what we are doing to cultivate that.
Encouraging them to get a drivers license is fine (run cross-country), but getting them a driver's license and buying your 16-year old a sports car with bald tires and no seatbelts (football) is negligent.
If cars, alcohol or weed caused 75%+ of the people who used them to have massive brain damage then it'd be unreasonable to allow people to use those too.
Yes, you’re optimizing for your kids individual life but nothing we Americans do anymore is holistic. It’s all short-term thinking.
Masculine culture has traditionally, and currently, favored conformance and lack of individuality over basically everything else. It’s one of the more toxic parts of masculinity as portrayed by the patriarchy.
There are many ways to be a woman. There are many ways to be a gay man. There’s really only one way to be a straight man, if you want to be valuable in the eyes of the patriarchy. It’s all about conformity, conformity, conformity. No deviancy, no thoughts, just a blank slate of a man ready for work, family, and an early death, be it at war or doing stupid things.
How you dress, how you speak, how you walk, who you are friends with, what shows you watch, who you respect, how you show that respect, what you do, how you earn a living, how you have sex, how you obtain relationships. Everything, from life until death.
The perfect man is the perfect cog. He works, he doesn’t think too much, he walks and talks right, he makes moral love to his wife, and he raises his kids in a standard American family hand-picked for him by his forefathers. Any deviance from that is marks-off.
I think a lot of men need to believe that their life just so happens to perfectly fit the mold, but you see, it’s by choice. If that’s what they need to believe to be happy, then okay. I’m fine with that.
And they are not courageous. They are so scared they will be seen as unmanly or outsiders, that they will do, enable and tolerate pretty much anything.
If they don’t play and everyone else does, their development will be many years behind their peers which makes it unlikely they could play at a high level.
But maybe you’re okay with that.
And like any responsible parents, they presumably also don't just defer to what they're elementary aged children "want to do with their life" nor feed into the exaggeration that "everybody else" does anything at all, let alone play tackle football.
If you disagree with the dangers of the sport or are afraid of shaping your children's life choices for their own benefit, that's fine for you, but the rhetorical and snide way you presume others should share that view seems strange.
This is the only wise position. Despite the common and misleading film tropes, children do not know themselves perfectly. Often the adults "holding them back" are doing those children a great favor.
The correct thing to do is to ban tackle football below a certain age. Probably college. That levels the playing field.
Sorry about the misread!
And different sports have different safety concerns.
Distance running is known to cause increase chance of cardiac arrest.
How about gymnastics, some of those dismounts are pretty dangerous
Why single out one of them
It's singled out because it's the single sport that appears to lead to life-altering effects from invisible injuries, rather than an acceptable cost/risk of accidental injury or increased chance of extremely rare events in other sports. They are open for debate just the same if evidence comes to light.
The real question is why you believe your personal experience has any bearing on the facts presented, to the point of farcical argument. It's a shame that anything we enjoy may later turn out to be harmful, but you are arguing the equivalent of: "I smoked all my life and I'm fine", "but red meat gives you cancer too", "why are you targeting smoking when people drink", "people have died choking on air".
I coach middle school girls. It's a blast. It has by far the most strategy of any youth sport.
If I had sons, I wouldn't let them play tackle football before high school, and I would have to think long and hard about that even.
I enjoyed flag football as a coach so much that I built my own play creation and team management software (https://getplaylook.com). One of the things that you get with flag at an early age because you aren't so focused on the physical side of the game is a higher emphasis on technique, particularly route running, and play design. Good play design can scheme people open, even if your team isn't very fast.
I played football in high school & college. Did I get hurt? Yes. But I also got hurt in other sports. My worst injury by far was in baseball (it required ~22 stitches & I couldn't see out of one eye for a while).
With every activity there's a tradeoff with risk.
Let's say we take tackle football off the table. We ban it from high schools, justifying it based on a study showing it produced 3.96 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions & 8.22 concussions per 10,000 (the highest for both).[1]
Okay, but then do we also ban woman's soccer?
It's the second highest, at 2.65 injuries per 1,000 practices or competitions and 6.11 concussions per 10,000.
Or why let our children take any risk?
As a parent, I know I can't shelter my children. They have to take some risk. I let my children ride a bike, knowing full well there is a non-zero chance he could get by a car. We live in a big city & I let my pre-teen walk to meet a friend at a local burger joint for lunch, knowing full well there are bad people in the world who might do something untoward to him.
As for CTE specifically, I am very concerned about in the NFL. I have mixed feelings if I'm complicit in things by watching. As a diehard Bears fan, I found Dave Duerson's story heartbreaking. I'm supportive of the guardian helmets and hope the league starts to mandate them.
But the athletes in the NFL are not like amateurs. They are far bigger, far stronger, far faster. You can't take the CTE data from professional & extrapolate it to high school, etc.
Soccer is addressing the concussion issue by banning headers. I think the current rule is no headers for U12s and below. That will probably be adjusted upwards to U14s at some point.
† https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/07/12/world-cup-headers-2...
Additionally, people in college and NFL have played waaay more football which increases the chance of CTE. 95% of HS football players will not play beyond HS.
Removing HS football and lower wouldn’t make a big difference and would negatively impact the most people.
And I started all four years, The first two years on both offense and defense.
I did for eight years, from 5th grade through 12th grade. There was a lot of value in learning aspects of teamwork, comradery, and working towards a common goal. However, given the hard data we have on the potential dangers, I am not letting either of my sons play. There are plenty of other ways (and sports) to get those lessons with much lower risks to their developing brains.
I think we can all agree that injuries to the brain are especially worrisome for children, especially when compared to common baseball injuries (hamstring, elbow, rotator cuff, etc.)
I'd rather my child accept a high risk of sprain, than even a low change of CTE.
I know a ex-professional football player that doesn't let his children play football.
I fear I have some mild anger problems. I can't tell you if any of it is even related to football, but if I could go back and stop myself from playing football in middle and high school, I would in a heartbeat. I hated the sport and felt trapped. I imagine I'm not the only kid with a similar story. And just because I never had an official injury doesn't mean the sport had no effect on my developing brain.
Kids don't always have the autonomy to make decisions for themselves; we don't let them use cigarettes or alcohol, get tattoos, etc. The sport has the ability to leave lasting damage on those playing it unlike other sports because impacts are intrinsic to the game as it's currently played. Other sports like soccer can and have banned headers.
I think it's reprehensible to continue allowing children to continue playing contact football.
I did, and I agree with the comment you responded to.
Pretty much all my worst injuries are related to football, sprains, hip issues, knee issues, and a concussion that took me out of a game in college.
Or why let our children take any risk?
Why let our children take all risks?
In other sports it's called an accident. In football it's called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The equivalent in baseball would be if the rules/style of the game required to batter the bat ball by smashing it on their head every single time.
The article also explains how it works, and while someone that stops playing football after high school stops the increase of the "cumulative blows to the head" counter, it still leaves a trace.
Considering that by 50 you'd have the brain of an 80 year old, I don't see why expose myself to that risk in the first place.
It's fairly likely they'll change the rules to reduce injuries. In the US, they already banned kids under 10 from deliberately heading, with some practice rules after that.
And ultimately, changing the rules is sort of like a ban. You can't (competitively) play the original sport.
Most of a football game is spent waiting for resumption of play, while girls soccer is continuous.
Football also introduces a different type of collision than those experienced on a soccer field (conceding girls soccer can be pretty intense). Dangerous football plays are by design, often straight ahead collisions, while contact in soccer is often incidental.
We are finding lifelong debilitating disease in football players, at rates far exceeding other sports, so I think it's fair to scrutinize the risk. Entering a profession that promises a 75% likelihood of degenerate brain injury is a sobering thought. Then consider high school and college football players are exposing themselves to the risk of developing some form of this disease before they're old enough to understand the risk, and without a luxury lifestyle to show for it.
FWIW, I played American football for 10 years and I relished contact, but older and wiser now I think I could have scratched that itch in a safer way.
My daughter does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu since a few years already now: her uncle is a black belt. She skateboards too. Those aren't "safe" sports. BTW she already dislocated someone else's arm (nothing serious but the other person wanted to "see if BJJ works": she got her answer).
And yet there are sports I won't let her do, like proximity flying or basejumping for example.
Saying: "All sports have risks, so all sports are equally risky" is a logical fallacy.
Boxing is by far the worst from this point of view, much worse than the combat sports that allow knock-outs but also have other alternatives, like MMA.
Combat sports like judo or fencing are much safer than American football.
FWIW, the NFL seemingly increasingly penalizes and expands the definition of unsafe hits every year. If people just liked the violence, BKB or power slap would be much more popular than they are.
0 - https://apnews.com/article/cte-australia-rugby-league-035e24...
That being said, rugby is a different game. Football for the most effected players is one crushing impact per down, and a lot of waiting around and planning. Without helmets, half of the players would be knocked out cold. Rugby is not like that.
Every down in football is basically like a sumo tachi-ai (initial charge.) It's absurdly stressful without a helmet to do it even once a day between professionals. People would have to stop leading with their heads.
> If people just liked the violence
This is irrelevant. I love gridiron football, I think it's the best team sport ever invented, especially for spectators. I don't just like the violence, I like the violence. I have to accept the fact that I might not like it as much if people weren't leading with their heads. It's also the smartest game in my opinion, and I'm amused by upper middle-class people in the US thinking that "soccer" is classy (because Europe) when all the players are so much dumber (let's talk about heading; that ball is soft, too.)
American football is an atrocity, though. Even at the professional level, it doesn't pay enough for how bad it hurts you (and careers are shortest for the people who see the most impacts.) At the college level, forget it.
The equipment to make it safe is the problem - it allows you to take orders of magnitude more blows to the head. There were many people saying that to improve the safety of football, you should get rid of helmets entirely.
Padded helmets in football and padded gloves in boxing serve the same purpose as having filters on cigarettes. Filters on cigarettes allow you to smoke a lot more, and a lot of the stuff that is worst for you is not filtered out.
To the NFL's credit, they have made rules and equipment changes to address this.
Football and boxing involve guaranteed sub-concussion head impacts every session and likely full concussions at least a few times a year.
Anecdotally, I have many friends, of both sexes, who like to go skiing, and after many decades none of them has ever been injured. Some falls from time to time are unavoidable, but if the speed is not excessive for the terrain and the fall is managed correctly, most falls will not result in injuries.
the freeride stuff is really popular now. i fortunately never got into it, seems a lot riskier
People who do not like unnecessary risks can go downhill as slow as they choose. Skiing speed is controllable, unless you are an inexperienced beginner, in which case you should not attempt to go downhill where that is too steep.
It’s a sport many people step away from for long periods of time (I.e. the muscles aren’t in shape and they're rusty) and it demands a lot unless you’re sticking to bunny slopes.
But its also a lot of fun. Its crazy how much we crave excitement in life but that excitement often carries enormous risks.
Have you ever seen ice hockey? Okay well imagine that if it was on a field and if you made it into a really fast and violent contact sport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandy#Bandy_and_ice_hockey
Ice hockey is generally used to mean the specific Olympic sport invented in Canada and played professionally in the NHL at the same level as the NFL.
In shinty a perfectly acceptable tackle is to hook someone's legs out from under them and then hit them as they go over to make sure they stay down for a bit.
Uh, what? Do you know what a body check is ?
Ice hockey is a really boring sport.
They don’t even compare tbh
"This analysis revealed that risk ranged from a 5-fold increase in Alzheimer’s disease, through an approximately 4 fold increase in motor neurone disease, to a 2 fold Parkinson’s disease in former professional footballers compared to population controls."
https://www.thepfa.com/news/2019/10/21/field-study-increased...
"...the odds of having chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) increased by 34% each year [of ice hockey] played, and 18 of 19 National Hockey League players had CTE."
https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/news-events/articles/2024/larg...
yes. unfortunately, more than one thing can be a problem at the same time.
Requiring a child to play football should be actual child abuse, and even allowing it should be frowned upon the way that letting a child play with a blowtorch is.
The fact that they're a repeated part of the game and not occasional incidents is very, very bad.
I've gotten a concussion falling off an electric scooter. But slamming my head on the pavement isn't the point of riding an electric scooter, and if you're doing it regularly, you're doing something wrong. Unlike contact football.
But if it is significantly worse than other sports, why not single it out as the worst thing ever?
Several sports increase the risk of CTE, but football has been more studied, I think because the incidence of obviously impared former players is higher than in other sports.
Rugby and ice hockey are certainly bad, but at least the impacts are generally limited to play near the ball/puck, whereas with American football, essentially every player has an impact on every play (WR blocking on rush plays, etc).
Correct. NFL payers are better paid, get better medical care, have better training and equipment, and their brains are more developed.
At that size ratio from kids to pro, they should be rivaling Dark Helmet from Space Balls.
It's well established that the effects of repeated head trauma are cumulative, with progressively longer healing periods, worse symptoms, etc. And that sub-concussive impacts also accumulate along with the concussive impacts.
From the article: The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level ... and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,” said Daneshvar.
also there are studies on this
McKee et al. (2023) – Neuropathologic and Clinical Findings in Young Contact Sport Athletes Exposed to Repetitive Head Impacts (JAMA Neurology) [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...]
Alosco et al. (2017) – Age of First Exposure to Tackle Football and Later-Life Cognitive Impairment and Neuropsychiatric Symptoms (Translational Psychiatry) [https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2017.197]
even intl football headers have concerns
Provide your data Mr. Thrwaway, if that even is your real name.