Young soccer players who 'head' the ball face cognitive decline, new research shows
A new study from Western University found the practice of hitting a soccer ball with the head leads to noticeable cognitive decline in young players, and researchers are now calling for more restrictions in the sport.
Over the course of a five-month season, the study tracked a U13 London soccer team made up of male players around 11 and 12 years old. Researchers fitted each player with a custom mouth guard to track head impacts, and had them do regular cognitive tests. One of the main findings that stuck out to Rachel Watson, a PhD student at Western, was that every time a player hit the ball with their head, their reaction time slowed down by about six milliseconds.
"Each time it was a small amount that it slowed down," Watson said. "But, by the end of the season, this all accumulated or snowballed into a much larger effect."
Many more head hits occurred during practices compared to games, Watson and her team observed. With the team practicing four times per week, there were far more opportunities for head impacts than at weekly game, but some practice drills led to hundreds of these impacts, she said.
Currently, policies are in place in Ontario to provide guidelines for coaches, stating how often players of different age groups should be hitting the ball with their heads. Kids under 11 should not be heading the ball at all, players aged 12 to 13 should have a maximum of one session per month with up to five head hits with a lightweight ball, and 14- to 17-year olds should have one session with up to 10 hits. These guidelines were not being followed when researchers were following the team's season, Watson said.
Every coach needs to rethink what they're doing.
"Coaches have a really great ability to limit this in practice and focus on emphasizing other alternative methods of controlling the ball," she said. "And what the athletes are practicing in practice will come out in the game."
The team's coach, Jonathan O'Neill, was surprised by the results of the study, he said. While the study showed the majority of head impacts were occurring at practices, the team doesn't actually practice a lot of heading, he explained. Most of it would have happened on recovery days, when the team played soccer tennis or Teqball, which are variations of the sport with very low impact on the head, he said.
"But obviously the low impact still had a cumulative effect on the players' nervous systems and their ability to respond to football interactions," O'Neill said.
Heading will happen as a byproduct of the game, because players cannot control the opponent and the chaos that sometimes causes the ball to go into the air, he said. But the safety of players is paramount and now that the effects of heading on cognitive ability is better understood, every coach is going to have to rethink what they're doing, he added
While heading the ball is just one of many technical skills in soccer, Watson said, young athletes are likely not thinking about the short or long term effects of their actions—whether they are unaware of them, or simply don't care.
Even if banning the practice of heading is not fully attainable yet, Watson believes coaches and parents should emphasize the findings of this study to really get it across to the players that it can be harmful.
"Then when the athletes are older, stronger and more developed and more aware of the effects of head impacts, they can choose to make an informed decision themselves if they want to head the ball or not."
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