All that heading in football can cause brain damage

Heading is a core skill of football players but it has been linked to a risk of cognitive impairment in later life. — Sebastian Kahnert/dpa

“He’d put his head where others wouldn’t even put their feet” is a well-worn eulogy for a braver-than-usual footballer.

Typically a centre-back or sometimes a striker – positions which entail more heading of the ball than elsewhere on the pitch – such players often become cult heroes.

To many observers, heading is a core skill of the sport.

On occasion, it serves up some of its more memorable moments, such as Sweden’s Henrik Larsson’s spectacular diving header at the European Championships in 2004, or, a decade earlier, Bulgaria’s Yordan Letchkov’s soaring effort to eliminate defending champions Germany at the quarter-final stage of the World Cup in the United States.

But since the death of English ex-pro Jeff Astle, who passed away in 2002 at just 59 years of age and after a dementia diagnosis, attention has increasingly turned toward the possible dangers of years of heading a football.

When Jack Charlton, another Englishman and a World Cup winner in 1966, died in 2020 at the age of 85, his family said the dementia that preceded his death was likely caused by a long career spent heading the less water-resistant leather footballs of the era, which got heavier as they soaked up rain.

The push to curtail or limit heading is set to gain further momentum with the publication by the American Medical Association of an investigation into the century-and-a-half-old men’s game, which found “repetitive heading during a professional soccer career” to be ”associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment in later life.”

The researchers, led by Weiya Zhang of the University of Nottingham, assessed 459 retired male professional players older than 45 and found the more they had headed a ball during their careers, the more likely they were to register impairment in areas like verbal fluency and reasoning.

”Further study is needed to establish the upper threshold for heading frequency to mitigate this risk,” the researchers concluded.

There are other investigations taking place, with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine assessing 300 ex-professionals with the aim of comparing the results to the wider population.

”While several studies have suggested an increased risk of various neurological disorders, this has not yet been established,” the school says. – dpa