This is an easy step that soccer has taken to reduce the occurrences of brain injuries. Anyone who is confused on this issue should note that any jostling of the brain can cause minor, short-term brain damage. It's bad enough to bounce a relatively soft soccer ball off your head to warrant removing the practice from the sport, especially for younger players.
Other sports, like football, present a much harder challenge. Even if you remove direct head contact as a variable, most aspects of tackling can result in concussions. The reason football is uniquely controversial is that minor concussions are mostly inevitable and severe concussions are commonplace.
By contrast, the most likely way to get a concussion in soccer is to head the ball, which isn't fundamental to gameplay. In any sport, you might run into another player at high speed but that's not typically a core part of the gameplay. Football is controversial because it's hard to fix.
The possibility of concussions is present in [nearly?] every sport. Typically, head injuries are not a core part of gameplay. In the case of soccer, there have been concerted efforts to remove "heading" from practice and from games. Football is being targeted because minor/severe concussions are commonplace and result from a core aspect of the game.
> The possibility of concussions is present in [nearly?] every sport
Tennis, golf, swimming, weightlifting, etc - probably have a pretty low incidence of concussion. Stuff with teams and fast movement are probably most suspect; hockey and football would intuitively seem like the worst offenders.
"Based on the national estimate, the majority of concussions resulted from participation in football (40.5%, n = 55 007), followed by girls' soccer (21.5%, n = 29 167), boys' soccer (15.4%, n = 20 929),..."
So 40.5% of concussions in football and 36.9% in combined boys/girls soccer.
Looks like there are about 3 times more kids playing soccer than tackle football. I'd say a 3x lower concision rate isn't close to "nearly as bad".
In addition to concussions, football players are also believed to receive repeated microtrauma from running into each other repeatedly, which contributes to CTE.
Football is a full contact sport. It is inherently more dangerous. Collisions in soccer happen accidentally. They happen intentionally in football.
In addition there are new restrictions on heading the ball in soccer for younger kids, which will likely make the game a bit safer.
In 2016 (in the US) 1.08 million students participated in high school football while 821,851 participated in soccer.
I don't have stats available for middle school, but earlier than that the players don't hit nearly as hard, as they have considerable lower mass and speed.
Not sure where your 3x number comes from, but I don't think we need to include YMCA recreational league soccer any more than we need to include flag football.
Where are those numbers from? I know that football has a lot of extra bodies on the sideline, but it doesn't have a girl's team so I would guess that more kids are playing soccer than football. At the very least the number of man-hours played has to be way higher.
>"Based on the national estimate, the majority of concussions resulted from participation in football (40.5%, n = 55 007), followed by girls' soccer (21.5%, n = 29 167), boys' soccer (15.4%, n = 20 929),..."
>So 40.5% of concussions in football and 36.9% in combined boys/girls soccer.
If 21.5% of girls (~6270) and 15.4% of boys (~3223) get concussions then 9493 (6270 + 3223) received concussions out of 50096 (20929 + 29167) total participants. 18.9% (9493 / 50096) for soccer vs 40.5% for football.
Unfortunately n, in this paper, doesn't seem to mean sample size like you would expect in statistics. It is an extrapolated number of concussions nationwide based on a study of 100 high schools.
That still doesn't mean you can just add the percentages. You cannot determine the percent of boys+girls soccer head injuries without knowing the sample sizes.
Or, if you can figure out the relative difference between the number of boys and girls who play soccer, you can do a weighted average of the percentages.
Either way, adding the percentages is completely incorrect.
With that said, the correct weighted value is more like 21.5x.48 + 15.4x.52 = 18.3%, which is significantly less than the 40.5% you quoted for football.
I've no axe to grind, my daughter did Tae-kwon-do and had no real interest in soccer and my son is special needs and wouldn't be participating in either. I'm not really a football fan, grew up in Indiana where basketball is king.
So if I have something wrong here, please educate me. I am willing to learn. And see my other comment, n isn't a sample size, at least not in that paragraph.
