The Temporary October 20, 2025
Main international outage impacts standard apps and web sites, wanting on the security of the NFL, and extra
The Temporary October 20, 2025
Main international outage impacts standard apps and web sites, wanting on the security of the NFL, and extra
Close to the tip of the high-school soccer season a number of years in the past, John Pizzi realized he had an issue. Due to season-ending accidents, the soccer workforce at Riverdale Nation Faculty, the New York personal highschool the place he’s the athletic director, didn’t have sufficient children to complete the season.
He canceled the workforce’s final sport after which referred to as Chris Nowinski, the CEO and co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Basis, who has been speaking for years about the necessity to higher defend athletes of all ages from persistent traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative mind illness brought on by repeated hits to the pinnacle.
“I stated to him, ‘It’s a must to assist me: soccer is both not going to proceed right here or now we have to determine one thing out,’” Pizzi says.
Nowinski dove into analysis and checked out how Riverdale and its sports activities league, the Metropolitan Unbiased Soccer League, may tweak the sport in order that gamers have been injured much less incessantly. He discovered there have been some straightforward wins—analysis had discovered that faculty kickoffs within the Ivy League particularly made up 6% of performs however 21% of concussions, so eliminating kickoffs might assist simply keep away from some accidents—and put collectively a presentation with a couple of dozen strategies.
A number of the adjustments have been minimal, like limiting groups to six hours of full-contact apply within the preseason and 20 minutes per week within the common season. Some have been greater, like eliminating kickoffs. Pizzi and Nowinski offered the concepts to the league after which to oldsters, and although many individuals have been skeptical, most understood that they wanted to do one thing to get participation up and accidents down. So that they determined to check out the brand new guidelines.
Their adjustments have been extraordinarily uncommon outdoors of the world {of professional} soccer. Though the NFL, pushed by the gamers’ union, has made some vital adjustments lately to attempt to scale back head accidents, youth leagues like Pop Warner, the Nationwide Federation of State Excessive Faculty Associations (NFHS), and even the NCAA have carried out little or no.
“Everyone in soccer is conscious of what the NFL has carried out and has made an energetic alternative to not observe,” Nowinski says. “It’s only a dramatic failure of management.”
Modifications to make soccer safer have met resistance in any respect ranges—even from the very best workplace. In a September social-media submit, President Donald Trump referred to as the league’s new kickoff coverage “‘sissy’ soccer” and stated that “the NFL has to do away with that ridiculous wanting new Kickoff Rule.”
Scientists, in the meantime, are beginning to higher perceive CTE as extra athletes say they imagine they’ve it. “Our greatest understanding of what causes CTE is that it’s the cumulative drive that an individual will get uncovered to,” says Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, chief of the division of mind harm rehabilitation at Harvard Medical Faculty.
CTE is nearer to Alzheimer’s illness than it’s to a traumatic mind harm, Daneshvar says. Scientists imagine that repeated hits to the pinnacle harm the mind cells, which causes persistent irritation and cells to transform right into a diseased and dying state. That sort of diseased mind cell is much like the sort present in Alzheimer’s and a bunch of different neurodegenerative illnesses.
As a result of CTE is brought on by cumulative head impacts and never only one large blow, individuals who begin taking part in soccer as children—and who usually don’t play previous highschool—can find yourself with CTE. One 2011 research discovered that high-school gamers in some positions skilled as many as 868 impacts to the pinnacle over one 14-week season. One other Boston College research discovered that the chance of creating CTE doubles for each 2.6 years of taking part in soccer.
Shane Tamura, the gunman who killed 4 individuals in Manhattan in July earlier than taking his personal life, believed that he had developed CTE although he by no means performed professionally and even in faculty. (CTE can at the moment be recognized solely after an individual has died.) Tamura, who began soccer at age 6 and performed by means of highschool, reported having frequent, debilitating complications as an grownup. He left a three-page notice in his pockets referencing CTE and asking researchers—together with, reportedly, Nowinski— to review his mind. In September, New York Metropolis’s health worker launched an announcement saying that it had discovered “unambiguous diagnostic proof” of CTE in Tamura’s mind.
What the NFL modified to scale back accidents
In recent times, as analysis about CTE has turn into extra conclusive, some sports activities leagues have begun to concede that head impacts are an issue. In 2016, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged that football-related head trauma was linked to mind illness, an enormous step for a league that had been reluctant to confess any connection.
Since then, the NFL has made quite a lot of adjustments to sport guidelines and apply tips to attempt to scale back head impacts. The league has prohibited tackling throughout offseason practices and in early levels of preseason, and permits just one full-contact apply per week. It diminished the size of additional time within the preseason and common season to 10 minutes from 15, and prohibited gamers from reducing their heads to make contact with an opponent utilizing their helmet. Maybe most significantly, the NFL considerably modified the kickoff within the 2024 season, transferring groups nearer collectively to restrict how briskly gamers run at each other.
The adjustments look like lowering concussions. Recorded concussions decreased 17% in 2024, the yr the brand new kickoff guidelines went into place, in comparison with 2023.
However apart from Pizzi’s Metropolitan Unbiased Soccer League, few faculty, highschool, or youth leagues have made main adjustments to how the sport is performed—and even acknowledged the connection between the sport and CTE.
“If the identical rule adjustments which were applied on the NFL degree have been applied on the faculty, highschool, and youth degree, it will considerably scale back the variety of people who develop CTE and the severity of CTE for individuals who develop it,” stated Daneshvar.
Fewer adjustments on the faculty degree
The NCAA, for instance, nonetheless permits a comparatively excessive variety of dwell contact practices—these during which gamers put on full pads and apply tackling and blocking—in keeping with its Division I guide. Whereas preseason begins with 5 days of apply with out dwell contact, college students can apply in full pads starting on the sixth day. After that, faculties are allowed to have eight full-contact practices within the preseason, and they’re allowed to apply tackling and blocking for so long as 75 minutes in every apply.
The NCAA has additionally not adopted the NFL’s kickoff adjustments. (Trump alluded to this in his submit: “Luckily, faculty soccer will stay the identical, hopefully eternally!!” he wrote.)
“The NFL makes adjustments to the kickoff rule, and that looks like a rule that may be applied broadly. I all the time surprise why that hasn’t been applied throughout different ranges,” says Dr. Michael Alosco, a neuropsychologist who’s the co-director of medical analysis at Boston College’s CTE Middle. “When you concentrate on CTE, one of the simplest ways to mitigate it’s to scale back your quantity of publicity.”
The NCAA has made some adjustments, although far fewer than the NFL. Sure drills—just like the Oklahoma drill, during which two gamers primarily collide head-on—have been prohibited in faculty soccer since 2021, the NCAA says. Again in 2012, the NCAA additionally moved kickoffs to the 35-yard line from the 30 within the hope that extra balls can be kicked out of play and never returned. Nonetheless, many kickoffs are nonetheless returned, and NCAA kickoffs are vastly completely different from these within the NFL right this moment as a result of they nonetheless contain gamers operating at one another from nice distances, permitting them to construct up velocity that may result in arduous hits.
The NCAA declined to remark for this story. Its Division 1 guide outlines a technique it units itself other than leagues just like the NFL: “School soccer is completely different from skilled soccer and collegiate coaches depend on these apply alternatives to show their student-athletes the basics of the sport,” the guide says.
Nominal adjustments to highschool soccer
Highschool soccer has carried out even lower than faculty. Though each highschool and league can change its personal guidelines, just like the Metropolitan League did, most look to the NFHS for steering on participant well being and security.
When requested whether or not it had modified any features to the sport, like kickoff, to scale back head affect, a NFHS spokesperson cited a 1975 rule change that outlined “spearing”—utilizing the highest of a participant’s helmet to provoke contact—as a disqualifying private foul.
In 2014, NFHS issued suggestions for minimizing head affect publicity and concussions in soccer that included limiting full-contact apply to the common season and limiting contact in practices. However the suggestions nonetheless allowed full-contact practices two to 3 instances every week and restricted full-contact time to about 90 minutes per week. The suggestions additionally acknowledged that preseason practices may require “extra full-contact time” than practices within the common season.
It’s not sufficient, says Nowinski, of the Concussion Legacy Basis. “There’s nonetheless a unprecedented tradition of CTE denial on the faculty, highschool, and youth ranges,” Nowkinski says.
Karissa Niehoff, CEO of NFHS, wrote in a 2019 weblog submit that there was no hyperlink between CTE and taking part in highschool soccer. She says she nonetheless believes that right this moment, and that there’s no approach for researchers to disentangle the potential results of taking part in different sports activities after they research this query. “It is actually arduous to strictly pinpoint high-school soccer with CTE, as a result of we frequently see that the concussion harm is sort of a snowflake,” she says. “It is completely different for everyone.” (Scientists say that CTE is precipitated not solely by concussions but in addition by repeated head impacts.)
“I feel now we have to keep in mind that on the decrease ranges, from youth to highschool, these usually are not elite athletes,” says Niehoff. “We have to actually assist our athletes study the game, after which as they turn into extra expert they usually get greater and sooner and stronger, we simply have to look at how the foundations assist defend them.”
In her weblog submit, Niehoff cited a research by Munro Cullum and colleagues that studied 35 former NFL gamers over the age of fifty who had sustained no less than one concussion of their careers. It discovered no affiliation between the variety of years that they had performed or variety of head impacts that they had sustained and their cognitive perform later in life. (The research didn’t have the brains of the gamers so it couldn’t report on CTE.)
Cullum, a professor of psychiatry, neurology, and neurological surgical procedure on the College of Texas Southwestern Medical Middle, says that though there’s a correlation between repeated head hits and CTE, that doesn’t imply that one causes the opposite. It may very well be that some individuals are at higher danger for CTE due to genetic or different elements. He additionally believes there’s not sufficient proof to hyperlink repeated head hits to irregular conduct or cognitive decline later in life.
“We imagine that concussions and head hits is usually a danger issue for cognitive decline later in life, however not for most individuals,” he stated. CTE continues to be very uncommon, he says, and lots of NFL gamers would not have any cognitive difficulties after they grow old.
Some latest analysis, nevertheless, means that CTE will not be as uncommon amongst skilled soccer gamers as as soon as thought. One 2023 research from the Boston College CTE Middle studied the brains of 376 former NFL gamers and located that 345, or 91.7%, had CTE.
NFHS has taken some steps to scale back contact, similar to limiting the quantity of taking part in time children have in every week, as a result of some children on each the varsity and junior varsity groups had been taking part in in two video games on a weekend, Niehoff says. Each state has a sports activities drugs advisory committee that’s concerned in occupied with defending children, she says.
However some states go even additional than NFHS requires. In 2019, New Jersey’s Interscholastic Athletic Affiliation diminished the period of time that groups might have interaction in full-contact drills to quarter-hour per week, down from the restrict of 90 minutes that NFHS suggests. The state additionally restricted preseason contact drills to 6 hours whole and banned spring and summer season practices. In 2019, Michigan set a restrict of half-hour of full-contact apply every week.
Minimal protections for soccer’s youngest gamers
Specialists argue that youth soccer is the least regulated of all. “In contrast to nearly each different sport in America, no one units the foundations of youth soccer,” Nowinski says. “You might have a bunch of small, capitalist fiefdoms which might be rewarded by enrollment, so no one is prepared to be a frontrunner on these adjustments as a result of they don’t need to scare away shoppers.”
It’s straightforward to seek out TikTok movies of children in youth soccer leagues operating the Oklahoma drill or the bull within the ring drill, each of which pit two gamers in opposition to one another in shut contact. Each result in excessive incidents of harm and usually are not allowed on the skilled degree. However even with out these drills, youth soccer may end up in severe accidents. In 2024, a 13-year-old died from mind trauma after making a sort out throughout middle-school soccer apply; in 2023, three younger soccer gamers died of head accidents.
In contrast to on the faculty or highschool degree, there usually are not any medical professionals on the sphere throughout youth soccer video games or practices, which may imply that when somebody does get harm, their accidents can flip deadly. In 2023, a 12-year-old New Jersey boy died after collapsing at soccer apply; nobody on the sphere knew CPR.
Pop Warner, one of many largest youth soccer leagues within the U.S., made some adjustments to restrict publicity to go affect. In 2012, it banned full-speed head-on blocking or tackling drills the place gamers lined up greater than three yards aside. In 2016, it introduced that contact is restricted to 25% of apply time and stated that if a workforce has apply on two consecutive days, it could have dwell contact in solely considered one of them. In 2016 it additionally eradicated kickoffs for its youngest divisions, in keeping with a spokesperson. Nevertheless it nonetheless permits tackling for even its 6-and-under division.
The perfect technique to guard youth, Nowinski and different consultants say, is to set minimal ages for probably the most harmful actions, like tackling. In 2011, USA Hockey banned physique checking within the 12-and-under leagues, and in 2016, U.S. Membership Soccer banned heading for gamers underneath 12. There appears to be little curiosity in banning tackling in soccer for youths underneath 12, although, Nowinski says.
“American soccer would be the solely sport on this planet that has zero dialogue of—and can in all probability by no means themselves create—an age minimal for tackling,” he says.
The one approach for bans on youth tackling to succeed in all the youngsters who play can be state or nationwide laws. In 2023, the Concussion Legacy Basis labored with legislators in California on a invoice banning sort out soccer for kids underneath 12. The invoice had the assist of legislators and cleared a key legislative committee, Nowinski says, however in January 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed that he wouldn’t signal it if it reached his desk. (Newsom has stated that he believes it’s potential to “strengthen” sort out soccer and develop flag soccer in California “with out implementing bans that infringe on dad and mom’ rights.”) If California received’t go such a invoice, Nowinski says, it’s unlikely some other state will.
However making adjustments on the particular person league degree is doable—simply ask John Pizzi. The Riverdale athletic director says that though another coaches and fogeys have been hesitant at first, the league has absolutely embraced the safer sport guidelines. That’s in all probability as a result of they’ve led to decreased concussions and elevated enrollment. As highschool soccer nationally sees its numbers slip, enrollment within the soccer program at Riverdale is growing, Pizzi says.
Some households who had prohibited their children from taking part in soccer have relented underneath the brand new guidelines, he says.
The varsity has found out methods to make the sport safer whereas nonetheless serving to gamers get higher, he says; utilizing a tackling wheel—primarily an enormous foam donut—as a substitute of an individual helps educate method with out risking children’ well being, he says. Not having to apply kickoffs frees up extra time to apply different features of the sport. The varsity now additionally runs junior-varsity practices as “managed practices,” primarily having the coaches stroll gamers by means of what they’re doing relatively than simply presiding over chaos, Pizzi says.
Now, some gamers and fogeys at Riverdale’s video games have by no means skilled a season the place the workforce does a kickoff—they only place the ball on the sphere and begin taking part in.
Pizzi has heard from dad and mom of children in different soccer leagues who’re envious of the adjustments that Riverdale has made, wishing their college would do the identical. However, he says, he hasn’t heard from different coaches or leagues who need to implement what Riverdale has carried out, and make soccer safer for youths to play.
