My son is a big kid and is playing high school football. It was not on our radar, so we have begun to navigate these kinds of questions. Like - do you want to play at the next level? What do you even need to do if you would like to? But also the realization of how much money is made off of these kids and how cruel and unforgiving it can be.
IFAB doesn’t directly restrict heading, but permits each national FA to place their own restrictions at the grassroots level.
The US adopted restrictions 10 years ago. No heading at all for age 10 and under (indirect free kick to the opponent for violations). Under 13 years old coaches are required to keep track of heading and limit any individual player to fewer than 25 per week total between training and matches.
The English FA also has adopted rules limiting heading for youth. I image most of Europe has as well.
The ball for soccer/association football is fairly pliable and headers are not that common. You also don't see players obviously dazed or knocked out after heading the ball. I have to think the damage from soccer headers, if any, is orders of magnitude below that of American Football.
Edit: I am happy to see good research supported that headers can cause damage. However, please note that I am suggesting headers in Association Football are much less damaging compared with American Football, as a opposed to a complete avoidance of damage.
Matters of health are probably the wrong ones to speculate on or try to speak authoritatively about when you "didn't spend much time researching" them. CTE can be a problem in soccer specifically because "Evidence indicates that repetitive concussive and subconcussive blows to the head cause CTE"[emphasis mine][1]. You don't need to be "dazed or knocked out" to cause damage. Suggesting otherwise is dangerous.
The thresholds for brain damage keep getting revised downwards.
"60 Minutes" recently ran a segment where soldiers experiencing a lot of gunshot sounds get brain damage, too. The result is soldier training is now done with rounds that are much quieter.
P.S. as a kid, I was a miserable failure at baseball. The reason was I did not want to get smacked in the head with a hardball. I avoided the ball. That didn't please the coach at all.
I'm guessing this is actually looking at the wrong thing. If you've ever headed a ball in practice, you don't think it's dangerous to head the ball. If you do it right, it barely feels like anything.
But if you are trying to maneuver your head to a position where you can head the ball, you sometimes find the danger is actually other people's heads. If you've ever knocked heads with someone, you might suspect it is not healthy.
> You also don't see players obviously dazed or knocked out after heading the ball.
That depends a lot on the relative speed, and some kids can kick the ball pretty damn hard. I had an incident where I headed the ball, and had no other memory formed for the rest of that day. I don't recall the rest of the match, the final score, or how I got home.
Even if headers themselves are safe for brains (and there is some evidence they're not), going for one puts you at increased risk for an unpadded, head-to-head collision with your opponent. That kind of thing we do know is bad for brain health.
Less damaging. But still damaging. Compare smoking a cigarette a day to a pack. Clearly less is more healthy, but still not healthy and probably should mostly be avoided all together.
The current guidance is no/limited heading for youth soccer players. [1]
Futsal, a small-sided variant of soccer, has way less heading because of the type of ball and how the game is played. It also teaches excellent technical skills, so it's great for kids who want to play regular soccer later on. [2] If as a society we continue the trend towards less and less acceptability of brain injury risk in sports, then futsal may well become the more-popular form of soccer.
My family, too. My oldest is hoping to cover at least some college costs as a middle distance runner and my riding 9th grade daughter is a starter on a top team in a top league and also wants to play collegiately.
We are clear with both of them that sports are not a career and they need skills and experience beyond competition to set them up for a comfortable life. The House deal makes it even harder for all athletes outside of basketball and football (excepting a very select few additional sports at specific schools, like LSU baseball or BYU track & field or UVA swimming, etc).
A competitive athletic program is a huge time sink: practices, weight room, travel, meets, game day. That time spent elsewhere can go a long ways to covering college costs, such as taking extra classes and finishing a semester or quarter earlier or going to a school with a good coop program. Even a low-paying on-campus job can be competitive if the per hour rates are fairly compared.
But even lower-level sports and any number of other activities can be significant time sinks as well. Perhaps less so than being on a top-ranked varsity team but not necessarily insignificant.
Why anyone would think 18 year old adults should subsidize other adults, because earning what they are worth is “morally wrong”, is absurd to me.
We went through decades of travesty to get to the current NIL system because young kids were getting screwed. You don’t need it to be a career, but getting paid well for a few years after sacrificing your childhood is fair - fuck everyone else!
If it helps, I did the math for different sports in different countries and the chance of a kid becoming a professional at a sport is about 1 in 10,000 - 20,000 (and that is counting like making 50k/year at a low division).
You probably want to encourage an interest/skill level that is good enough to get scholarship money to a good college, but not so good he wants to pursue it as an actual career. That is - just another box tick on the resume.
I grew up in a football obsessed town in a football obsesses county which frequently won the championships, etc.
Of all the kids in all the decades before/after me that played, 1 guy made it to the NFL and made ~$10M over 10 years. Amazing money, yes. But this was the kid who was practicing non-stop from a young age. He had nothing else. You'd see him & his dad running their own 1-1 football practice at the field in the off season.
Similarly there was another kid I was friend with who was smart, played football enough to get a scholarship, went to an Ivy and became a doctor. Probably better lifetime earnings than the NFL kid, and theres way more spots for doctors!
And in the 25 years since, all the 100s of kid who went through the program, no one has gone pro. For that 1 kid who went pro, I'm sure there were 100s who got in inadequate educational preparation for their adult life and football was a net negative in the end for them.
My son is a big kid and is playing high school football. It was not on our radar, so we have begun to navigate these kinds of questions. Like - do you want to play at the next level? What do you even need to do if you would like to? But also the realization of how much money is made off of these kids and how cruel and unforgiving it can be.