Should soccer as a whole should stand alongside the U.S. and outlaw heading at the youth level?
There are, of course, two different issues here: there’s outlawing it at the youth level, and there’s outlawing in at the professional level.
Outlawing it amongst the pros is essentially a non-starter. Some of the reasons why are legitimate: Unlike in football, there’s no serious evidence yet — both anecdotal or otherwise — to suggest this is actually a problem. Does a ball need to be traveling at a certain speed, for example, or hit your head a certain number of times before it starts having a detrimental effect? Does it have a negative effect at all? Even if it does, soccer players enter into professional contracts so they’re allowed to assume certain risks. There’s also the elephant in the room that soccer fans have proven fiercely resistant to any kind of change — it’s why refereeing in the sport is an never-ending farce.
But it’s different at the youth level. We know that heading a ball can do serious harm to young people; children’s heads are disproportionately large, and their necks haven’t fully developed yet. It’s hard, quantifiable evidence that’s forcing U.S. soccer’s hand.
According to Scientific American:
We recommend that youngsters under the age of 14 not head the ball in soccer, not play tackle football and not full-body check in ice hockey. Impacts to the head are more damaging under that age, due to a number of structural and metabolic reasons. The brains of youngsters are not as myelinated as adult brains. Myelin is the coating of the neuron fibers—kind of like coating on a telephone wire. It helps transmission of signals and it also gives neurons much greater strength, so young brains are more vulnerable.
Soccer isn’t like most other sports: In the major professional leagues across Europe, players are signed to teams when they’re still extremely young — Lionel Messi arrived at Barcelona when he was 13. Outlawing children heading the ball up until the age of 14, as the above passage recommends, may not directly alter the professional league, but it’s hard to see it not having an affect at all.
(EPA)
What would soccer look like if Messi and his junior academy classmates had no concept of how to head a ball before the age of 14? And if you can’t head the ball, you can’t practice set pieces in the sense that we understand them now. The smaller, quicker players would presumably thrive, which means they’d be the ones to filter into the first team. And with players making their professional debuts far younger than in most sports — between 16 to 19, in most cases — would two years of heading be enough for a young defender, for instance, to succeed at the pro level? Headers will suddenly become less important because far fewer people are good at them in the first place.
U.S. soccer has taken the first step down a logical path, and one that others seem destined to follow. The professional game may hold firm, but even if they do, it won’t matter. The ground will shift underneath them anyway.
