Peter Monk gave a wry response when asked if he thought children should be allowed to head a football from a young age.
“To be honest, with the younger ones, if a goalkeeper kicks high, very rarely will you get them heading the ball anyway,” said the chair of the Panshanger football club in Hertfordshire. “It comes out the sky and they act like it’s a UFO and just let it bounce.”
On Thursday, a debate about child safety was sparked in youth football clubs throughout the UK after it emerged that the Scottish Football Association looks set to implement a ban on children under the age of 12 heading a football in training – because of links between the sport and dementia.
The spotlight has now fallen on the English FA, which has reiterated its belief that heading is safe and has no plans to change its policy. There was no evidence to suggest that heading in youth football would put players at more risk than at other stages in a professional footballer’s career, the English FA said.
“Heading is actually significantly less common in children’s games,” read the statement. “Our analysis shows that on average there are only around 1.5 headers per game in youth football.
“The Medical & Football Advisory group currently don’t advise any changes to the rules of the game, but they have supported practical guidelines for heading practice which are common sense and in line with modern coaching practice.”
The move by the Scottish FA was welcomed as a “positive step” by campaigner Dawn Astle, daughter of the former West Bromwich Albion striker Jeff Astle who died in 2002 of what a coroner said was an “industrial disease” partly caused by heading heavy footballs.
“We applaud them for trying to put things in place to reduce the risk and not hanging on and hanging on and keep saying ‘more research, more research’,” she said. “I hope that children in other countries – English, Welsh, whatever – mean as much to our specific FAs as clearly Scottish children do to theirs.”
Astle and others argue that the body of evidence showing links between heading a football and dementia is growing. The SFA move comes after a landmark study by the University of Glasgow, published in October, found that former professional footballers are three and a half times more likely to suffer from dementia and other serious neurological diseases.
But others have warned that the evidence remains patchy. “This is not evidence-based policy but a desire to be seen to be doing something,” said Dr Dominic Malcolm, reader in sociology of sport at Loughborough University.
“What has fuelled it is a study of professional footballers, but the link between former professionals and young footballers is not there. If you actually believed the science was compelling you would change the professional game. But they haven’t chosen to do that. Why?”
The move in Scotland comes after other sports have taken proactive steps to protect children – in English rugby tackling is banned for the under-nines, while leading concussion experts have argued that rugby should limit – or ban entirely – contact training sessions to reduce the risk of brain injury.
While Scotland would be the first European country to ban heading in football for under-12s, the United States Soccer Federation announced a ban on headers for children aged under 10 years in 2015. The ban is accepted as normal according to Thomas Talavage, professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, which carried out a study on female high school soccer players and found they showed a risk of low‑level brain injuries through heading the ball.
“I think there is enough evidence to suggest that in sports with collisions there are links with both long and short-term brain injuries,” says Talavage. “I think most parents and coaches accept [the ban], because they think – why put everyone at risk when you don’t really have to?”
Some of those working at the grass roots level in England told the Guardian they were not keen on the idea. One woman who had worked with thousands of young players over a 20-year period said the policy, in any case, was unenforceable.
“I’m sorry but if you’ve got a bunch of kids who have watched a great header go in at the weekend in a professional match, on a Wednesday night training session they are going to try it – how on earth is it going to be policed?”
For Monk and the coaches at Panshanger the answer is not to ban heading in training, but to teach children how to head the ball properly. “We teach the kids that on your forehead there is an imaginary cross and that’s where you head the ball, not your nose, not the top of the head,” he said. “Personally I think [a ban] would be a shame. Let’s not go and ban everything or we’ll just have kids who never leave the house.”
