Since Maracanazo is about all aspects of football, I invited a guest author who contacted me to write about the specific injury known as TBI that can come about when playing football.
Chelsea Travers is an outreach representative of CareMeridian Las Vegas Nursing Home, a subacute and skilled nursing/rehabilitation facility located throughout the Western United States for patients suffering from traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, or medical complexities such as neuromuscular or congenital anomalies.
Soccer (football) and American football are fast paced games that require a great deal of speed and athleticism from its participants. Due to the physical nature of the game, injuries are common on the field. One injury that can cause great distress to a player is a traumatic brain injury, also known as a TBI. A TBI occurs when the head, brain or skull experiences force or trauma. TBI affects the function of the brain and can also change the personality and mental capabilities of an individual. The condition may also require decade’s worth of rehabilitation from special care facilities. Even then, there are no guarantees that an individual will fully recover.
American football is one of the toughest and most physically tasking games played. A football players head risks contact with the ground, or another players head, hand, shoulder, arm, or leg with just about every block or tackle that takes place. That is just a result of how the game is played. Due to the number of injuries that were being sustained, football took a precautionary measure and instituted a rule that requires all players to wear protective helmets to prevent head injuries. They also implemented rules on how a player can be tackled or blocked to further prohibit blows to the head. There is also no advantage that a player gains from using their head to block or tackle a player, thus discouraging them from purposefully using it to make contact. Unfortunately, even with the rules in place, accidents do happen and head injuries are still a problem. However, the NFL has at least made an attempt to protect players and players are fully aware of the risk of injury. Soccer, on the other hand, has no such rules in place and risk of injury is a lot less apparent.
Arguably the most popular sport in the world, soccer is also one of the most dangerous due to the risk of TBI. Soccer is supposed to require finesse, design and patience and a lot less of the physical punishment that people have come to expect in football. However, concussions make up 2-3% of all injuries in soccer. This number doesn’t seem significant but it happens to be the same rate as football. The obvious explanation for the concussion rate is that soccer requires the use of a players head in order to control or redirect the ball. Using your head is actually encouraged because doing so can give you an advantage over another player. Therefore, concussions almost become a requirement of the job. In fact, injuries to the head or neck account for between 4% and 22% of all injuries in soccer. A study taken of Division I soccer players in Norway showed that 35% of 69% players had abnormal EEG patterns, which was twice the number of control subjects.
Injuries occur in every sport, but heading the ball in a soccer game is not generally thought of as physical punishment and serious injury is not generally associated with the sport. Since using your head in soccer is thought of as “part of the game”, most players don’t consider it to be a risk factor and the consequences of doing so are rarely considered. The lack of precaution that a soccer player takes to protect their head puts them at high risk of suffering a TBI. The inability of a soccer player to notice the symptoms of a TBI and their failure to seek immediate treatment causes the injury to be much more serious. If players are educated about TBI’s and what can be done to prevent them we can reduce the incidence of this injury exponentially. While the intent is not for soccer to end by increasing awareness about TBI, at the very least, a soccer player may pay more attention to heading the ball properly and will have a better idea of when they might be suffering a TBI and seek immediate treatment.
Maracanazos seek to inform readers.