It’s time to trial a game of football with no heading

FINALLy, Professor Willie Stewart went there. To the only place he could logically go. To the place football has never before ventured, to the challenge it has never been brave enough to confront.

He looked at his latest paper. The one from his team at the University of Glasgow that directly links degenerative brain disease to the length of a professional football career and field position.

The more frequently a player heads the ball, the longer his career continues, the greater his chance of incurring a debilitating neurological condition, like dementia.

Professor Stewart, the leading expert in the field, has always resisted pushing the doomsday button. He has always been sensitive to the sport and its resistance to change. But he’s also a medical professional. It’s not his job to reassure against all evidence, to, in effect, lie. So he said it. The only thing left to say.

‘Is heading absolutely necessary for football to continue?’ Professor Stewart asked. ‘That is the question. It is called football, not head ball.’

Note the measured language. Professor Stewart was still mindful of the sport’s fragile sensibilities; still conscious of how long it has taken to get even this far. But nothing he has done to here has proved anything other than repeated heading of footballs significantly increases the chance of brain deterioration in later life.

And we can argue that it is the training where the damage occurs, the repeated heading drills, many repetitions across a short space of time. Except this research suggests a direct link between playing position, time in the game and illness.

So those are match situations. And, true, those players who are going to head the ball in games will also spend more time heading in training. yet if training time for heading is strictly limited — as it is from this season — it will decline as a skill, so why would any coach go down that tactical route in a match? Over time, heading’s importance will decline.

So ban heading? No, nobody has said that. All Professor Stewart has asked is a question, and not a greatly outlandish one. Could the game survive without it? And here is the most incredible thing: no-one has ever tried to find out.

Not FIFA, whose slogan is ‘For the good of the game’ but who display no great urgency protecting those who play it. Not even our own Football Association who are in the vanguard compared to most countries — last March it was reported that just five of 211 national associations had adopted the new concussion protocols — but have never tried to see what the game might look like if players couldn’t head the ball.

This is all that is being asked. How would such a game unfold? Would it be ruined? Would it be boring? Would it change so irrevocably that it would no longer resemble football to most eyes?

Earlier this year Gary Lineker (right) who, as a centre forward was in one of the field positions where heading was more likely, even if it wasn’t the biggest part of his game, made the same point.

‘It would be interesting to see what football is like without heading,’ he said. ‘They could do trials, like when they make law changes.’

Exactly. A trial. Like those that experiment with nuanced alteration to offside rules, or helped outlaw goalkeepers picking up the ball from a pass back. Except nobody has ever died from an offside judgment, or a backpass, whereas all available evidence suggests there is a potentially fatal price for heading footballs.

‘I’ve had conversations with Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, that come 10 or 15 years it might happen to one of us,’ Lineker added. ‘The odds are it will. It’s concerning.’

So why aren’t more people in positions of power concerned? Why aren’t FIFA, UEFA or the national associations actively seeking minor leagues or competitions that are prepared to be part of the most important trial in football’s history? One that could be conducted with full knowledge, rather than the dancing in the dark football’s dementia victims did for decades.

Players will say they want to win football matches and if heading is the best way to do that, then they will worry about the consequences in 30 years’ time. And maybe that would be the conclusion. That football without heading would be a moribund spectacle and an inferior sport and that now players are aware of the risks, they make a choice, we put protocols in place to protect them as much as is humanly possible, and on we go.

It could be, however, that football without heading — or with heading only allowed once the ball has bounced,

perhaps, which would be a version of the rules governing aerial play in hockey, is exciting in different ways. We can never know unless we try. That is all Professor Stewart is asking: that

we try.

TIMO WERNER has been explaining the tribulations of his first season at Chelsea. ‘When you play good you are the hero everywhere,’ he explained, ‘but when you play badly it is a totally different story.’ Indeed. It’s a result and performancerelated game. Otherwise, why keep score?