"Football" will be largely referred to as "soccer" in this post. Sorry, it's for convenience, especially since I was reading off articles that call it "soccer."
MarsAtlas said:
I assume that you're being facetious,
I'm not.
but I have to run with the "but other sports have risks" angle.
But it's not "other sports have risks," it's "other sports have the same serious risk we're vilifying here because pop culture has latched on to this one." It's "isn't the other sport in question as bad?"
And since I didn't get the answer here, I looked it up. Articles on Google Scholar list substantial numbers, and the one I found that compared American Football and the other kind didn't exactly paint either favourably. It listed 70.4% of respondents demonstrating signs of concussion in football players and 62.7 of "soccer" players in the previous
year.
It seems absolutely, utterly absurd to single out one sport as a concussion problem, especially in a thread discussing a sport that appears to be better by a handful of points.
The severity and occurance of soccer injuries absolutely pale in comparison to that football injuries.
I thought we were talking about concussions specifically. You said "concussionball," not "injuryball." I don't know the numbers on other forms of injury, can you give me some real-world comparison figures?
Hell, so much so that there's basically four sports I'm not permitting my future children to play until they're old enough to consent: Football, cheerleading (lots of severe injuries), wrestling, and gymnastics (these last two due to the expectation that competitors starve themselves).
At that point, it seems less fact-based than fear-based. Soccer does have a high instance of concussion at the least. Even this one [http://www.reactcanada.org/FR/resources/articles/youth/Am_J_Sports_Med-2011-Lincoln-0363546510392326%5B1%5D.pdf] puts the risk as majorly substantial, with a third of all youth sport concussions being (girls') soccer, and that's looking more and more conservative as I go on (which may be due to the fact that it's looking at reported concussions). This one [http://journals.lww.com/cjsportsmed/Abstract/2001/10000/Concussions_Among_University_Football_and_Soccer.5.aspx] suggests there ay be a greater risk of concussion amongst soccer players than football, though it doesn't look at school level.
At this point, I'm really curious as to why this is still on the table for you when those others are not, because it doesn't seem to be particularly good either. At what rate does the risk of one or more concussions become an issue to you and your kids? I would certainly count those as serious injuries.