It has been a while. There was a warning of considerable health risks and the inextricably linked liability risks in sport. The massive claims for damages from players of the NFA or the NHL, as they were and are common in the USA, threatened to reach Europe as well. So far, nothing has happened. Of Theo Langheid.
On the association side, if the published opinion is to be believed, the problem does not appear to have arrived yet. Not on the insurer’s side either. This may (also) be due to the fact that there have been no serious claims for damages so far. Either the presumptive victims and the lawyers named after them sleep or German skulls and their contents prove to be more shock-resistant than foreign models.
Ironically, the British who are obsessed with sports are now – as they did with corona vaccination, where they take the top position in the European vaccine race after, because of or despite Brexit – as pioneers of medicine prevention. The Football Association (FA) there, supported by the ministers Oliver Dowden (Culture) and Nigel Huddleston (Sport), prepares binding rules that should at least protect the players from excessive header training. Charlotte Cowie, the head of the medical department of the FA, sees the – seriously undeniable – causal connection between the frequent dementias of professional soccer players and the header game.
All of this seems to be urgently needed: in Germany a good 50,000 athletes suffer concussions every year with an unreported number of up to 50 percent, in the USA the number is an estimated 1.5 to three million. Concussions are an inevitable everyday phenomenon in ice hockey, rugby and football; in boxing, they are the meaning of the matter, so to speak. Head injuries are also common in football and the many headballs during the game, especially during training, do the rest.
The international soccer players’ union FifPro had a total of 576 former soccer, ice hockey and rugby players examined, and it was found that the concussions that are unavoidable in contact sports lead to “late mental effects”.
Read the full blog post on our Partner site VersR.
Author: VW editorial team
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