The Brief October 20, 2025
Major world outage impacts common apps and web sites, taking a look at the security of the NFL, and extra
Near the finish of the high-school soccer season a couple of years in the past, John Pizzi realized he had an issue. Because of season-ending accidents, the soccer crew at Riverdale Country School, the New York non-public highschool the place he’s the athletic director, didn’t have sufficient youngsters to complete the season.
He canceled the crew’s final sport after which referred to as Chris Nowinski, the CEO and co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, who has been speaking for years about the want to higher defend athletes of all ages from power traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative mind illness attributable to repeated hits to the head.
“I mentioned to him, ‘You have to assist me: soccer is both not going to proceed right here or now we have to determine one thing out,’” Pizzi says.
Nowinski dove into analysis and checked out how Riverdale and its sports activities league, the Metropolitan Independent Football League, would possibly tweak the sport in order that gamers had been injured much less often. He discovered there have been some simple wins—analysis had discovered that faculty kickoffs in the Ivy League particularly made up 6% of performs however 21% of concussions, so eliminating kickoffs may assist simply keep away from some accidents—and put collectively a presentation with a couple of dozen recommendations.
Some of the adjustments had been minimal, like limiting groups to six hours of full-contact observe in the preseason and 20 minutes per week in the common season. Some had been greater, like eliminating kickoffs. Pizzi and Nowinski offered the concepts to the league after which to folks, and although many individuals had been skeptical, most understood that they wanted to do one thing to get participation up and accidents down. So they determined to check out the new guidelines.
Their adjustments had been extraordinarily uncommon exterior of the world {of professional} soccer. Although the NFL, pushed by the gamers’ union, has made some important adjustments lately to attempt to scale back head accidents, youth leagues like Pop Warner, the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), and even the NCAA have finished little or no.
“Everybody in soccer is conscious of what the NFL has finished and has made an energetic selection to not observe,” Nowinski says. “It’s only a dramatic failure of management.”
Changes to make soccer safer have met resistance in any respect ranges—even from the highest workplace. In a September social-media put up, President Donald Trump referred to as the league’s new kickoff coverage “‘sissy’ soccer” and mentioned that “the NFL has to eliminate that ridiculous trying new Kickoff Rule.”
Scientists, in the meantime, are beginning to higher perceive CTE as extra athletes say they imagine they’ve it. “Our greatest understanding of what causes CTE is that it’s the cumulative drive that an individual will get uncovered to,” says Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, chief of the division of mind harm rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.
CTE is nearer to Alzheimer’s illness than it’s to a traumatic mind harm, Daneshvar says. Scientists imagine that repeated hits to the head injury the mind cells, which causes power irritation and cells to transform right into a diseased and dying state. That sort of diseased mind cell is just like the sort present in Alzheimer’s and a number of different neurodegenerative ailments.
Because CTE is attributable to cumulative head impacts and never only one huge blow, individuals who begin enjoying soccer as youngsters—and who usually don’t play previous highschool—can find yourself with CTE. One 2011 examine discovered that high-school gamers in some positions skilled as many as 868 impacts to the head over one 14-week season. Another Boston University examine discovered that the threat of growing CTE doubles for each 2.6 years of enjoying soccer.
Shane Tamura, the gunman who killed 4 individuals in Manhattan in July earlier than taking his personal life, believed that he had developed CTE though he by no means performed professionally and even in faculty. (CTE can presently be identified solely after an individual has died.) Tamura, who began soccer at age 6 and performed by way of highschool, reported having frequent, debilitating complications as an grownup. He left a three-page word in his pockets referencing CTE and asking researchers—together with, reportedly, Nowinski— to review his mind. In September, New York City’s health worker launched an announcement saying that it had discovered “unambiguous diagnostic proof” of CTE in Tamura’s mind.
What the NFL modified to scale back accidents
In latest years, as analysis about CTE has grow to be extra conclusive, some sports activities leagues have begun to concede that head impacts are an issue. In 2016, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged that football-related head trauma was linked to mind illness, a giant step for a league that had been reluctant to confess any connection.
Since then, the NFL has made quite a few adjustments to sport guidelines and observe pointers to attempt to scale back head impacts. The league has prohibited tackling throughout offseason practices and in early phases of preseason, and permits just one full-contact observe per week. It diminished the size of extra time in the preseason and common season to 10 minutes from 15, and prohibited gamers from reducing their heads to make contact with an opponent utilizing their helmet. Perhaps most significantly, the NFL considerably modified the kickoff in the 2024 season, transferring groups nearer collectively to restrict how briskly gamers run at each other.
The adjustments look like decreasing concussions. Recorded concussions decreased 17% in 2024, the 12 months the new kickoff guidelines went into place, in comparison with 2023.
But other than Pizzi’s Metropolitan Independent Football League, few faculty, highschool, or youth leagues have made main adjustments to how the sport is performed—and even acknowledged the connection between the sport and CTE.
“If the identical rule adjustments which have been applied at the NFL stage had been applied at the faculty, highschool, and youth stage, it could considerably scale back the variety of people who develop CTE and the severity of CTE for many who develop it,” mentioned Daneshvar.
Fewer adjustments at the faculty stage
The NCAA, for instance, nonetheless permits a comparatively excessive variety of dwell contact practices—these through which gamers put on full pads and observe tackling and blocking—based on its Division I handbook. While preseason begins with 5 days of observe with out dwell contact, college students can observe in full pads starting on the sixth day. After that, faculties are allowed to have eight full-contact practices in the preseason, and they’re allowed to observe tackling and blocking for so long as 75 minutes in every observe.
The NCAA has additionally not adopted the NFL’s kickoff adjustments. (Trump alluded to this in his put up: “Fortunately, faculty soccer will stay the identical, hopefully perpetually!!” he wrote.)
“The NFL makes adjustments to the kickoff rule, and that looks like a rule that may be applied broadly. I at all times surprise why that hasn’t been applied throughout different ranges,” says Dr. Michael Alosco, a neuropsychologist who’s the co-director of scientific analysis at Boston University’s CTE Center. “When you consider CTE, the greatest method to mitigate it’s to scale back your quantity of publicity.”
The NCAA has made some adjustments, although far fewer than the NFL. Certain drills—like the Oklahoma drill, through which two gamers basically collide head-on—have been prohibited in faculty soccer since 2021, the NCAA says. Back in 2012, the NCAA additionally moved kickoffs to the 35-yard line from the 30 in the hope that extra balls can be kicked out of play and never returned. Still, many kickoffs are nonetheless returned, and NCAA kickoffs are vastly completely different from these in the NFL at present as a result of they nonetheless contain gamers working at one another from nice distances, permitting them to construct up pace that may result in laborious hits.
The NCAA declined to remark for this story. Its Division 1 handbook outlines a method it units itself other than leagues like the NFL: “College soccer is completely different from skilled soccer and collegiate coaches depend on these observe alternatives to show their student-athletes the fundamentals of the sport,” the handbook says.
Nominal adjustments to highschool soccer
High college soccer has finished even lower than faculty. Although each highschool and league can change its personal guidelines, like the Metropolitan League did, most look to the NFHS for steerage on participant well being and security.
When requested whether or not it had modified any points to the sport, like kickoff, to scale back head influence, a NFHS spokesperson cited a 1975 rule change that outlined “spearing”—utilizing the prime of a participant’s helmet to provoke contact—as a disqualifying private foul.
In 2014, NFHS issued suggestions for minimizing head influence publicity and concussions in soccer that included limiting full-contact observe to the common season and limiting contact in practices. But the suggestions nonetheless allowed full-contact practices two to 3 instances per week and restricted full-contact time to about 90 minutes per week. The suggestions additionally acknowledged that preseason practices would possibly require “extra full-contact time” than practices in the common season.
It’s not sufficient, says Nowinski, of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “There remains to be a unprecedented tradition of CTE denial at the faculty, highschool, and youth ranges,” Nowkinski says.
Karissa Niehoff, CEO of NFHS, wrote in a 2019 weblog put up that there was no hyperlink between CTE and enjoying highschool soccer. She says she nonetheless believes that at present, and that there’s no approach for researchers to disentangle the potential results of enjoying different sports activities once they examine this query. “It’s actually laborious to strictly pinpoint high-school soccer with CTE, as a result of we regularly see that the concussion harm is sort of a snowflake,” she says. “It’s completely different for everyone.” (Scientists say that CTE is prompted not solely by concussions but additionally by repeated head impacts.)
“I feel now we have to do not forget that at the decrease ranges, from youth to highschool, these usually are not elite athletes,” says Niehoff. “We’ve acquired to essentially assist our athletes study the sport, after which as they grow to be extra expert they usually get greater and quicker and stronger, we simply have to observe how the guidelines assist defend them.”
In her weblog put up, Niehoff cited a examine by Munro Cullum and colleagues that studied 35 former NFL gamers over the age of fifty who had sustained not less than one concussion of their careers. It discovered no affiliation between the variety of years that they had performed or variety of head impacts that they had sustained and their cognitive operate later in life. (The examine didn’t have the brains of the gamers so it couldn’t report on CTE.)
Cullum, a professor of psychiatry, neurology, and neurological surgical procedure at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says that though there’s a correlation between repeated head hits and CTE, that doesn’t imply that one causes the different. It could possibly be that some individuals are at better threat for CTE due to genetic or different components. He additionally believes there’s not sufficient proof to hyperlink repeated head hits to irregular habits or cognitive decline later in life.
“We imagine that concussions and head hits generally is a threat issue for cognitive decline later in life, however not for most individuals,” he mentioned. CTE remains to be very uncommon, he says, and lots of NFL gamers don’t have any cognitive difficulties once they grow old.
Some latest analysis, nevertheless, means that CTE will not be as uncommon amongst skilled soccer gamers as as soon as thought. One 2023 examine from the Boston University CTE Center studied the brains of 376 former NFL gamers and located that 345, or 91.7%, had CTE.
NFHS has taken some steps to scale back contact, resembling limiting the quantity of enjoying time youngsters have in per week, as a result of some youngsters on each the varsity and junior varsity groups had been enjoying in two video games on a weekend, Niehoff says. Every state has a sports activities medication advisory committee that’s concerned in enthusiastic about defending youngsters, she says.
But some states go even additional than NFHS requires. In 2019, New Jersey’s Interscholastic Athletic Association diminished the period of time that groups may interact in full-contact drills to quarter-hour per week, down from the restrict of 90 minutes that NFHS suggests. The state additionally restricted preseason contact drills to 6 hours complete and banned spring and summer season practices. In 2019, Michigan set a restrict of half-hour of full-contact observe per week.
Minimal protections for soccer’s youngest gamers
Experts argue that youth soccer is the least regulated of all. “Unlike nearly each different sport in America, no one units the guidelines of youth soccer,” Nowinski says. “You have a bunch of small, capitalist fiefdoms which are rewarded by enrollment, so no one is keen to be a frontrunner on these adjustments as a result of they don’t need to scare away purchasers.”
It’s simple to search out TikTok movies of youngsters in youth soccer leagues working the Oklahoma drill or the bull in the ring drill, each of which pit two gamers towards one another in shut contact. Both result in excessive incidents of harm and usually are not allowed at the skilled stage. But even with out these drills, youth soccer can lead to critical accidents. In 2024, a 13-year-old died from mind trauma after making a deal with throughout middle-school soccer observe; in 2023, three younger soccer gamers died of head accidents.
Unlike at the faculty or highschool stage, there usually are not any medical professionals on the subject throughout youth soccer video games or practices, which might imply that when somebody does get harm, their accidents can flip deadly. In 2023, a 12-year-old New Jersey boy died after collapsing at soccer observe; nobody on the subject knew CPR.
Pop Warner, certainly one of the largest youth soccer leagues in the U.S., made some adjustments to restrict publicity to go influence. In 2012, it banned full-speed head-on blocking or tackling drills the place gamers lined up greater than three yards aside. In 2016, it introduced that contact is restricted to 25% of observe time and mentioned that if a crew has observe on two consecutive days, it might probably have dwell contact in solely certainly one of them. In 2016 it additionally eradicated kickoffs for its youngest divisions, based on a spokesperson. But it nonetheless permits tackling for even its 6-and-under division.
The greatest technique to guard youth, Nowinski and different specialists say, is to set minimal ages for the most harmful actions, like tackling. In 2011, USA Hockey banned physique checking in the 12-and-under leagues, and in 2016, U.S. Club Soccer banned heading for gamers below 12. There appears to be little curiosity in banning tackling in soccer for teenagers below 12, although, Nowinski says.
“American soccer could also be the solely sport in the world that has zero dialogue of—and can in all probability by no means themselves create—an age minimal for tackling,” he says.
The solely approach for bans on youth tackling to achieve all the youngsters who play can be state or nationwide laws. In 2023, the Concussion Legacy Foundation labored with legislators in California on a invoice banning deal with soccer for kids below 12. The invoice had the assist of legislators and cleared a key legislative committee, Nowinski says, however in January 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed that he wouldn’t signal it if it reached his desk. (Newsom has mentioned that he believes it’s potential to “strengthen” deal with soccer and develop flag soccer in California “with out implementing bans that infringe on mother and father’ rights.”) If California received’t go such a invoice, Nowinski says, it’s unlikely another state will.
But making adjustments at the particular person league stage is doable—simply ask John Pizzi. The Riverdale athletic director says that though another coaches and fogeys had been hesitant at first, the league has totally embraced the safer sport guidelines. That’s in all probability as a result of they’ve led to decreased concussions and elevated enrollment. As highschool soccer nationally sees its numbers slip, enrollment in the soccer program at Riverdale is rising, Pizzi says.
Some households who had prohibited their youngsters from enjoying soccer have relented below the new guidelines, he says.
The college has found out methods to make the sport safer whereas nonetheless serving to gamers get higher, he says; utilizing a tackling wheel—basically a giant foam donut—as a substitute of an individual helps train method with out risking youngsters’ well being, he says. Not having to observe kickoffs frees up extra time to observe different points of the sport. The college now additionally runs junior-varsity practices as “managed practices,” basically having the coaches stroll gamers by way of what they’re doing fairly than simply presiding over chaos, Pizzi says.
Now, some gamers and fogeys at Riverdale’s video games have by no means skilled a season the place the crew does a kickoff—they only place the ball on the subject and begin enjoying.
Pizzi has heard from mother and father of youngsters in different soccer leagues who’re envious of the adjustments that Riverdale has made, wishing their college would do the identical. But, he says, he hasn’t heard from different coaches or leagues who need to implement what Riverdale has finished, and make soccer safer for teenagers to play.