Professional Footballers’ Association Announces first CTE Prevention Protocol
Professional Footballers’ Association Announces first CTE Prevention Protocol
(San Francisco) The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), the union representing current and former footballers (soccer players) in the Premier League, the FA Women’s Super League and the English Football Leagues, announced today the implementation of the world’s first CTE Prevention Protocol, setting a new benchmark for protecting long-term brain health in sport.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head impacts that has been diagnosed in the majority of professional American football, soccer, rugby, and ice hockey players studied in global brain banks.
The PFA’s CTE Prevention Protocol is designed to reduce head impact exposure across a player’s lifetime. It includes measures like annual CTE education for players, minimizing heading in training, encouraging delaying heading until age 12, supporting CTE focused research, and compassionate, emotional, practical, and financial care for players already living with suspected CTE.
“CTE is preventable. Period,” said Dr. Adam White, Director of Brain Health at the PFA. “With what we know today about the disease, it would be a failure to our players to do nothing. The science and solutions are clear, it just takes willingness from the sporting bodies to put athletes’ long-term health first and I am pleased that we have been able to do that in England. I encourage all sports to put as much, if not more, effort into CTE prevention protocols as they have concussion protocols.”
White announced the new prevention effort today at the first Global CTE Summit in San Francisco, a conference organized by the Concussion & CTE Foundation in collaboration with the Boston University Center and the UCSF Fein Memory & Aging Center.
Research funded by the PFA and the Football Association (FA) has shown that professional football players in Scotland have a 3.5 times greater risk of dementia compared to the general population, and post-mortem studies of former professional football players in the UK have found a majority of those studied have CTE, a disease also never found in the general population. Converging evidence suggests the elevated dementia risk among football players is linked to cumulative lifetime exposure to repetitive head impacts, the only known risk factor for CTE, primarily through heading the ball.
Many former professional football players have been diagnosed with CTE after death, including most recently Gordon McQueen and Chris Nicholl, joining others including Jeff Astle, Rod Taylor, and Kevin Bird.
The PFA’s protocol follows the publication of a CTE Prevention Protocol framework in 2023 by an international group of researchers convened by the Concussion & CTE Foundation and Boston University CTE Center. The framework provides strategies focused on reducing repetitive head impact exposure in practice and games, educating athletes, and instituting a minimum age to begin to expose children to the risk of developing CTE.
“Athletes around the globe should applaud the PFA for their leadership on CTE prevention,” said Nowinski. “While many sports organizations still hide from CTE, refusing to take simple actions to prevent their players from developing dementia later in life, the PFA is showing moral courage by acting in the best interests of the players. Every sport now has a clear roadmap, and a responsibility to follow it.”