There is a situation brewing up in modern football that is rightfully gaining a lot of traction and Premier League managers are starting to give their views.
The Daily Mail have been running a campaign highlighting the issues of heading a football and thus causing dementia in latter stages of players lives.
They are calling for stricter measures for young players heading a ball in training, and the campaign has received backing from a number of Premier League managers.
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Of course, heading the ball is and always will be part of the game, but there are concerns over young players heading the ball constantly in training and it having a later effect on them in years to come.
The report states that professional footballers are three-and-a-half times more likely to suffer from dementia in later life, and the campaign has been backed by Frank Lampard, Graham Potter, Dean Smith and Slaven Bilic initially with more expected to speak out.
Lampard said:
“We have to start with youth football.
“The rules need to be stronger to make sure we’re not letting young children head it. They don’t need to. And in the developing years, that’s more than possible.
“We can control the levels of training. I am not sure, technically, how important it is to overload training at that age, and if we now know there is a health aspect to it then we can control that.
“I am certainly considering how we train here because of the seriousness of the issue.
“The eras they [previous professionals] played through were not as advanced as ours.
“We have the research, the proper medical insights into potential reasons why dementia has affected these players.
“We have to support them. So I am fully backing any movement that looks further into this, and firstly helps players of eras gone by who are suffering, and their families, and secondly looks at players now and to the future.”
