BRAIN INJURY expert Dr Bennet Omalu warns football faces extinction if it fails to take concussions seriously.
In 2002 Dr Omalu discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in American football players, a degenerative brain disease found mainly in boxers that can lead to amnesia, depression and dementia in later life.
Dr Omalu – who inspired the Hollywood movie, Concussion, starring Will Smith – accused football’s governing bodies of “denying and rejecting” the affects of repeated head injuries.
The kind of head injuries which led to Ireland international Kevin Doyle’s retirement after suffering headaches from multiple concussions.
He told Goal: The soccer industry should stop denying the truth. They should say: soccer is not a high impact, high contact sport, but you could suffer brain injury in sports.
“You need to be aware of that. You need to play safe, like removing heading from play.”
Dr Omalu also claimes football lags behind other sectors of society when its comes to its knowledge of brain injuries - warning this may lead to its downfall.
"We need to make soccer compatible with 21st century knowledge. The soccer industry should embrace the future and stop living in the past.
"If they fail to do that, soccer will not be as successful as it is.
"We need to be progressive, we need to be intelligent. We cannot continue to play soccer the way we played it in 1970.
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"If we continue to play soccer the way we did in 1970, then society will move ahead and leave soccer behind."
Currently, FIFA and the FA both have "If in doubt, sit it out" guidelines, but Dr Omalu says long-term brain damage does not come from one-off clashes of heads but rather repeated heading throughout development from childhood to adulthood.
He said: "Science has shown over the centuries that whenever the human head is exposed to repeated blows, there is a 100 per cent risk of brain damage."
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He is also urging FIFA and the FA to ban kids aged 18-years or under from heading balls.
And wants the governing bodies to stop 12 to 14-year-olds from using their heads in games.
"Children under the age of 18 should not be heading the ball. Children under the ages of 12 to 14 should not be playing soccer as we play it today because their brains are not sufficiently developed to handle soccer.
"They should play a new type of soccer that should be developed by the soccer leagues where there is less contact, less dribbling, less players and a bigger and lighter ball."
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