Was he previously a murderer or a soccer player?

Aarón Hernández was an idol of stratospheric dimensions in the United States, an American football star, a child prodigy, handsome, with enormous talent and on the best team to show it. In 2017, at the age of 27, he committed suicide by hanging himself with sheets in the cell where he was serving a sentence for murdering one of his best friends. When scientists analyzed his brain, they discovered damage never before seen in such a young person.

What Hernández suffered from was Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, an ailment associated with 99% of American football players, as a study showed in 2017 after analyzing 110 organs from deceased athletes. It is a brain disorder caused by a deterioration in which nerve cells die due to repeated impacts. It is something that scientists have been studying for years and that has led to the granting of significant compensation by the teams to the affected players and their families. So that the show goes on.

Aaron Hernandez suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. According to doctors, the damage to the brain of the 27-year-old man was comparable to that of a 67-year-old man.

A shocking report from the

New York Times

delved into the roots of this sport, in the amateur world, to show that not only professional athletes ended up suffering from this disorder, but that adolescents who start practicing it at the age of six, in school, They already suffer from it. This journalistic work collects the stories of four families, whose children took their lives before the age of 25. They committed suicide like Aarón Hernández. The work includes home recordings from the protagonists' childhood in which they are seen colliding with their playmates when they barely lift five feet off the ground.

The video that opens the report is that of Wyatt Bramwell, an 18-year-old boy who records himself inside his car, in which he explains that he has been suffering from depression and anxiety for a long time. “The voices in my head have taken control. I have been hit in the head many times playing soccer. Many. And I haven't told anyone how they made me feel and I have continued playing, which is not very intelligent of me," says the boy. In the recording he makes a final request to his parents, to donate his brain to scientific research to find out if he had damage to that organ. After that, he got out of the vehicle and shot himself in the chest. His family granted his wish and donated his brain. His suspicions were confirmed; he also had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, like the rest of the protagonists of the report.

This week, former Real Madrid player Raphaël Varane said in an interview that he has suffered concussions when hitting a header in his sporting career, and that these have had consequences on his health and performance on the field. Specifically, he refers to two games in 2014 and 2020. Varane says that in his current team, Manchester City, they are advised not to head more than 10 times in each training session, for example. He himself has asked his son, who also plays soccer, to avoid this movement with the ball.

The player has reported this to open this debate, so that the damage to health from repeated blows is taken into account and measures are taken. Varane has even pointed out that he played some matches with a real shock and that several minutes of the game have been erased from his memory. In his interview, the footballer mentions Dr. Philippe Malafosse, a French specialist who has been researching brain injuries for years in all types of sports in which there is contact, including rugby.

To what extent can health be put at stake for a sports competition? Perhaps the rules should be adapted to the times, now that scientific evidence tells us things that could only be intuited before. Although for that you have to touch more than a simple regulation and go directly to the heart of a society, as in the case of the United States, where American football is a question of identity. In the case of the four families whose children died before the age of 25 with severe brain damage, many parents respond that if they knew what they know today, they would let their children play the sport again.

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