The long-term harms of repeated head impacts suffered by professional athletes have been studied for more than 20 years now.
Rugby, American football, boxing… Attention turns spontaneously towards these disciplines, of which one perceives well what they imply of brutal contacts.
Football, on the other hand, goes more under the radar.
And yet.
To see a professional footballer split a head during a match, it is hard to imagine the force of the shock that his skull takes.
"A soccer ball sent from 10
to 20 meters away releases, when it hits the player, an energy of 250 joules, the equivalent of a strike launched in the face by a boxing professional weighing more than 100 kilos"
, sums up Professor Jean Chazal, neurosurgeon-anatomist, who has been studying head trauma for more than 40 years.
If the physical training of these athletes allows them to withstand the impact without collapsing, it happens however in certain extreme cases (on a strike, in case...
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