Keeping Players in the Game - Making Soccer Safer
How Neuroscience Is Making Soccer Safer Before Injury Happens
Keeping Players in the Game - Making Soccer Safer
How Neuroscience Is Making Soccer Safer Before Injury Happens
As the world watches the FIFA World Cup, University of Utah researchers are involved in a global effort to answer a question every soccer player, coach, and parent cares about: How can we make the game safer without changing what makes it great?
How Neuroscience Is Making Soccer Safer Before Injury Happens
Kelly Taeoalii has spent several lifetimes on the sidelines. The lifetimes of six athlete children.
Football. Basketball. Soccer.
Her three daughters—Faith, Grace, and Sariah—have played soccer from youth leagues all the way up to international tournaments.
Kelly has celebrated spectacular goals, witnessed heartbreaking losses, and endured the universal parenting experience of wondering whether a child is actually hurt or just being dramatic.
“That’s always what gets the parents,” she said. “The injuries.”
When the family recently swapped stories about memorable head injuries, they realized something surprising: The worst ones weren’t from heading the ball.
Sariah hit the turf hard after a collision. Grace was kicked in the face by a player trying to clear the ball. Faith was clocked by a ball to the head at close range—courtesy of a teammate!
Head injuries, it turns out, often arise from chaos rather than coordinated plays.
And that’s exactly why University of Utah Department of Neurology neuroscientists Carrie Esopenko, PhD, Elisabeth Wilde, PhD, and Melissa Cortez, DO, are asking different questions than they used to.
Instead of asking whether soccer can cause brain injuries, they're asking:
What happens when force reaches the brain? And how can we stop so much of it from getting there in the first place?
Not every injury has an elegant scientific solution. Softer playing surfaces can help. Stronger musculature can help. Better equipment can help. (Human error can’t be helped.)
Across sports science, researchers are increasingly focused on keeping force from turning play into an injury.
Because It’s All About the Gs ... ’Bout the Gs
Yes, we just made a Meghan Trainor reference. No, the science doesn’t get less interesting from here.
Unless you’re a fighter pilot or IndyCar driver, your most memorable experience with G forces probably happened on a roller coaster.
Athletes experience them too, just in a less fun way.
A collision with another player. A fall to the turf. A ball striking the head unexpectedly.
“Much in the world of brain injury is about force,” Esopenko said.
Researchers measure those forces in units called Gs. On a roller coaster, those forces build gradually enough that your body can absorb them. In sports, they can arrive almost instantly.
When that happens, the brain moves inside the skull, creating the potential for injury.
The challenge for sports scientists isn’t eliminating force; impacts are part of the game. The challenge is figuring out how to reduce the amount of force that reaches the brain.
Which leads to another important question: Can athletes train their bodies to handle those forces better?
Your Brain Has a Bodyguard
It turns out your brain’s first line of defense may not be your helmet, your trainer, or your mother. It might be your neck.
One of Esopenko’s research interests is understanding how neck strength and neuromuscular control influence head impacts and the white matter injuries they can cause.
“It’s not just how strong a person is,” she said. “It’s also how quickly they activate those neck muscles.”
Think about two scenarios: In one, a player sees a ball coming and braces for contact. In the other, a player is struck unexpectedly from behind. The difference matters.
“There is data to suggest, particularly with heading, that neck strength could predict their ability to be resilient to an impact,” said Cortez, who works with collegiate, pro, and Olympic athletes.
Researchers are still working out exactly how much protection that provides, but the findings are promising.
Grace immediately saw the connection.
Her soccer team regularly performs injury-prevention exercises designed to strengthen muscles and reduce knee injuries.
“If there was a set program” for neck strengthening, she said, “it would be easy to do.” To her, it felt like a natural next step.
That idea—simple training changes producing meaningful protection—is exactly the type of solution researchers hope to find. And their quest is global.
The Avengers of Brain Science
Soccer safety isn’t being studied by one lab. Or one university. Or even one country.
Esopenko and Wilde, along with other U of U researchers, are members of the ENIGMA Consortium Brain Injury and Sports-Related Injury Working Groups, scientists around the world studying brain health. They combine data, expertise, and technology to tackle questions that would be impossible for any single institution to answer alone.
Think of ENIGMA as the Avengers of brain science. Everyone has a specialty. Nobody agrees on everything. Somehow, they still save the day.
One team studies neck strength, while another studies brain imaging. Others focus on biomarkers, rehabilitation, mental health, or sports performance.
Together, they’re building a clearer picture of how the brain responds to sport and how athletes can be better protected.
The Future of Soccer Is Softer
One of the most encouraging things discovered thus far is that prevention doesn’t always require dramatic changes. Sometimes a solution is surprisingly simple.
For example, researchers are studying whether lower ball pressure can reduce force during heading. They’re also looking at the materials balls are made of. Soccer players have noticed those differences for years.
“You get a hard ball and you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t want that one,’ and you switch out,” Sariah explained.
Researchers are now putting numbers behind those instincts.
They’re also studying playing surfaces and whether newer turf systems absorb impacts better than older fields.
They’re studying movement patterns, balance, and strength training.
The goal isn’t to make soccer less exciting. It’s to make athletes more resilient.
That’s a message Wilde strongly supports. The benefits of sports, she notes, extend far beyond the field. Physical health. Mental health. Teamwork. Confidence. Community.
“We don’t want to keep athletes from playing,” emphasizes Wilde. “We want to help them play safely.”
For Kelly Taeoalii, those are goals and a future worth cheering for.
And for researchers like Wilde, Cortez, and Esopenko, it’s proof that sports science is changing.
Not from competition to caution, but from reaction to prevention.
Wait... What’s white matter?
Why White Matter Matters
White matter is basically the brain’s group chat. When messages stop getting through, things get complicated.
White matter is made up of millions of nerve fibers that connect regions of the brain and help information move from place to place.
Esopenko has spent years studying white matter in athletes and people who have experienced brain injuries.
Using advanced MRI techniques, researchers can visualize those pathways in extraordinarily beautiful detail, tracking how the brain’s communication system changes over time.
Why does that matter? Because understanding the most vulnerable parts of the brain helps researchers figure out how to better protect them.
In many ways, prevention starts with understanding what you’re trying to preserve.
About this Series
Keeping Players in the Game is a three-part series exploring how neuroscience is helping make soccer safer—from preventing injuries, to improving concussion recognition, to helping athletes recover and return to play.
The series features research from University of Utah experts Melissa Cortez, DO, Carrie Esopenko, PhD, and Elisabeth Wilde, PhD.
The series also includes the perspectives of the Taeoalii family, Utah residents whose lifelong involvement in sports provided valuable real-world insight into athlete safety. Sisters Faith, Grace, and Sariah Taeoalii have played soccer from youth leagues through high school and college competition as well as in FIFA World Cup qualifier tournaments. Sideline expert and mom Kelly Taeoalii is her daughters' biggest fan and booster.
Special thanks to the Taeoalii family for sharing their experiences, observations, and years of insight from the field.
Reviewed by:
Carrie Esopenko, PhD, and Melissa Cortez, DO
Department of Neurology
University of Utah Health
