He is 21 now, and was 14 when he suffered his first concussion.

This biggest danger in going up for a header is not the ball, of course, but other heads-which, unlike American football and rugby, don’t have any protective gear: For more on the head-injury risks in soccer, check out the 2014 New Yorker piece “The Cost of the Header.” Just last month, another study on youth soccer- from the Nationwide Children's Hospital and Ohio State University College of Medicine-revealed that the annual rate of concussions and “closed head injuries” per 10,000 participants increased by nearly 1,600 percent from 1990 to 2014. I hate to make a sick pun on such a serious subject, but it’s a “no-brainer” that children’s brains should not be knocked against the inside of their skulls in the name of sport. This latest study kind of proves that, and it is disgraceful that the sports bodies have ignored the overwhelming evidence and left it to universities to prove it. I also have read various science studies over the decades about how head knocks have long-term effects, especially on children-not just long-term effects like dementia, but immediate increased aggression. I’ve had worse head knocks in real life-car-crashes and fighting. One time I headed a very high ball rather than try to control it.

“Head the ball” was a play of words on that, but it was informed by the folk knowledge that footballers who headed a football rather than play it off their feet were stupid. “Ball Head” either meant someone bald but more often someone with air between their ears, preferably both bald and stupid. There are two relatively modern (well, my era) Scottish insults: Ba’ Heid and the more recent Heid the Ba’.

Head soccer 2016