Looks like there are about 3 times more kids playing soccer than tackle football. I'd say a 3x lower concision rate isn't close to "nearly as bad".

In addition to concussions, football players are also believed to receive repeated microtrauma from running into each other repeatedly, which contributes to CTE.

Football is a full contact sport. It is inherently more dangerous. Collisions in soccer happen accidentally. They happen intentionally in football.

In addition there are new restrictions on heading the ball in soccer for younger kids, which will likely make the game a bit safer.

In 2016 (in the US) 1.08 million students participated in high school football while 821,851 participated in soccer.

I don't have stats available for middle school, but earlier than that the players don't hit nearly as hard, as they have considerable lower mass and speed.

Not sure where your 3x number comes from, but I don't think we need to include YMCA recreational league soccer any more than we need to include flag football.

3x is the total number of youth participants in soccer vs total youth participants in tackle football.

I didn't see that your study was high school and college only.

It seems that girls suffer much higher rates of concussions in all sports likely do to less developed neck muscles according to this [1].

So you'd have to compare concussion rate in football vs boys soccer to get a real comparison.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/recruiting-insider/wp/20...

Where are those numbers from? I know that football has a lot of extra bodies on the sideline, but it doesn't have a girl's team so I would guess that more kids are playing soccer than football. At the very least the number of man-hours played has to be way higher.

>"Based on the national estimate, the majority of concussions resulted from participation in football (40.5%, n = 55 007), followed by girls' soccer (21.5%, n = 29 167), boys' soccer (15.4%, n = 20 929),..."

>So 40.5% of concussions in football and 36.9% in combined boys/girls soccer.

If 21.5% of girls (~6270) and 15.4% of boys (~3223) get concussions then 9493 (6270 + 3223) received concussions out of 50096 (20929 + 29167) total participants. 18.9% (9493 / 50096) for soccer vs 40.5% for football.

Unfortunately n, in this paper, doesn't seem to mean sample size like you would expect in statistics. It is an extrapolated number of concussions nationwide based on a study of 100 high schools.

That still doesn't mean you can just add the percentages. You cannot determine the percent of boys+girls soccer head injuries without knowing the sample sizes.

Or, if you can figure out the relative difference between the number of boys and girls who play soccer, you can do a weighted average of the percentages.

Either way, adding the percentages is completely incorrect.

EDIT: http://www.usyouthsoccer.org/media_kit/keystatistics/ suggests that the split is roughly equal -- in 2008 it was 52% boys and 48% girls.

With that said, the correct weighted value is more like 21.5x.48 + 15.4x.52 = 18.3%, which is significantly less than the 40.5% you quoted for football.

per the source material there were a total (extrapolated) of 135901 concussions across the 9 sports studied.

55007 for football - 40.5% of 135901

20929 for boys soccer - 15.4% of 135901

29167 for girls soccer - 21.5% of 135901

50096 combined soccer

50096/135901 = 36.9% of all concussions were from soccer.

You are correct. That is such an odd way to represent data like this.

I've no axe to grind, my daughter did Tae-kwon-do and had no real interest in soccer and my son is special needs and wouldn't be participating in either. I'm not really a football fan, grew up in Indiana where basketball is king.

So if I have something wrong here, please educate me. I am willing to learn. And see my other comment, n isn't a sample size, at least not in that paragraph.