The Header

In the mid-1970s the sometime manager of Manchester City, Crystal Palace, and Sporting Lisbon, Malcolm Allison, was interviewed for the position of USA’s national soccer coach. While in the USA, Allison’s experience of professional basketball had given him a plan for the national soccer team. He would, he explained to his interviewers, bring together a team comprised only of players of 6ʹ6” or above. The logic behind this plan was the dominance that such players would have heading high crosses in front of goal. Needless to say, Allison did not get the job (Jolly 2021).

I retell this only in part because it is a good story. More importantly it throws into relief the way in which thinking about football is changing. Perhaps an immediate objection to Allison’s plan lies in a sense that football dominated by excessively tall players would not be football as we know and enjoy it. That has not changed. A disproportionate emphasis on heading would disrupt the aesthetic experience of football. On 26 September 2021 a charity match was played in the north of England between Spennymore Town and former Middlesbrough FC players, and this game took a step in an opposite direction from Allison’s plan. The issue was not players’ height, but rather whether or not they could head the ball at all. This was the first adult 11-a-side game to be played with significant restrictions on heading. In the first half players could only head the ball within the penalty area (and the first goal was scored through a header), while in the second half no heading at all was permitted.

The game was an experiment, responding to growing concerns over the consequence that heading has on player’s health, particularly as a cause of dementia. Footballers are known to be five times more likely to suffer from neurodegenerative disease than the general population (Russell et al. 2021). Already some national associations have begun to restrict or ban heading for youth games, or during practice.

The Spennymore Town game highlights a series of important philosophical issues. The health and wellbeing of soccer players (and indeed athletes in any sport) is clearly of overwhelming importance. Brain injuries and injuries to the spinal chord rightly attract high levels of concern, and there are legitimate questions as to whether young players can give genuine consent to being involved in activities with such a high risk factor. Yet discussions of the Spennymore Town game suggest that there is nonetheless a trade-off to be had between what might be termed the bioethics of soccer and its aesthetics. Luke Edwards, reporting in the Daily Telegraph, noted immediately after the game that restricting heading to the penalty area made little significant difference to the nature of the game. The total ban on heading, however, led to fundamental changes: ‘there was too much short passing and it made defending easier without the threat of high crosses from the flanks. It was too much like 5-a-side-football. You suspect it would be too much for fans to accept’ (Edwards 2021).

Thus, while a total ban might be the preferred position from the viewpoint of bioethics, the changes to the nature of the game would be so great that they would be unacceptable, and one suspects to players as much as to spectators. At some point, the intrinsic pleasures of playing and watching football come to trump purely medical concerns. A game without heading would be impoverished, just as much as would a game shaped by Allison’s near exclusive reliance on the header. But there remains an important philosophical debate to be had. Are the costs incurred by players, in return for the aesthetic pleasure we all derive from our favourite sports, ethically acceptable?

Book Symposia

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy begins its own experiment with this issue, albeit one that does not have anything of the urgency or significance of that hosted by Spennymore Town. A new, irregular, feature, a ‘Book Symposium’, is being introduced. This will consist of three critics commentating on a recently published philosophy of sport monograph, along with a reply from the author. The first symposium features Ask Vest Christiansen’s Gym Culture. Subsequent symposia will focus on Steffen Borge’s Philosophy of Football (and credit where it is due, this was Steffen’s idea in the first place), and Kevin Krein’s Philosophy and Nature Sport. While not intended to replace the journal’s book reviews, I trust that this will allow some key monographs to receive deeper debate and critical examination. I am, of course, open to suggestions as to monographs that might benefit from this treatment in the future.