PFA voices for temporary concussion substitutes

Temporary concussion substitutes are needed to safeguard players because of the pressure on medical teams to make quick assessments, the English Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) said Monday.

On Sunday, Leeds United’s Robin Koch was substituted 19 minutes after suffering a head injury that needed to be bandaged in a 4-2 loss to Manchester United.

Permanent concussion substitutes have been used in the Premier League for the past year, allowing each side up to an extra two changes.

If players are replaced they cannot return to the field. In rugby, in contrast, a substitute comes on while an off-field head injury assessment is carried out.

“The injury to Leeds United’s Robin Koch demonstrates again that the current concussion protocols within football are failing to prioritise player safety,” the PFA tweeted on Monday.

The association pointed out that there have been various incidents where players returned to the field with a brain injury and only left the field after some time after worse symptoms were visible.

“We see frequent incidents of players returning to play with a potential brain injury, only to be removed shortly afterwards once symptoms visibly worsen,” they added.

The PFA said it had made its point to football’s international rule-making body The International Football Association Board (IFAB).

“As the representative voice of players in England, we have been clear to @TheIFAB that we want to see the introduction of temporary concussion substitutes,” they maintained. “Temporary concussion substitutes will allow medical teams additional time and an appropriate environment to make an initial assessment.”

They highlighted that the proposed rule would keep the game in the balance, with no team having a disadvantage of the reduced number of players.

“Introducing temporary substitutes would allow a match to restart with neither side numerically disadvantaged, reducing pressure on players and medical teams to make quick decisions on whether an injured player continues,” they added.

The association claimed that the current rules set by the rule-making body are working perfectly and put players’ safety at risk.

“Put simply, the current rules set by @TheIFAB are not working, and players are being put at risk,” they stated.

Leeds were not able to use one of their allocated concussion substitutes for Koch as manager Marcelo Bielsa explained the reason for his withdrawal was due to the cut he sustained to the head rather than a concussion.

Neuropathologist Willie Stewart, who has pioneered research into the degenerative impact head injuries can have on footballers later in life has called for football to adopt a similar protocol to rugby.

“Unquestionably! Rugby has made great developments in understanding how you can assess and identify players with brain injury on the field, and that should be the model and the benchmark that (other) sports start from,” Stewart told British parliamentary inquiry on the issue last year.

Stewart’s study in 2019 found that former footballers are approximately three and a half times more likely to die from the neurodegenerative disease than the general population.

A number of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning team have been affected by such diseases.