A dementia expert says soccer balls should be sold with a health warning.

Professor Willie Stewart leads the FIELD (Football’s Influence on Lifelong Health and Dementia Risk) study. 

The ongoing research effort has found that former footballers are three-and-a-half times more likely to die with dementia than the general public.

Outfield players are four times more likely to be diagnosed with neurodegenerative disease, but the risk is highest among defenders, who are five times more likely to have dementia than non-footballers.

“With the current data, we’re now at the point to suggest that footballs should be sold with a health warning saying repeated heading in football may lead to an increased risk of dementia,” Dr Stewart says.

“The data from this paper is the missing link in trying to understand this connection between sport and dementia... There is no other proposed risk factor, and this is one we could really address and eliminate this disease.

“I think football has to ask the difficult questions: is heading absolutely necessary to the game of football? Is potential exposure to degenerative brain disease absolutely necessary? Or can some other form of the game be considered?”

The Football Association (FA), Premier League, and other soccer governing bodies have taken up new guidelines that limit “high-impact” headers to 10 per week in training from the 2021-22 season onwards.

Dr Stewart says these rules were based on “unscientific guesswork”.

“There is no basis on which to say 10 headers of a certain level will somehow produce no risk, or even make a great difference to risk. It is a best guesstimate and we would have to wait 30 or 40 years to see the impact,” he said.