Future Of: Contact Sports
FutureOf is a series of events dedicated to discussing how our interests and industries will be shaped in the future. These aren’t talks, they are conversations. Kind of like TED Talks, only you can talk back.
What happens when an idol loses his mind?
The link between professional athleticism and brain trauma has been a highly contested issue over the past few years — especially since the Will Smith movie, Concussion, came out around Christmas of 2015 — and Alistair Leyland, founding partner of the digital shop Array of Stars, is keen to get to the bottom of it.
Leyland may be a digital strategist and entrepreneur during the day, but he’s an avid and passionate sports fan outside of his 9–5 (and sometimes during it). Throughout his talk about “The Future of Contact Sports,” he guided the discussion around professional sports as a not only a source of entertainment, but a business and media platform as well. He delved into the cultural significance that football has for Americans to really take a closer look at what’s going in the NFL with regards to mental illness and why they’re so resistant to change.
How do we treat our heroes?
Football is undoubtedly the most popular and profitable American sport. Aside from the obvious advertising opportunities that come with events like the Super Bowl, the cult following around football is evident in how their weekends are set up: Friday nights are reserved for high school games, Saturdays for college matches, and Sundays for the pros. The pigskin sport is possibly more all-American than apple pie or fried food. Which, perhaps, explains why the professional league is so hesitant to alter its policies — because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What it doesn’t explain, however, is the way in which the league treats its money makers and why very few officials are speaking openly about it.
What’s really going on?
A sport that involves head butts in almost every play will undoubtedly cause some injuries. With around 360 head injuries per game, however, good PR and huge settlements can only go so far. At the end of the day, Leyland explained, the fundamentals of the game need to change — and that goes far beyond the playbook.
He broke it down for us. With 3 in every 10 pro players showing signs of repeated head injuries within 5 years of retiring — including depression, anxiety, early onset alzheimer’s, psychosis, and suicide — Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), has become a critical topic of conversation in the sports world. The disease, which currently can only be diagnosed posthumously, raises questions like: What would football look like without tackling? Would alternative options for helmets and materials that offer a softer blow provide enough support for players? And, where is the NFLPA in all of this?
Notorious B.I.G (Sports)
Being plagued by a notoriously old school mentality is not exclusive to the NFL or even “Big Sports” in general; innovation and awareness of critical issues are all too often swept under the rug when money and tradition are at play. It’s time for the league to step up and start questioning some of the tried-and-true fundamentals of the game and make room for some newer, more forward thinking voices. Creating infrastructures within the sporting industry that support players who are suffering from mental (and physical) illnesses is one thing, but penetrating the long-established ideological hold that football has on American culture is, quite literally, an entirely different ball game.
