Soccer, CTE, and the Cultural Representation of Dementia

Abstract

This article deploys a qualitative media content analysis to examine discourses linking sport, head injury, and longer term neurocognitive decline. It draws on a seminal British television documentary and associated print media coverage to demonstrate that the representation of sport-related brain injury is intricately connected to both conceptions of risk in sport and a wider social response to aging and dementia. The article augments existing North American analyses to provide the first cross-cultural comparison of this phenomenon and, in doing so, illustrates how the social prominence of cultural representations of sport-related brain injury relates in part to the distinct characteristics of the sport-related phenomenon, which extend and amplify both the broader cultural crisis of concussion in sport and existing representations of dementia. The study is therefore important because it provides a unique perspective on both a key contemporary sporting issue and this global health concern.

Former Athletes' Illness Stories of Brain Injuries: Suspected Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and the Entanglement of Never‐Aging Masculinities

“…There is a general frustration expressed by men about the lack of standardized treatment for the effects of (sub)concussions and CTE. As one former football player states, “it's weird because nobody is working on treatment protocols because there's not even a diagnostic to, to, to determine that you have it while you're alive.” In fact, medical research has not produced any scientific breakthroughs in relation to the treatment of CTE (Malcolm 2021). Similar to the neurogenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, treatment options focus only on managing symptoms.…”