Category: football

Eliminating Concussion and CTE From Australian Rules Football

Every time a sporting body is confronted with concussion data, someone inevitably asks whether the game can be played without the risk. In most industries, that question is the starting point for a “so far as is reasonably practicable” (SFAIRP) analysis. In sport, it’s treated as heresy. But if we apply the same occupational health and safety (OHS) logic to Australian rules football that we apply to construction, mining or manufacturing, the answer is, if you want to eliminate concussion and the risks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), you have to eliminate the mechanisms that cause it. And once you do that, you no longer have the game as we know it.

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AFL, CTE and SFAIRP: When “the rough and tumble” becomes a foreseeable harm

The death of 23‑year‑old footballer Nick Lowden should force the Australian Football League (AFL) and every sporting body that claims to care about player welfare to confront the fact that the risks of brain injury in Australian football are no longer mysterious, emerging, or debatable. They are foreseeable, documented, and cumulative. And once a risk is foreseeable, the occupational health and safety (OHS) duty to eliminate or minimise it so far as is reasonably practicable (SFAIRP) applies.

A Four Corners investigation to be broadcast on June 29, 2026, examines Lowden’s death. (This article is based on some preliminary reporting on the issue by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

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Professional Sport as a Workplace: Elijah Hollands, Mental Health, and Employer OHS Duties

Most countries and regions seem to have a sport of cultural significance. Australia has several, but all professional sports are played in workplaces, the players are employees, and the sporting clubs are employers. Most have a supervisory and administrative body. Recently, an Australian Rules Football player, Elijah Hollands, displayed signs of a mental health condition during a match. Some spectators noticed that “something was wrong”; some players noticed this at the time, but Hollands played three-quarters of the game, offering only one direct contribution to play, before he was taken off, to only return later in the last quarter. The ABC and 7News provide a good background to the situation

The questions that remain unanswered are why Holland’s employer did not remove a clearly unwell player earlier, and whether the Carlton Football Club breached its duty of care.

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Australian Football Needs Better Workers Compensation

[Guest post by Eric Windholz]

Last week I again had the pleasure to contribute to the Headfirst: A Concussion Podcast, this time talking about recent developments concerning the compensation of athletes (and in particular, AFL (Australian Football League) players) suffering concussion. The key takeaway – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Continue reading “Australian Football Needs Better Workers Compensation”

Poor footballer mental health may be a symptom of CTE, but it is the risk of CTE that should be prevented

The concussion risks of sportspeople continue to appear in the media and popular discussions after every suicide, death, or retirement of sportspeople who play contact sports. Recently, Alan Pearce, Professor, Adjunct Research Fellow, School of Health Science, Swinburne University of Technology, wrote an opinion piece for The Australian newspaper (paywalled) that touched on some occupational health and safety (OHS) themes that deserve expanding.

[This article discusses suicide]

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Learning of ourselves from others

Adam Goodes will be a featured speaker at the 23rd World Congress of Health and Safety At Work in Sydney, Australia, in November 2023. My initial response was, “What does he know about workplace health and safety?” This question is perhaps more indicative of my limited perspective of occupational health and safety (OHS). I have discussed my question with several people over the last week and have a partial answer to my question, but, as is often the case in OHS, more questions arose.

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Concussed sportspeople are workers too

David Michaels devoted a whole chapter to sport-related concussions and brain damage in his 2020 book “The Triumph of Doubt“. He wrote about how the National Football League obfuscated over the appearance of concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and how the the NFL downplayed the injury’s significance by referring to repeated head trauma as Mild Trauma Brain Injury.

The Australian experience is different and this was examined recently in an excellent edition of the ABC radio program, The Ticket. Significantly several interviewees mentioned the injuries in relation to occupational health and safety (OHS) and workers compensation.

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