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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Second, there are lots of time when soccer players aren't really engaged in the action, which is fine, its the nature of the sport. And its their job. So a defenders job may be to creep up the field, but do they really have a "critical" assignment when the ball is on the opponents zone? Not really.[/quote]

Luckily my son's travel team is not very good, so he's generally pretty busy as a defender.  In all seriousness, though, soccer is also a rough-ish sport.  He's had a ton of injuries (none to his head, fortunately) and is only 14. [/quote]

Agreed.  It's very rough.  And a real risk of head to head contact.

Honestly, if you wouldn't let your kid play football, you probably shouldn't let them play soccer either[/quote]

You have to look at injuries as per hour played - youth football is estimated at 9-40 injuries per 1000 hours played. Youth soccer is around 4-8 injuries per 1000 hours played. Anecdotes are not useful. My kid plays soccer and we know about 50-75 kids who also play youth soccer. We know exactly 1 kid who plays youth tackle football. He broke his leg playing football. We know of 2 sprained ankles and a broken arm among the soccer players. But it’s just anecdotal. [/quote]

Right.  I know about 75-100 kids that play youth tackle football.  Over the past 2 years, we've seen one broken bone: collarbone.

We know 2 kids that play youth soccer.  One got a concussion from head to head contact going for a ball.

See?  We can both trade un-usefull anecdotal stories.

But I'm not here to argue that football is as safe as soccer.  It's absolutely not.  It's more dangerous.  I do think, though, that parents that chose soccer for their kid over football, are just fooling themselves.  The risk is smaller, but still present.

If you're worried about injuries from collision, those parents should sign their kids up for golf or tennis or cross-country.

Any sport where bodies are running at each other at full spring carries some level of risk, and choosing soccer over football doesn't do as much as people like to think it does to mitigate that risk (one study showed that out of the 400k soccer injuries, 22% were concussions [url]pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22120567/[/url]).

Heck, even basketball has high rate of injury than both football and soccer.

At some point, you just have to accept the risk of your child doing something that they love.  [/quote]

Not sure where you got your data, but basketball routinely has fewer injuries per thousand than football or soccer. There is also a different metric that is not often reported - rate of catastrophic injury. Sports like football, freestyle ski, and gymnastics have a higher rate of catastrophic injury like spinal cord injury or traumatic brain injury. You might get a sprained ankle in volleyball, but the chances of a spinal cord injury is pretty low. Clearly the risk is tolerable for most of us since youth sport involvement is so high. We live part of the year in a ski town, and I have heard many stories of catastrophic injury among young winter sports athletes. But the youth programs are still oversubscribed, so the risk must be tolerable. [/quote]

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