This week, as the USA soccer establishment counted the dollars coming in from big European teams playing friendlies across the country, they might have also been keeping an eye on the dollars going out from another sport, and hopefully learning a valuable lesson.
On Tuesday, the NCAA reached a $75 million settlement on a class action concussion lawsuit, which also bound them to a new and far-reaching protocol for the assessment and treatment of concussions. The settlement will also prevent the NCAA from becoming involved in the type of costly class action lawsuits in which the NFL has only just reached tentative settlement, with up to 5,000 of its former players.
The latter furor has represented a legal battle whose ultimate (and still uncapped) costs could run to the billions and which has also involved collateral damage to the game and governing body's image. And the NFL's handling of the affair has possibly undermined its future position as undisputed number one sport in the country.
When President Obama told a New Yorker writer that 'I would not let my son play pro football' in January of this year, he was arguably echoing the thoughts of many parents around the country, who had watched the concussion debate, and the attendant revelations about NFL's alleged suppression of player's medical data, with mounting alarm.
Concussion, an injury usually caused by an impact in which the brain is jarred or shaken to the point where the spinal fluid surrounding the brain doesn't cushion it effectively against the inside of the skull, can be difficult to diagnose and track, since its effects can range from immediate unconsciousness and visible disorientation to subtler symptoms.
Properly diagnosed and with proper recovery time (which can take up to a few weeks) most such injuries can be overcome. But the larger issue around concussions in sport, and most recently the NFL in particular, has not just been addressing the types of tackles and hits that cause concussions, but taking the proper medical precautions to ensure a player is not exposed to the type of secondary impact that can cause permanent damage and possibly even death. With the pressure to get back in action felt by players and even club medical staff, the scales can be tilted towards unnecessary risk.
Yet as certain recent high-profile incidents have shown, any hopes soccer might have of benefiting from being perceived as a safer sport for young people to play, has to be tempered by the reality that it too is a contact sport.
One emblematic moment came during the sport's marquee game, the World Cup final, earlier this month, when Christoph Kramer, the German defender who moments earlier had been dazed in a clash with Argentina player Ezequiel Garay, approached Italian referee Nicola Rizzoli and asked him: 'Ref, is this the final?'
A concerned Rizzoli made him repeat the question, and then seeing the player's stunned response to his reply, communicated to Kramer's teammate Bastian Schweinsteiger that the evidently concussed player needed to be subbed out, which he was, 14 minutes after the original incident.
Kramer's predicament was hardly an isolated incident. Indeed it was only the highest-profile of a number of head injuries during the World Cup, including a knee to the head for Gonzalo Higuaín from Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer in the same game.
Christophe Simon / AFP / Getty Images
Gail Oskin / Getty Images