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Further implications
Over the last ten years the ALF has made substantial moves to reduce the likelihood of head injuries both to professional players and lower-level players and to those playing as juniors. These changes to tackling rules and the development of better protocols for the management of on-field concussions were initially in response the growing awareness in the United States of the risk that head trauma poses to professional and amateur athletes.
The AFL faces challenges on several fronts as a consequence of mounting publicity regarding head injuries. One is the growing momentum among retired players to gain some sort of recompense for the claimed long-term effects of the head injuries they received while playing. On September 17, 2020, former AFL player Shaun Smith was awarded a $1.4m insurance payout for 'total and permanent disablement caused by multiple concussions while playing football'
and former Adelaide player Sam Shaw had launched legal action in relation to the handling of his concussion during his career with the Crows. However, while an ex-players' class action has been mooted for several years, as of September 2020, no such proceedings had commenced. The threat of players taking successful action against the ALF is reduced by the fact that retired players have been excluded from the national workers' compensation plan since the 1970s, after a player was paralyzed in a game. Club directors realised that they were personally liable if a player sued his team. So, the sports minister in Victoria successfully lobbied the state government to exclude professional athletes, including footballers, from receiving workers' compensation. Other states passed similar legislation. Sports executives are now free from personal liability, yet injured players still cannot file claims.
Despite the difficulties, players agent Peter Jess has suggested, 'There's potentially a class action going to occur in the near future, mainly for players from the 1980s and 1990s, with the issue of what concussion protocols were like then. When you look at all that, you wonder whether or not, in the same way as the American sports did... whether a settlement or a redress type scheme...based on independent medical assessment of players would be the way to go.'
The engine that is likely to drive a players' class action against the AFL is the further discovery of CTE among retired players whose brains have been dissected postmortem. In the space of the last twelve months CTE has been found in the brains of three prominent former AFL players, two of whom died as a result of suicide following a pre-death history of anxiety and depression, both conditions associated with CTE. An increasing number of AFL players and other athletes from contact sports are now pledging their brains to the Australian Sports Brain Bank.
If the evidence of CTE continues to mount it will create a case the AFL will find it difficult to resist.The other major source of concern to the AFL regarding play-related head injuries is the impact on the parents of potential young players. If the game is seen to be unreasonably hazardous then parents will begin to discourage their children from playing. As junior and lower-level competition is the seedbed and ultimately the recruitment pool from which the AFL draws its senior players this would ultimately make the game unsustainable.
To this point, substantial withdrawal from the game among young players does not seem to be occurring; however, much will depend on the extent to which the Sports Brain Bank discovers further evidence of CTE among former players. It is also the case that the current heightened awareness of the potential for brain injury means that head trauma is being taken seriously at all levels and what once went unnoticed is now recorded and responded to. This is another avenue through which the true extent of the problem will become more apparent.
The consequences for Australian Rules football and other contact sports remain to be seen.