26,510 headers on video: the first count across English football's elite pathway

English football has spent five years making rules about heading with remarkably little data on how much heading actually happens. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on 29 December supplies the missing denominator [s2].

Researchers coded purposeful heading events from video in 687 matches played between April 2021 and June 2024, spanning Premier League first-team fixtures and Category 1 and Category 2 Academy matches [s1]. The dataset contains 26,510 purposeful headers across 49,703 match minutes [s1]. The authors describe it as the first published study to report heading rates across an entire elite men's football pathway [s1].

The gradient

Heading rate rose by about 13% per age group from under-9s to senior level, climbing from 0.167 headers per minute to 0.875 [s1].

That is roughly a fivefold difference between the youngest academy age group and the professional game. It is a description of exposure, not a judgement about it: heading is a skill that is deliberately introduced and progressively developed, and the curve reflects that design.

Position matters more than most people assume. Central defenders accounted for between 34.2% and 36.3% of all heading events [s1]. The most common preceding event was a long pass [s1] — which means heading volume is partly a product of how a team plays, not only of who is playing.

The head-impact numbers

The study also coded unintended head impacts occurring during heading events — head-to-head, elbow-to-head, head-to-ground contact.

These were infrequent: 31 occasions across the whole dataset, under 1% of all purposeful heading events [s1]. Incidence was highest in senior players, at one per 971 match minutes, and lowest in the foundation phase covering under-9s to under-11s, at one per 1,852 match minutes [s1]. Six players were removed from play following medical assessment [s1].

The direction of that gradient is the point. If the concern about youth heading is primarily about accidental collisions during aerial duels, this dataset places the highest rate in adults, not children [s1].

Why the same evidence produced two different rules

This research did not appear in a vacuum. The Premier League commissioned an analysis of heading activity in just short of 700 games, including 180 covering under-9s to under-11s, as part of a consultation on academy heading policy [s3].

The outcome was a split. In grassroots football, the FA is removing deliberate heading from matches in stages: up to under-9s from the 2024/25 season, up to under-10s in 2025/26 and up to under-11s in 2026/27, with a deliberate header penalised by an indirect free kick [s3][s4]. In academy football, the Premier League decided to continue permitting heading in matches at all ages while further work and research continue [s3].

Its reasoning, set out for parents, is that academies have expert pitch-side medical care at every match, that the research shows unintended head-impact events during heading are infrequent, and that heading rates at under-9 to under-11 level are low — averaging 4.75 to 7.46 headers per team per game in those age groups [s3]. The Premier League also states that the FA's decision to remove deliberate heading in grassroots football is not based on medical or scientific evidence [s3], and commits to a formal review of its own position every two years [s3].

Readers should weigh that characterisation knowing its source. It is the position of the body that chose the less restrictive rule.

Training is already restricted

Match heading is only part of exposure, and training guidance is where most of the existing restriction sits.

Under FA guidance, heading is not introduced in training at under-7 to under-11 level; at under-12 to under-13, a maximum of five headers in one session per week using light balls, unopposed; at under-14 to under-16, up to ten per session in one weekly session; and for under-18 and adult amateur football, a maximum of ten headers per session with heading practice limited to one session a week [s4].

For professional players, guidance shared by the domestic football partners in 2021 limits weekly high-force headers — defined as those following a long pass of more than 35 metres, or from crosses, corners and free kicks — to ten [s3].

What the study does not establish

This is a descriptive observational cohort. It counts events. It contains no measure of head acceleration, no biomarker, no cognitive outcome and no clinical follow-up. It cannot say whether any of these exposure levels is safe or unsafe.

The authors say so directly: further research is needed to understand variability in heading exposure across an individual player's development and any potential clinical ramifications [s1].

The sample is also entirely male [s1], and heading exposure and head-impact patterns in women's football cannot be inferred from it.

What to watch

Whether the Premier League's Games Programme trials — in which deliberate heading is removed from certain academy fixtures [s3] — produce comparative data, and whether any study links exposure counts of this kind to a measured outcome rather than to another exposure count. Until that happens, football is regulating a dose whose effect it has not measured.