"We must protect our kids." That's Raphael Varane — former Real Madrid and Manchester United centre-back, World Cup winner, and a man whose own brain paid the price for decades of heading footballs — and he's now sitting on Como's board of education and actually doing something about it.
The Serie A club have introduced one of the most detailed heading restriction frameworks in European club football, covering every age group from under-10 to their oldest academy players. No heading at all before U11. Light rubber balls for technique work at U12 and U13. A maximum of five headers per session. Throw-ins along the ground instead of aerial balls. The whole structure is built around one idea: the brain is still developing, so stop treating it like it isn't.
What Como are actually doing
The detail here matters. At under-10 level, heading is banned entirely — in training and in matches. Corners are replaced by ground-level throws. Under-11s can be introduced to heading technique toward the end of the season, but only with a lighter rubber ball. Under-12s get heading once a month, maximum five reps, same light ball. Under-13s once a week, still capped at five headers, with throw-ins directed below head height.
Coaches across all age groups are also instructed to avoid over-inflated balls and to actively reduce "repetitive and unnecessary heading exposure." The guidance gets reviewed throughout the season — this isn't a press release policy that gets filed and forgotten.
Varane put it plainly: "This pathway reduces unnecessary contact at the youngest ages, when the brain is still growing, and then teaches the skill properly, step by step, with the right control." He's spoken before about his own body being "damaged" by heading, and about how a culture of ignoring head injuries hurt him and his peers. He's not theorizing. He's describing his own career.
The science backs all of this up
A 2023 University of Nottingham study — commissioned by the FA and the PFA — found that retired professional footballers were three times more likely to develop dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases than the general population. Three times. An inquest last year established that Nobby Stiles headed the ball at least 136,000 times during his career before dying with advanced dementia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in 2020. Five of England's 1966 World Cup final starters were eventually diagnosed with dementia.
A Loughborough University study published in April identified "distinctive pressure waves" in the frontal brain region on contact with the ball — energy transfer patterns already well-established as a cause of brain injury in contexts like low-level military blasts. That's the force children's developing brains have been routinely absorbing on a Saturday morning.
The FA began phasing heading out of under-12 matches in England in 2024. U.S. Soccer banned heading for under-10s back in 2015. Como's framework is more granular than most, and that specificity — five headers, rubber balls, ground-level throw-ins — is exactly what makes it credible rather than cosmetic.
Como's men's team make their Champions League debut next season. Their academy is now doing something the competition's biggest clubs haven't matched. That's a strange sentence to write, but here we are.
