At the age of 14-18, you know the risks involved. Straight up. Especially now. If not for their parents, then the fake attempts by the NFL. We know what we are getting into. You can educate all you want, but if someone wants to do something they will.
Studies have shown that soccer carries concussion issues, especially if they play from a young age. Headers from the age of 4 on up can mess up someone.
Soccer carries concussion issues via headers mostly, or errant collisions, but it is something that can be (and has been) remedied, especially at the youth level. How exactly do you remedy this with tackle football? How do you remove the violent collisoins that are much more an inherent part of the game than in any other sport. I"m not talking just about linebackers getting trucked or receivers getting speared, I'm talking in the trenches, the lineman crashing into each other. That shit is just as bad for the human brain and body.
Also again, claiming that 14-18 year olds "know the risks" and can make reasonable decisions for themselves is simply ridiculous. We don't leave teenagers to their own devices in any other walk of life. We don't let them drink or smoke or even vote because society has deemed they aren't mature enough, but we are going to act like they can make informed and reasonable decisions on something that is going to potentially effect the qualify of their life 20-30 years down the road?
Personally, just to clarify, I am not on the side that the government needs to step in and "abolish" or ban football, but I do believe that over time, within the next couple of decades, several factors are going to lead to the decline of football in American society. It will be a domino effect. If these concussion and health issues continue, it's going to become riskier and costlier for schools to fund football programs. Sure you are going to have the diehards in places like Texas and Florida and Ohio where football is life, but that is going to severely gimp the talent pool. Great athletes will be funneled into other sports instead of automatically taking up football. The decrease in talent is going to be felt at the college and eventually pro level, to the point where the product will suffer in quality, and if this season has taught us anything, it's that the NFL isn't bulletproof. If the quality declines, people tune out.