Euros 2025 | USW research could shape future of heading in women’s football

With UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 underway, researchers at the University of South Wales (USW) are playing a key role in one of football’s most pressing debates, whether current heading guidelines should take account of sex differences.

A study led by Dr Chris Marley, Senior Lecturer in Exercise Physiology and member of USW’s Neurovascular Research Laboratory, is investigating how repetitive heading in football affects female players. This research could ultimately reshape concussion policy in women’s football.

The project builds on the team’s influential 2021 study with male footballers, which was the first to show that long-term heading can impair how the brain regulates its own blood flow, impacting cognition and potentially contributing to risks of dementia later in life.

Now, as interest in women’s football reaches new heights, the team at the Neurovascular Research Laboratory is applying the same methods to the female game. They will be comparing female players to a non-playing control group to examine how the brain responds to a history of heading. Dr Marley said: “Women are more likely to report concussions, experience more severe symptoms, and take longer to recover. However, existing research suggests that female players may not suffer the same effects from repetitive heading as male footballers.

“There could be several reasons for this. It might be that female players head the ball less frequently, or that the forces on the brain are lower. But these differences suggest that current generic guidelines on heading might need to be sex specific.

“There’s growing evidence across many sports that females are at greater risk of concussion and related long-term problems like dementia. But the research is still far too male-dominated. Our work is helping to fill that gap. The goal is to find biomarkers that show which players are at risk before symptoms emerge.”

The research uses cutting-edge blood analysis to track proteins released into the bloodstream following impacts. The team can measure more than 180,000 different proteins, helping to detect early warning signs of brain injury even before structural damage appears.

As the team prepares to publish new results in the coming months, their research is timely, especially with record numbers of young girls now taking up football after England’s triumph in the Women’s Euro 2022 and both Wales and England qualifying for this year’s tournament.

“There’s still a lot of speculation in this field,” said Dr Marley. “But the more robust evidence we can provide, the better we can support safe participation in the sport.”

This is one of the many USW projects looking into the effects of contact sports. Professor Damian Bailey, who leads USW’s Neurovascular Laboratory, works with Head for Change, a charity dedicated to prioritising brain health in sports.