🧠 The price of the game

CTE — a degenerative brain disease from repeated head impacts, diagnosable only after death — has always been hard to measure for the obvious reason: the subjects aren't around to ask.

A new study in the British Medical Journal tracked 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. Of the 235 who donated their brains, 215 tested positive for CTE. The upper-bound estimate across all deaths: 97.7%.

The Harvard-led team added an inconvenient detail: most of those hits happened in high school and college. The NFL just collected the damage — and already paid $1 billion to settle claims from over 5,000 former players in 2016.

The sport knew. The sport paid. The sport continued.

BBC Sport