Soccer, CTE, and the cultural representation of dementia

This article deploys a qualitative media content analysis to examine discourses linking sport, head injury and longer-term neurocognitive decline. It draws on a seminal British television documentary and associated print media coverage to demonstrate that the representation of sport-related brain injury is intricately connected to both conceptions of risk in sport and a wider social response to ageing and dementia. The article augments existing North American analyses to provide the first cross-cultural comparison of this phenomenon, and in so doing illustrates how the social prominence of cultural representations of sport-related brain injury relates in part to the distinct characteristics of the sport-related phenomenon which extend and amplify both the broader cultural crisis of concussion in sport and existing representations of dementia. The study is therefore important because it provides a unique perspective on both a key contemporary sporting issue, and this global health concern.