CTE Risk Beyond Football: What the Research Shows Across Sports
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Football gets the headlines. Most of the research funding, most of the media coverage, and most of the public understanding of CTE has been built around the NFL. But the caregivers and families dealing with suspected CTE outside of football, soccer parents, rodeo families, snowboarders, hockey players, often find almost nothing written for them. That gap is real, and it's worth closing.
Here's what the actual research shows, sport by sport, including where the evidence is strong and where it genuinely isn't yet.
Soccer: a growing, credible evidence base
Soccer has more published, peer-reviewed CTE research than any sport besides football, boxing, and hockey. A 2017 study out of University College London examined the brains of 14 former professional soccer players who had developed dementia (Ling et al., Acta Neuropathologica). All 14 showed neuropathological signs of CTE. Six of the fourteen had no history of a diagnosed concussion at all, which points specifically at repetitive heading, not just documented head trauma, as a contributing factor.
A separate 2023 review of 14 soccer-related CTE cases found CTE was the primary diagnosis in 10 of them, with the remainder showing CTE pathology alongside another form of dementia (Puvenna et al., published via PubMed). The researchers were careful to note that questions remain about whether heading itself, independent of concussion, is a direct risk factor, but the pattern across multiple independent studies is consistent enough to take seriously.
Rodeo: one confirmed case, and a research base still being built
Rodeo, particularly bull riding, saddle bronc, and bareback riding, involves repeated high-force impacts to the head and neck, but almost no long-term brain health research existed until the last fifteen years. Researchers at New Mexico State University and the University of Nevada, Reno have both said plainly that no large-scale, long-term cohort studies of rodeo athletes exist yet, unlike football or boxing.
What does exist is one confirmed, named case. Ty Pozzobon, a professional bull rider and 2016 Canadian champion, died by suicide in 2017 at age 25. His family, suspecting his death was connected to repeated concussions sustained during his career, donated his brain to the University of Washington. Neuropathologists confirmed CTE, the first documented case in a professional bull rider. His diagnosis is credited with pushing the rodeo community to start taking head injury more seriously, but it remains a single confirmed case rather than part of a larger published dataset.
Snowboarding and extreme sports: the thinnest evidence, and the most caution required
This is the category where the least is actually known. Most available data on snowboarding and skiing covers injury frequency, not long-term brain pathology. Snowboarding consistently shows the highest reported concussion rates among winter sports, but a high concussion count is not the same evidence as a confirmed CTE case, and the two shouldn't be presented as interchangeable.
One confirmed, named case anchors this category. Dave Mirra, a BMX and X Games athlete, died in 2016. A postmortem examination confirmed CTE. His diagnosis is widely credited with bringing CTE awareness into action sports for the first time, the same way Mike Webster's case did for football decades earlier. But one confirmed case, however significant, is not the same as an established research base, and families in this position deserve to know that distinction rather than have it glossed over.
Why the evidence looks so different across sports
The difference isn't about which sport is "more dangerous." It's about which sports have had brain banks, funded research programs, and decades of attention pointed at them. Football and boxing have that infrastructure. Soccer is building it. Rodeo and action sports mostly don't have it yet, which means the absence of large studies reflects a lack of research, not necessarily a lack of risk.
If your family's sport isn't well represented in the medical literature yet, that doesn't mean your experience isn't real or worth taking seriously. It means the science hasn't caught up to the families already living with it.
What this means if you're watching for it
Across every sport in this article, the pattern researchers keep coming back to isn't one big hit. It's repetitive impact over years, sometimes without a single diagnosed concussion along the way. If you're a parent, spouse, or caregiver of an athlete in any high-impact sport and you're noticing mood changes, memory issues, or personality shifts that don't match who that person used to be, that pattern is worth paying attention to and worth bringing to a doctor, regardless of whether their sport has made it into a published study yet.
Sources
- Ling H, Morris HR, Neal JW, et al. Mixed pathologies including chronic traumatic encephalopathy account for dementia in retired association football (soccer) players. Acta Neuropathologica. 2017.
- Puvenna V, et al. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Soccer Players: Review of 14 Cases. (PubMed, 2023)
- University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Neurological Surgery — neuropathological findings, Ty Pozzobon.
- CBC News, "Traumatic brain injury confirmed in young B.C. bull rider who took his own life," 2017.
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