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In December of 2020, prompted by FIFA's input, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) announced that 2021 would be the year to begin experimenting with a 'concussion substitute'. This refers to an adaptation to the rules of the game to allow an extra substitution for a player under suspicion of having a concussion. On January 18th, 2021, FIFA announced that during the Club World Cup in February they would implement the rule as a test. Various leagues around the world soon showed interest in following suit and conducting a trial implementation of the rule into some of their domestic leagues, including England, the Netherlands, Japan, Portugal, and the USA.
Given the eagerness to test the rule by some of the world's most substantial leagues and competitions, as well as the apparentness of its benefits, one could be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that over the next couple years the rule will spread across the world, and in a decade or two the thought of a player staying on the field after a head injury will sound absurd.
Head injuries and concussions have been a generally unsolved problem in soccer so far
However, the credit for coming up with this idea of a 'concussion substitute' and how best to implement it has potentially been misplaced. To find the origins of this rule, as well as FIFA's first encounter with and rejection of the 'concussion substitute', you'd have to look further back to 2017 and into the living room of John DeBenedictis, the Executive Director of the National Soccer Coaches Association of Canada who also happens to be a SportsEdTV Soccer Contributor, and who is here to share the real history behind the rule:
I was switching channels on my remote control looking for a soccer game to watch. Just as I found a game between Manchester United and Saint-Étienne, I saw players huddled around a player on the ground. The referee was talking to players on both teams but all parties looked concerned as the player on the ground was not moving and being attended to by a couple of trainers. The injury looked serious but I had not seen what had happened.
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