In cooperation with the Sports Doctors Network — a group of team physicians from some of the world’s leading clubs (Real Madrid, AC Milan, Manchester United, PSG, Atlético, Arsenal and others) — we are working to advance concussion protocols and concussion research in elite football.

In Madrid, we shared the first outcomes of a project launched earlier this year by SAFP together with the SDN: the International Conference on Head Injuries in Football in Zurich. Our goal was clear — to put the real experiences of those on the pitch at the center: team doctors and players.

Instead of creating another top-down conference, we built a platform where practitioners and players could openly discuss the challenges they face in concussion recognition, care, and return-to-play. Their perspectives guided our next step: identifying how policies, regulations, and research must evolve to become more practical and truly applicable in elite football.

The result: twelve medical position statements, shaped directly by frontline clinicians — and by what players told us they need to feel protected and taken seriously. We presented the first results in Madrid last week, and we will publish all twelve statements next year, alongside our editorial submitted to the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

By taking a participatory, bottom-up approach, we aim to surface real-world problems, define applied research priorities, and build meaningful, context-specific policy change.

If we all agree that health comes first, then we must take steps to implement safeguards.

#PlayersFirst #BrainHealth #ConcussionCare #SAFP #SportsDoctorsNetwork #PlayerSafety #EliteFootball #ZurichDelphiStudy #FootballMedicine