Australian Football League funded study on concussions in former players, then was uncooperative and restrictive, lead researcher claims

By Josh Wu. This article was initially published in our Concussion Update newsletter; please consider subscribing.

A revelatory article from Melissa Davey, Stephanie Convery, and Emma Kemp of The Guardian claims that the AFL (Australian Football League) sabotaged its own concussion research. Concussion researcher claims AFL hindered two-year research project into players’ health focuses on associate professor Alan Pearce’s claim that “...the league hindered a two-year-study the AFL itself had funded.” Dr. Paul McCrory, who resigned from his position as chair of the Concussion in Sport Group (CISG) over evidence of plagiarism, was then senior concussion advisor for the AFL and may have contributed to the hindrance of Pearce’s research. McCrory’s resignation and questions around the AFL concussion study influenced Pearce’s call for “the AFL to be more transparent over its research into the long-term health impacts on its players.”

In 2016, Alan Pearce signed a contract with the AFL to study the brains of retired players who were diagnosed with a concussion “amid growing concern about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, also known as CTE, in athletes playing contact sport.” However, despite the AFL’s seemingly proactive efforts to address their players’ health, Pearce claims that the AFL hindered his study’s progress by controlling which subjects and diagnostic tests he could use and not providing subjects in a timely manner. These restrictions created a litany of problems in his research, leaving him with a small, biased subject sample examined with a cursory diagnostic that would provide meaningless results without other tests. Pearce tried reaching out to the AFL multiple times to fight for the integrity of his research but was ignored or rejected each time. 

The AFL possessed a contact list of 600 former players that they didn’t give to Pearce. Instead, “just six months to go before the study funding ran out,” they gave him 40 contacts, many of which had invalid emails. The AFL also forced Pearce to only use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the former players, which is not enough to diagnose, much less draw conclusions from the data. Pearce never finished the study. Comments from the AFL regarding this issue have been unrevealing. 

In the Guardian article, Pearce describes several incidences of Dr. Paul McCrory disparaging the study while McCrory was the senior concussion advisor for the AFL, although it is unknown if McCrory was involved in quashing Pearce’s research. In January 2021, McCrory “ceased to be involved with the league’s concussion committees or working groups.” As of Monday, the AFL named senior lawyer “Bernard Quinn QC to lead the independent review into Associate Professor Paul McCrory’s historical medical research and advice provided to the AFL.”

Author’s note: Pearce’s fight for players’ health over the AFL’s profits and television ratings is analogous to many other incidents where head injuries have been downplayed to preserve the reputation and profit of powerful organizations. It’s important to realize that there might be a conflict of interest in sports leagues when it comes to players’ health, and we as an audience have to be aware of this potential injustice. 

We recommend this 6-minute video about Pearce’s allegations. Read more about the resignation of Paul McCrory from the Concussion in Sport Group in our blog post.