CTE Is Hitting Every Level of Footy and We Can’t Look Away

There’s a particular kind of dread that comes with a story that keeps getting bigger no matter how much you want it to stop growing. The CTE crisis in Australian Rules football is exactly that story — and the latest wave of diagnoses confirms what many have feared for years: this isn’t just an AFL problem, it’s a footy problem, full stop.

Dozens of former players who never set foot on a suburban ground as a listed AFL footballer — blokes who played district, country, suburban, amateur — are now being diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That ought to shake every single person who loves this game, from the AFL’s head office all the way down to the volunteer who marks the boundary line on a Saturday morning.

What CTE Actually Is — And Why It Matters Here

For anyone still getting their head around the terminology, CTE is a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated head trauma. It can only be definitively diagnosed post-mortem, which means that every time we get a confirmed case, a family has already been through the grief. It causes memory loss, depression, aggression, cognitive decline — a horrible cocktail that robs people of who they are, often long before it kills them.

We’ve been hearing about this in American football for the better part of two decades. The AFL started paying more serious attention after a wave of prominent former players and their families began speaking out publicly. But for a while, there was a quiet, uncomfortable assumption that the risk was somehow concentrated at the top end — elite athletes who played a thousand games under the bright lights and collected brutal hits from equally elite opponents.

These new diagnoses blow that assumption apart. Completely and utterly.

The Suburban and Country Game Is Exposed Too

The bloke who played 250 games in the Ovens and Murray League never had the luxury of the AFL’s concussion protocols, the team of medical staff, the careful management that even imperfect elite systems now provide. He got his bell rung on a Thursday night training session, was told to run it off, and fronted up the following Saturday. Multiply that across a career, and you start to understand how the damage accumulates.

Country and suburban football is the lifeblood of this sport. It’s where most Australians actually interact with footy, not as spectators but as participants. The culture of toughness — don’t show you’re hurt, get back in the contest, she’ll be right — is ingrained far deeper at those levels than it ever was at AFL clubs, where at least money and public scrutiny eventually forced some change.

And yet for years the conversation about brain trauma has been almost entirely focused on the AFL. That framing has now run out of road.

Riggsy’s Accidental Education in Things Going Wrong

Look, I follow Essendon, which means I’ve spent more time than most fans thinking about institutional failure and what happens when governing bodies drop the ball. I didn’t choose to become an accidental expert in the MRO and Tribunal — life just sort of handed me that curriculum. So when I see a governing body that has been slow to act on something this serious, I recognise the shape of it.

The AFL has made genuine progress on concussion management at the elite level — the 12-day concussion substitute rule, improved return-to-play protocols, research funding. I’ll give credit where it’s due. But progress at the top of the pyramid doesn’t automatically filter down. State leagues, community footy associations, school competitions — they all operate with different resources, different medical support, and frankly different cultures around injury.

The game’s governing bodies at every level need to treat this as the whole-of-sport emergency it clearly is.

What the Families Are Carrying

I don’t want to get too heavy here, but I also don’t want to rush past this part. Behind every CTE diagnosis is a family that watched someone they loved change. That watched a father or a husband or a son become someone they barely recognised. That tried to understand why the angry outbursts were happening, why the memory kept failing, why the depression wouldn’t lift.

And a lot of those families then had to fight — hard — to even get the diagnosis confirmed, because CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem. They had to advocate for an autopsy and push for answers at a moment when they were already grieving. The fact that they’ve done that, publicaly, to try to protect the next generation of footballers, is extraordinary.

Footy owes these families more than it has delivered so far.

What Needs to Happen Now

There’s no magic fix here, and I’m not going to pretend there is. But there are concrete things the AFL and its affiliated bodies can and should do, and the scale of these new diagnoses makes inaction even less defensible than it was before.

• Mandatory concussion protocols at every level of the game, properly resourced. Not just guidelines that sit in a PDF on a website, but practical implementation with trained personnel and actual consequences for clubs that ignore them.
• Genuine investment in research into the long-term neurological impacts of sub-concussive hits — not just the big-collision injuries that get flagged, but the accumulation of smaller contacts across a career that might be doing just as much damage.
• A welfare fund for former players at all levels who are dealing with neurological conditions. Not just ex-AFL players. Everyone.
• A cultural shift in how we talk about head knocks, from juniors all the way up. If a kid sees his hero get up and shake it off on telly, that shapes how he understands what’s acceptable when it happens to him.

This Is a Conversation the Game Has to Have With Itself

I love Australian Rules football. It is genuinely one of the great sports on earth — the athleticism, the skill, the contest, the community it builds. Saying that these structural problems need to be addressed isn’t the same as wanting to tear the game down. It’s exactly the opposite. If we want footy to survive and thrive for another hundred years, we cannot allow the sport to keep producing neurologically broken former players at every level of the competition.

There will be people who say we’re being alarmist, that the game has always been tough, that people accept the risks. And yes, adults can make informed choices about contact sport. But informed is the operative word. For decades, players at every level — particularly at the grassroots — were not making fully informed choices, because the information wasn’t there and the culture actively discouraged anyone from acknowledging the risks.

We know better now. That means we’re responsible for doing better now.

September Should Be About Football

Every year I go into September hoping it’ll just be about footy — about who gets a flag, about whether my mob can finally put together a finals campaign that doesn’t resemble a slow-motion disaster (still waiting, but I remain optimistic in the way only Essendon fans can). But the existential questions about the game’s health don’t pause for the finals series.

The CTE diagnoses coming out of every level of the game are a reminder that the sport we all love has real, serious work to do. Not eventually. Now. The families who have already lost someone to this disease have done their part by speaking out. The rest of us — fans, administrators, clubs, media — need to make sure their sacrifice actually changes something.

Because if it doesn’t, the next round of diagnoses will be on all of us.