Super League has successfully reduced head collisions by a significant margin in the opening weeks of the new season following an overhaul of the sport’s tackle height laws.
The Rugby Football League approved a raft of changes during the winter designed at better protecting players and minimising contact with the head, introducing stricter punishments for players who make head contact in a tackle. The changes were met by a backlash in the early stages of 2024, but early data seen by the Guardian has shown they are making a difference.
Since the governing body started collating tackle statistics in 2018, 13% of all tackles in Super League included some form of contact with the head. So far in 2024, that figure has been reduced to just 4.2%, essentially meaning there are several hundred fewer tackles making contact with the head compared with this stage last year.
The number of players being diagnosed with concussions, however, has remained constant. That is in part due to a significant increase in the number of Super League players wearing instrumented mouthguards, which help determine a player’s risk of a head injury and enable them to be removed from the action.
More than 75% of Super League players are wearing the guards this year, up from 15% last season. The expectation is that concussion rates will decrease in the coming months, particularly when the sport lowers the legal limit for contact to below the armpit at professional level from next year.
At present, contact below the neck is deemed legal but the RFL hoped that, by introducing stricter punishments for head contact this year, player behaviour would change sufficiently to avoid a marked difference in the look of the sport from next year when the changes are formally introduced.
The number of yellow cards has increased, but there has been a dramatic reduction in players charged for contact with the head since the beginning of the season, something the governing body attributes to a positive change in player behaviour. Some 16 players were charged following the opening round of Super League games in 2024; by contrast there were no charges last weekend.
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The change in player behaviour is also shown by the amount of penalties awarded per round, which has stabilised to last year’s average. The opening round featured a record 90 penalties awarded but that has reduced to below 60 in recent weeks, with last year’s average 58 penalties per round across the six fixtures.