“PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS USUALLY DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN ON A REGULAR BASIS.”

So concluded the National Football Group in a December 2005 scientific paper in concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible also to a casual enthusiast, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked well in vain to convince the NFL that it had been facing a deadly new scourge: A chronic human brain disease that was traveling an alarming variety of players about League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth — including some of the all-time greats — to madness.

Little league of Denial reveals how the NFL, more than a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny installation evidence of the bond between football and brain harm.

Comprehensively, as well as for the very first time, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of the public health crisis that emerged through the playing fields of our 21st hundred years pastime. Everyone understood that football is certainly violent and dangerous. But the actual players who constructed the NFL right into a $10 billion sector didn’t know – and what the league sought to shield from their website – is that no quantity of padding could safeguard the mind from the force generated by contemporary football; that the essence of the game could be exposing these players to human brain damage.

In a fast-paced narrative that moves between your NFL trenches, America’s research labs as well as the boardrooms where in fact the NFL visited war against technology, Group of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed study — a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Popularity Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was simply so disturbed during his death he fantasized about capturing NFL professionals; and former Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased human brain became the prospective of the unseemly scientific fight between researchers as well as the NFL. Predicated on exceptional interviews, previously undisclosed documents and private email messages, this is the story of the actual NFL knew so when it knew it – questions in the centre of crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way right down to Pop Warner.