Whatever the Premier League is doing about head injuries, it isn't working - The Warm-Up

About fifteen minutes into Leeds' loss to Manchester United, Robin Koch banged his head against the rampaging form of Scott McTominay, did a fair amount of bleeding, and was issued with a large head bandage in the Terry Butcher style. Fifteen minutes after that, he felt woozy, sat down, and was substituted. He will now miss Leeds' game against Liverpool tomorrow.

According to Leeds, Koch had passed all of the on-field tests that the Premier League's protocols demand as part of a concussion check. This leads us to one obvious conclusion: the protocols are bobbins. Or, as the players' union puts it: "The injury to Leeds United’s Robin Koch demonstrates again that the current concussion protocols within football are failing to prioritise player safety." That's fancy talk for 'bobbins'.

The PFA go on to reiterate their call for temporary substitutes when dealing with head injuries: for players who bang their heads to be allowed to leave the field until such time as a delayed effect becomes clear, or doesn't, and for a replacement to cover them in the meantime. Like rugby, or American football: those sports where the battering of head into head is even more important to the experience.

This seems sensible. (The policy, not rugby. Rugby is not sensible.) It also runs entirely counter to the way football conceives of substitutions, which is perhaps why it hasn't happened yet. The current model — when you're off, you're off — works very nicely for tactical changes, and for injuries that are immediately apparent. Can't run? Off you come. But the permanent nature of the change actively disincentivises what we might call exploratory changes: taking somebody off because they might be injured in a way nobody's noticed yet.

This disincentive is reinforced by the way in which football squads are built. Cover is often thin. A lot of the time there is a clear drop-off in quality between the first eleven and the bench. And Leeds were already improvising in the absence of Kalvin Phillips. To be clear, we're not accusing Leeds in particular of doing anything wrong: we're sure they followed the protocols as written and we're sure no other club would have done different. But the structure and competitive logic of the sport actively works against the principle of 'if in doubt, sit them out'. Take the idea of removing an important player with an hour to go, just to be on the safe side, and try and squeeze it into the Premier League. It doesn't go.

Or try and squeeze it into how we think about bravery, commitment, and other things we like to see in our footballers. Football, like all sport, is deeply saturated with the idea that the brave thing to do is to play through pain: that as a matter of principle the cause is worth suffering for. Pulled your hamstring? Grit your teeth. Broken your leg? Run it off. This deeply unhealthy irrationality is baked into the process of becoming an elite sportsperson and it's beyond any rule tweak to unpick it. But it becomes a particular problem when, as with Koch, there can be ten clear minutes between "this lad's fine, get me the big bandage" and "hang on, his brain's come loose".

Temporary substitutions won't solve or stop concussions. But they might soften the contradictions between the competitive logics of the game, the competitive illogics of sporting performance, and the strange nature of injuries that don't appear immediately. Contradiction that, at the moment, are falling with full weight on the players. And if it's a bit like rugby, then that, perhaps, is something uncomfortable that we'll all have to get used to. It's not like there's a direct link between temporary substitutions and wearing brown shoes with blue jeans, right? Right? Please say there isn't. Please.

The thing about modern football, right, is that there's loads of it. Loads. That goes double for the really good teams, who have to play an awful lot of games just to get through all the competitions they went and qualified. Too many games? Almost certainly.

This has all sorts of knock-on effects — bloated squads, stockpiled players, rotation as a principle — and one of the most interesting is the way in which problems have to be solved as games get played. There's virtually no time to try and fix things away from the hard glare of the television cameras and the muttering and jeering of the crowds.

As has been widely documented and roundly mocked over the last day or so, Romelu Lukaku was barely involved as Chelsea beat Crystal Palace on Saturday. He touched the ball seven times, which is the lowest involvement of any player in a top-flight game since records began. Admittedly, records only began in 2003, which makes that a little less spectacular. And hey, back in the good old days, players used to get lost in the fog sometimes. They'd actually disappear! Gone in the haze and the lamplight. You know, this probably isn't helping.

Thomas Tuchel has suggested, rather sweetly, that this is "not the time to laugh about him and make jokes about him," a sentiment that was immediately steamrollered by football's banter-powered ecology. But the starkness of the stat — seven! — does raise some interesting questions. Is Lukaku hiding? Are Chelsea playing around him? Seven? Is this a failure of tactics or confidence, a problem of the system or the individual? Or, if both, then to what extent each? Seven?!

Chelsea play again tonight. Chelsea are always playing. Game, recover, game, recover. Whatever the answer to those questions is, the people involved — Tuchel, Lukaku, his teammates — are going to have to work them out on the pitch, on the television, where we can see them doing it. And that, the Warm-Up is guessing, is a pretty terrible set of circumstances in which to fix anything, let alone a tangled question of confidence and team-building. Sort it out. But also keep winning. Stick Lukaku on the bench, where he'll be miserable, stick him up front and hope things click. Once again, we discover that the way in which football is arranged makes life needlessly difficult for the people that make it happen.

Obviously the process of hiring a new coach is a very serious one, and there were all sorts of good, solid football reasons for Tottenham to approach and ultimately recruit Antonio Conte. But if Spurs' strategy had consisted entirely of a whiteboard with "TREMENDOUS CONTENT" across it in big wonky capital letters, that would have been absolutely fine.

Happy 49th birthday — we're old, we're all so old, the bells are tolling, the backs are aching — to Juninho, the impish little genius that loved Middlesbrough so much he joined them three times. Here's every goal he scored for the club, crammed into 11 joyous minutes.

And then, if you're in the mood for more Juninho stuff, here's a charming Q&A with the man himself, in which he explains why he moved to Boro in the first place; and here's Football365's John Nicholson explaining why Middlesbrough — the club, the fanbase, the city — loves him back, forever and ever, IDST. Let's have ourselves an impromptu Juninho Day, why the hell not. Here he is talking to Goal about Brazil's 2002 World Cup campaign.

Today's recommended reading comes from Sid Lowe over at the Guardian and concerns Athletic Bilbao, past and present: the great team of the late '50s that beat Real Madrid in the Bernabéu to win the Copa del Generalísimo, and the modern day incarnation that beat Real Sociedad 4-0 last weekend. The Warm-Up has long maintained that Spanish football is about 10% more interesting when Athletic are good, so this is all very pleasing.

The Chaaaaammpppiiiooons! Chelsea play Lille and Villareal host Juventus. We also have games in the Championship — Boro against West Brom probably the pick there — and placement games in the Pinatar Cup, where Wales take on the Republic of Ireland.