If you reintroduced the Coliseum, it’d be people desperate for money and the occasional guy with the actual agency to live out his dream fighting in it, and the aforementioned vast crowd of whiners with no self-awareness would be watching it on TV all the same, while ranting about how incompetent those gladiators are, and that they’d be much better, if only not for [insert convenient excuse here].
Indeed, the NFL exists, and you have described it to a tee. Given the amount and severity of injuries, I would say it’s a very close substitute.
Hah! Being European, I’m used to regular ol’ football, which while may have fans just as obnoxious, it usually doesn’t result in lethal injuries or permanent brain damage (though you may be excused if you thought otherwise after seeing the grand displays of pain players can make whenever a potential penalty is on the line). But yes, the NFL (or things like Nascar racing for that matter) is barely a couple step removed from straight up gladiatorial fights. I’d be curious in comparing survival statistics; it’s not like Roman gladiators actually fought to the death every single time either, after all.
Fair, I wasn’t aware of this! Though I’m going to guess that American Football still is uniquely bad in the rates of such injuries? This paper suggests that:
I think there’s going to be some repeated trauma involved in lots of sports (e.g. skiers stress their knees a lot and have a lot of risk of fractures, lots of team sports involve risks of collisions with other players, deep divers often black out on resurfacing, boxing literally requires one to cause some kind of head trauma to the opponent as one condition to end the game, and so on so forth).
I would guess football, hockey, rugby, boxing, kick-boxing and MMA to be amongst the worst sports for this stuff. Wrestling too possibly though obviously in that case it’s more like the result of performances gone wrong.
″ football, hockey, rugby, boxing, kick-boxing and MMA to be amongst the worst sports for this stuff.” - - I’m not up to date on the current literature but I’m pretty sure this list is rather wrong. I don’t remember all the details of the study I do remember (and I don’t have time for a lit review) but in it women’s high school soccer actually had the highest concussion rate (idk if it was per participant season or hour or per game minute or...).
Indeed, the NFL exists, and you have described it to a tee. Given the amount and severity of injuries, I would say it’s a very close substitute.
Hah! Being European, I’m used to regular ol’ football, which while may have fans just as obnoxious, it usually doesn’t result in lethal injuries or permanent brain damage (though you may be excused if you thought otherwise after seeing the grand displays of pain players can make whenever a potential penalty is on the line). But yes, the NFL (or things like Nascar racing for that matter) is barely a couple step removed from straight up gladiatorial fights. I’d be curious in comparing survival statistics; it’s not like Roman gladiators actually fought to the death every single time either, after all.
That is not true:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5723188/
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/sports/what-is-cte-and-how-often-are-soccer-players-diagnosed-with-it/2870811/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28205009/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22120567/
See also:
https://www.aans.org/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-Treatments/Sports-related-Head-Injury
https://www.braininjuryinstitute.org/sports-injuries-and-traumatic-brain-injury/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK326721/
Fair, I wasn’t aware of this! Though I’m going to guess that American Football still is uniquely bad in the rates of such injuries? This paper suggests that:
https://doi.org/10.4088/PCC.20br02653
I think there’s going to be some repeated trauma involved in lots of sports (e.g. skiers stress their knees a lot and have a lot of risk of fractures, lots of team sports involve risks of collisions with other players, deep divers often black out on resurfacing, boxing literally requires one to cause some kind of head trauma to the opponent as one condition to end the game, and so on so forth).
I would guess football, hockey, rugby, boxing, kick-boxing and MMA to be amongst the worst sports for this stuff. Wrestling too possibly though obviously in that case it’s more like the result of performances gone wrong.
″ football, hockey, rugby, boxing, kick-boxing and MMA to be amongst the worst sports for this stuff.” - - I’m not up to date on the current literature but I’m pretty sure this list is rather wrong. I don’t remember all the details of the study I do remember (and I don’t have time for a lit review) but in it women’s high school soccer actually had the highest concussion rate (idk if it was per participant season or hour or per game minute or...).