It's almost comical how many people on football boards act like this is some kind of binary thing, where you either get CTE 100% or 0% of the time from playing football. It's basically like smoking. Some individuals smoke a pack a day for 30 years and never develop lung cancer**. Some people smoke a couple times a year, or maybe never, and get cancer. But, taking the entire smoking population as a whole, you can draw an extremely strong correlation between frequency of smoking and development of cancer. CTE is the same way, some people take a ton of hits to the head and their quality of life isn't too different. Some people suffer one bad blow and it screws them up so much they attempt suicide. But, on the whole, the more brain-jostling hits you suffer, cumulative, both frequency and magnitude of hits integrated over your lifetime, the higher that integrated value is, the more likely you are to develop the symptoms of CTE in your life. When it comes to head injuries, is soccer safer than football? For sure. Is soccer safer than baseball, or tennis, or swimming? Nope.

**or emphysema or collapsed lungs or whatever other long-term ailments arise from it