Love of the Game

Love of the Game is a campaign which seeks to reduce concussion-related issues arising from contact and non-contact sports. Love of the Game takes a solutions-based approach to the problem by working with athletes, technologists, academics and the business and financial communities to develop new technologies that will prevent, diagnose and treat head injuries in sport.   

We are an impassioned community of athletes, players, fans, innovators and experts, united by our love of sport and the desire to, not only protect players of all ages from the potentially devastating impact of head injuries, but also to protect the integrity of the sports we know and love. Love of the Game aims to preserve our sports by reducing the risk of early onset dementia to players, lengthening sporting careers and reducing the fear of taking part. 

Our mission statement is:  

To protect players of all ages from the potentially devastating impact of head injuries, while also protecting the integrity of the sports we know and love. 

Like most sports, success is the product of a whole team. Solving this crisis is no different. We have brought together a unique network of over 600 supporters representing the UK’s major sports, government, academia, technology, science and business.  We are forging new and productive relationships with major and grass-roots sporting clubs, research institutes, charitable organisations and major governing sports bodies.   

Love of the Game (LOTG) itself represents a meeting of the worlds of sport and business/campaigning through its founders.  Its President is former England and British and Irish Lions rugby union international Simon Shaw MBE.  Simon, who played elite rugby for 23 years, now suffers from frequent memory loss, an issue he believes is caused by the severe knocks to the head he faced as a player.    

Solutions-based approach 

Rather than focusing on the challenges of the past, LOTG’s aim is to protect the players of the future and ensure that future athletes are protected from long term health risks that yesterday’s and today’s players have had to accept. In order to achieve this, LOTG promotes actions across a series of pillars: 

Education 

• Improving recognition of the symptoms of concussion 

• Positioning the long-term protection of the head and brain as part of a player’s training regimen and routine 

Diagnosis 

• Promoting more coherent sharing of information to aid in the identification of diagnosis tools 

• Developing a more sophisticated method of identifying the signs of concussion at the point of impact and for markers over the course of a player’s career 

• Creating impact assessment wearables and big data analysis to grade risk and severity of concussion and the proper course of action needed 

Treatment & prevention 

• Promoting multi-disciplinary collaboration (bringing together investors, inventors, researchers and sports experts) to accelerate product development, experimentation and implementation. 

Concussion Prevention 

In April 2024, LOTG held our second annual UK Concussion Prevention Network conference, in London, in partnership with the University of Bath and Calgary University. This marked the creation of a new UK Concussion Prevention Network. A Steering Group and an Advisory Group have been set up to deliver the aims of the network and provide governance and communication with key stakeholder organisations.  

Creating a national network of dedicated sports concussion care 

LOTG has been working with the University of Cambridge and the Regional Sports Concussion Centres to develop a business plan for a network of dedicated sports concussion clinics to provide specialist care across the four nations of the UK for patients referred from Accident and Emergency units. The plans are currently being developed, in consultation with government. 

Creating an integrated national approach to concussion in sport 

LOTG has been working closely with Government to define an integrated approach to Concussion in Sports, linking multiple government departments, the RSCCs, research and technology committees and work on Prevention and Concussion Management guidelines.