WEST NEWBURY, Mass. — Soccer without headers? My team has experienced it for the last two months, and we may not be ahead of the curve for long.

A new study by the University of Stirling in Scotland has found that a single session of heading the ball can significantly affect a player’s brain function and memory for 24 hours. Tens of millions of people have played, and continue to play, the game without health problems. But as hints of evidence of a link between even small, subconcussive impacts and long-term damage begin to accumulate, it is time to at least consider the possibility that the leaders of the world’s most popular sport may eventually determine that heading is too much of a medical and legal risk to allow.

The game, though diminished, surely would carry on. Tactics would be altered, but to eliminate heading would not be the same existential threat to soccer that eliminating tackling would be to rugby or American football. For now, the outright ban on headers is confined to the early stages of youth play in the United States.

That includes the girls whom I coach on an under-12 soccer team in Massachusetts. They are fifth and sixth graders — age 10 or 11 — and the youngest among them have never headed a ball intentionally in competition.