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zmedic said:
Also I don't have data on this, but my gestalt is that the mechanism is relatively low risk for C-spine injury. Most of the spinal fractures I've seen or heard about (in young people) involve high energy transfers. Ie motorcyclist ejected, diving injury, tackling someone with your head in football where there is an axial load etc. Head to head in soccer with an awake patient who denies neck tenderness and has no extremity neuro signs is pretty low risk in my book.

Not wrong to board if you are concerned. But in trauma to the head is not automatically the same as significant mechanism of injury for the spine.
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I certainly wasn't there and didn't see the MOI that caused the head lac. I have seen a couple cervical injuries during football games and I've studied it some... most occur from either axial loading (likely didn't happen here) or from a very significant force applied that very violently snaps the head back or to the side. Both C3-4 injuries I've seen took a falling head on a rising knee to cause enough energy transfer to injure the C-Spine. It doesn't take much force, comparatively speaking, to cause a good-sized scalp or facial lac.

In events where both are standing, I doubt that much displacement occurs to the C-Spine, where the upper body also contacts the other object after the initial contact with the head and other object.

Think about it like this: would you put yourself into C-Spine precautions if you walked into the corner of a wall and gave yourself a similar laceration? The energy transferred isn't much, yet is often of sufficient shear forces to tear skin. Now transfer that concept to the soccer players... the transferred forces may be higher, but you might see concussion symptoms in addition to the highly distracting (to you) laceration.
 
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