PlayStation blamed for England football failure

Nov 23, 2007

Videogames are everyone's favourite patsy. They've been accused of providing murder-sims for kiddies, gorging a nation of fatties with sedentary entertainment and, now, fingered as the reason that the state of English football is in such a mess.

Last night, on BBC Radio 5's 5 Live Sport show, newly appointed Bolton Wanderers assistant manager Chris Evans shared his thoughts on the future of English football:

"There's no kids outside playing football, kicking balls against walls. They're all inside playing GameBoys, PlayStations and Nintendos."

We'll let the GameBoys thing slide - that seems to be the catch-all phrase for videogames that people who don't play videogames use. Evans is, after all, just worried that this nation's kids are more interested in polygons than goalposts.

But has our hobby really contributed to England crashing out of the Euro Championship qualifiers? We're pretty sure it hasn't. Yet. Just don't say you weren't warned when we're ranked sixty places below Andorra in 2016.

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.