UNITED KINGDOM — The sun was in my eyes. The ball took a bad bounce. The coach sat me out too long and my muscles tightened up.We’re all used to hearing the above manner of excuse for poor performance on the playing fields and ball courts of any number of major professional sports.
According to the head of one British sports clinic, soccer stars in the UK are suffering from a new manner of affliction that is leading to distracted, sub-par play on the pitch: Internet “porn addiction.”
Peter Kay, the chief executive of the UK sports clinic Sporting Chance, told BBC Radio Five Live that while there have been several high-profile cases involving players with gambling, drinking, and drug addiction problems over the years, many players are now having a hard time staying away from online porn when they’re not on the field.
“When you start going into a porn site it leads on to other porn sites and then maybe more risky material,” said Kay, according to TheHerald.co.uk.
Kay noted that it “must be stressed that if a 21-year-old is scanning a bit of porn and accessing pleasure from it, doing that once then that is not unusual and nor is it a problem.”
Kay added that the porn surfing “becomes a problem when he is doing it 14, 15, 16 times and then when he stops, he is playing a football game and is thinking ‘I can’t wait to get back to that site.’”
Radio Five Live also interviewed an unnamed Premier league player who talked about his experience with being “hooked” on Web porn.
“You can get hooked on anything, going on one site for two minutes isn’t enough,” the unnamed player said.
The player also spoke of a kind of “sticker shock” that is likely familiar to many purchasers of internet porn.
“You don’t realize how much you’re spending until you see it on your bill at the end of the month,” the player said. “On porn websites you have got advertisements for the porn and you end up spending more money on there. It’s kind of like kids in a sweet shop.”
The player said part of the problem is the amount of free time that comes with his job, noting that footballers “finish at lunchtimes with our jobs, and you can sit there for hours on end.”
