England World Cup stars banned from Twitter

Written by Matt Pitt Thursday, 27 May 2010 15:39

England World Cup Blog

The Football Association has announced that the 23 men chosen to represent England at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa will be banned from using social networking sites Twitter and Facebook.

All players will also be forbidden from writing articles for magazines and columns for newspapers whilst they are on England duty. Instead they will only be able to comment through The FA's official website.

Twitter's popularity has exploded in recent years, with 500,000 "tweets" being sent in the final quarter of 2007, which increased to an astronomical four billions tweets being sent during the first quarter of 2010.

A number of sportsmen and other figures in the public eye use the microblogging site so they can interact with their army of fans. However, sometimes airing their thoughts in the public domain can have embarrassing consequences.

In July 2009 Darren Bent was forced to apologise to Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy after he accused him of deliberately disrupting his transfer from Tottenham to his current club Sunderland.

England will not be the only team not "tweeting" in South Africa as Spain's coach Vicente del Bosque has informed his squad they will not be allowed to use social media sites either as he wants "no distractions.".

Spain a 9/2 favourites to lift their first ever World Cup, with the previous best finish being a fourth place in 1950. Spain find themselves in Group H with the Chile, Honduras and Switzerland for company.

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