Studies have shown that video games helps kids develop certain skills that can be important in sports or rather how to think the sport in question.
That sound a bit a replication crisis type of study or worst correlation without a causation proven, it would be without any doubt that the average sport video game player is better at that sport than the average gamer that do not play that sport game for pure interest reason. It would be like finding video gamer have better reflex and conclude that gaming help reflex (and not that people with better reflex like measured will tend to prefer gaming more), the study would be completely inconclusive on which is which but the media reporting on it will have the video game help reflex title.
For something like Football it could very well be true that it help with learning the different playsbook and rules.
It would be so costly to do an actual blind study (finding a large amount of kids that never played game to start with would start to be hard, force half of them to play and the other to not start and compare result) that we would mostly only see correlation study that will make no effort to isolate the play game or not element.
For example:
Story at a glance A new study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports examined the role of diet and exercise in children’s thinking. Researchers found child…
thehill.com
As if there was not a giant list of difference between the average kid (and more so their parents) that play in a organized sport vs those who don't outside the sport activity itself... Or that parent in this day in age that make their kids read instead of playing video game are not possibly the reason the kid are more intelligent, more so than the actual difference in the activities.
At one point, people even thought that having a lot of books in a house helped kids be good at school as if it was not simply a proxy for the kind of parents the kids had., because of a strong correlation between school result and the amount of books in the kids household.. thinking that it was the actual presence of books itself that could help, every kids that has internet having almost every book ever made a click away now make that sound silly.
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