Evidence pointing to a network of paedophiles in English club football
REVEALED: Bennell's horrifying link with second paedophile coach raises new fears over extent of terrible crimes
BARRY BENNELL and fellow child sex abuser Frank Roper coached a youth team together and, Sportsmail can reveal, organised matches against sides managed by Eddie Heath, the former Chelsea chief scout and another alleged abuser.
Some games between the teams took place at Bisham Abbey, where England teams were based.
The FA have declined to comment but have instructed QC Clive Sheldon to scrutinise the roles of clubs and the governing body and investigate the links between Bennell, Roper and Heath.
Bennell, 64, will be sentenced tomorrow after being convicted of 50 counts of sexual abuse, related to offences committed between 1979 and 1990, during a coaching career that involved links with Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra. It is understood that 86 others have come forward to say they were also victims.
Roper, the predator who abused former Tottenham and Liverpool midfielder Paul Stewart, died in 2005, but the police have heard complaints from more than 31 individuals about the former coach, who mostly fed players into Blackpool.
And in 2015, ex-Chelsea player Gary Johnson signed a confidentiality agreement in return for £50,000 after he alleged he was abused by Heath in the Seventies. Tragically, at least two players who played under both Bennell and Roper have subsequently committed suicide.
Alan Davies, the former Manchester United FA Cup winner, took his own life in 1992, while Mark Hazeldine, whose career was cut short by injury at Burnley as a teenager, died in 2006. Sportsmail can expose collusion between the abusers and how they exploited their relationships with football clubs, including Blackpool and Chelsea, to attract young talent.
STANDING behind a bar and surrounded by a flock of children, Bennell and Roper appear barely able to contain their smiles.
The year is 1974 and the coaches are on a day trip to Blackpool with their young team Manchester Senrab, aged between 10 and 13.
The players enjoyed a tour of Bloomfield Road, then headed for the seaside. It is one of several trips the two men went on with the squad, including visits to Barry Island in Wales and Bisham Abbey in Marlow.
Graham Wright was a young player in the team. He said: ‘We played one of Heath’s Chelsea nursery sides and stayed at Bisham Abbey, where the FA were based. I remembered it vividly because the Tottenham team featuring Steve Perryman was there. We won 1-0, then played a QPR team. It’s where England used to play. So there were games between [teams coached by] paedophiles on FA grounds.’
The trip to Barry Island, however, is the one players from Bennell and Roper’s teams recall most vividly. Local newspaper cuttings state that 15 players went in June 1974 and stayed at the Butlin’s holiday camp for a week. Bennell is quoted as saying they ‘had a fantastic time’.
When Bennell later worked full seasons at Skegness and Pwllheli, he would select the ‘boy of the week’ and then every boy would return at the end of the campaign for the paedophile to select his ‘boy of the season’.
Wright said: ‘Bennell wasn’t just a paedophile, he was a bully as well.
‘At Barry Island, we got up for breakfast. We would start eating our bacon roll and he’d have put tubs of pepper on my sandwich. He used to just laugh at you over the breakfast table as we coughed our guts up. There was a trip where we stayed in two chalets, half of us with Roper and half with Bennell.’
There was also a more chilling side to both these men. Another team-mate, who asked to remain anonymous, said: ‘Roper was weird. He would ask, “When did you start masturbating?” In the chalet, he would try to tickle our backs.’
Another says he was abused by Roper. ‘He seemed a very friendly guy,’ said the player. ‘He found me through Senrab, then I played for him again at his Nova Sports team. But within a few months, Roper was into me. It happened in a house. It happened in the car. I’d sit in the back and he’d say, “Sit in the front”. He’d stroke my leg.
‘It’s upsetting to explain... he masturbated me, he made me do things to him. He was horrible and where he is now [dead] is the best place for him. I was frightened to go to the next training session. My dad said, “You’ve only just joined”. I said, “I don’t like it”. I’ve always wanted to stay strong and keep it within myself. I was too scared to go to the police.’ Over the past year, Sportsmail has spoken to several who played in the Manchester Senrab team. Playing alumni of the London Senrab set-up include Ray Wilkins, Alan Curbishley, John Terry and Sol Campbell, though they were not abused. The most influential coach at London Senrab in the 1970s was Heath, Chelsea’s lead recruiter of talent between 1968 and 1979.
Throughout that period, Heath remained attached to the London Senrab club, a nursery side for Chelsea. He died in the 1980s. Bennell was a 14-year-old youngster on schoolboy forms at Chelsea when Heath arrived at the club and
a relationship endured. In the picture from Barry Island, Bennell and his Manchester Senrab team are shown wearing the colours of Chelsea and Bennell wears a Chelsea tracksuit.
Yesterday a Chelsea spokesman said: ‘We remain absolutely determined to do the right thing; to fully support those affected and the investigations which are being carried out... we are committed to helping victims in any way we can.’
Players from a slightly older Manchester Senrab team, also coached by Bennell and featuring youngsters such as the former Manchester City captain Nicky Reid, also recall being given a tour of Stamford Bridge during Heath’s tenure. The Wythenshawe Express recalls a game between the two Senrab teams in Gatley, near south Manchester. On December 20, 1973, the newspaper wrote of Bennell and Roper’s Manchester side: ‘In a friendly game against Chelsea’s nursery side, Senrab, they shared the honours in a 3-3 draw.’
ALAN DAVIES was the captain of Manchester Senrab. He was the best of his generation and broke through at Manchester United, scoring against Juventus in a Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final and creating goals for Bryan Robson and Norman Whiteside in the 1983 FA Cup final win over Brighton.
Yet at the age of 30, after moving to Swansea, he committed suicide. The son of a police inspector, Davies is said to have stayed over at Bennell’s home and a close family relative also dated Bennell for an extended period of time.
On a 1974 trip to Barry Island with Bennell and Roper in charge of the team, who stayed at the Butlin’s holiday camp, one player recounts that the temperatures were sweltering but, after winning a trophy, Bennell returned to the lodge in which the boys were staying with Davies and swiftly shut the curtains.
One close friend said: ‘I worry immensely about Alan. Alan was his pet. We said to Barry, “You never tell your pet off”. I hate to think... When he took his own life, I didn’t instinctively think it. The story I heard was Alan went to Swansea as a player and just got down. Did he take his own life because of that or because everything came together? Maybe we will never know.’
Terry Woodward, the father of Bennell’s victim Andy, remembers being sat next to the paedophile when news broke on the radio that Davies had died in February 1992. As Woodward drove down the motorway, his then son-in-law Bennell smirked. ‘Didn’t you used to coach him? Weren’t you close to his family?’ Woodward asked. Bennell nodded in the affirmative but would not explain his odd response. ‘Why did you smile then?’ Terry Woodward persisted. Again, Bennell would not say.
Davies is not an isolated case. Hazeldine came through Bennell’s feeder teams in the 1980s and was in the Manchester City youth set-up as a teenager. He also played under Roper at a team called Nova Sports. The families of both Hazeldine and Davies declined to comment when contacted by Sportsmail.
Bennell and Roper’s relationship became fractious. By 1975, the pair had stopped training teams together. By the mid-1980s, the pair were coming to blows in public. Frank Sharp, the father of former Leeds midfielder Kevin Sharp, who played under Roper, recalls: ‘I remember vividly a scene at a school playing pitch. Bennell was there and approached Kevin and a team-mate. Roper came storming over, telling him to keep away from his boys and there was a physical argument between the two.’
Bennell had a short fuse. One player recalls Bennell losing his temper at a five-a-side game, picking up a baseball bat and threatening to knock out a rival manager. In the mid-1970s he made enemies in Manchester’s Hulme gangland and was stabbed in the back. Only the thickness of his leather jacket saved him.
Roper, also a photographer who took portraits at family weddings of some of his young players, did continue to speak with Bennell and often provided the team kit.
Andy Woodward is convinced he was part of a paedophile network.
‘I remember being in the car with Barry when he met up with Frank Roper,’ said Woodward. ‘Definitely there was a network. There was Roper and there were others. There were all these tournaments we’d go away to. The Southampton Cup, the Norwich Cup, the Ipswich Cup and the Celtic Cup and the Northern Ireland Cup. Five tournaments where they would all inter-mingle.’
Bennell’s conviction relates to 11 boys between 1979 and 1990. Bennell, at last, is to face justice. But Heath and Roper were spared.