Predators and paedophiles are still in football
Former City star David White says the focus on past abuse puts children at risk NOW
Thanks all the same, says David White, but there is something more significant to talk about than being one of Manchester City’s greatest generation of homegrown players and contributing three goals to a 10-1 win for the club.
The victory in question is remembered by many City fans with as much affection as the glories of the abu Dhabi era. It came against a huddersfield team managed by Malcolm Macdonald.
The small details which stick in White’s mind include huddersfield’s ‘revolting’ black and yellow checked kit, Macdonald’s managerial inexperience and City fans demanding ‘we want 10’ as their side led 8-0 with 10 minutes to play in november 1987.
afterwards, the club’s thrifty secretary, Bernard halford, panicked as he realised he’d have to give away four Mitre balls: three for the players, including winger White, who scored hattricks and yet another for Paul simpson, man of the match. ‘The career was brilliant,’ White says. ‘It came. It went. The story is what’s going on now.’
he is talking about events he carried silently through almost four decades, the beginnings of which can be traced to 1978. he was a promising 10-year-old with Eccles Boys on Manchester’s western fringe. he acquitted himself well against the Under 12s of a City feeder club, Whitehill, and was asked to join them.
The lean, athletic coach of that club was known as ‘Benny’ to most people back then, though he insisted on his name being spelled Bené, White relates, ‘with an accent over the second “e” as in Pelé’. That’s Benny as in Barry Bennell, an individual who became what White describes as a ‘godlike figure’ both to him and to his father, whose determination to see White make it in football became an obsession.
What transpired is dismally familiar to many of those who came within Bennell’s sphere — the coach’s carefully constructed opportunity to abuse the young player, which he seized.
so much has been written about Bennell in the past few years that there seems little more to say, yet White’s autobiography, written with Joanne Lake, delivers a level of insight surpassing any other into abuse within football.
In searing detail, White and Lake map the path to abuse laid by the coach whom parents reverentially called The king. The football skills he showed off, the pristine kits he provided, his ‘nunchaku’ martial arts ‘party piece’ made famous by kung-fu legend Bruce Lee.
Then, in the spring of 1979, the consequences: White’s father bursting into his 11-year-old boy’s room ‘to tell me about the latest development in my football journey’, as he recalls it.
‘“Fancy a trip to spain next month, David?” he asked excitedly. “Bené’s asked me if he can take you and another lad to Majorca during the holidays”.
‘“Majorca? Really?” I said, incredulously. “Yep. Really. he thinks a nice break in the sun will do you the world of good,” he grinned, explaining that Bené had also agreed to lay on some special warm-weather training sessions, designed to make me an even better player. “how does it feel to be in Bené’s good books, eh, you little superstar?”’
The abuse that occurred after White’s father had pressed a wad of notes into Bennell’s hands at the airport and said ‘treat yourselves’ was only a part of the bleak ensuing mental struggle.
White feared what the truth would do to his father. Even when the story of Bennell’s abuse of another young player, andy Woodward, was about to become known in 1998 as Cheshire Police investigated, White could not disclose what had occurred at hotel Cala d’Or on Majorca. ‘I told the police nothing had happened,’ he says. ‘I convinced myself they didn’t nneed me to get this conviction.’
White’s book captures the aambivalence he feels for the way his father pushed him into a career in football. ‘Project David’, WWhite calls it. he writes of how his fafather’s state of mind depended eentirely on his son’s performance on the pitch. ‘If he was curt and tetchy all week, I’d blame myself.
‘It’s a fine balance between a parent who doesn’t give a s*** and a parent who is a burden,’ he says. ‘ TThere’s enough pressure in fofootball and I found that pressure ththe hardest one.’
he is embarrassed to bracket himself with others who were subjected to far worse abuse by Bennell. But he and another three of that number — ex-City player Paul stewart, Derek Bell, who played for newcastle, and Ian ackley, whose testimony first put Bennell behind bars — are arguably doing more than anyone to protect those in today’s grassroots youth football from the abuse they encountered.
The four came into contact almost two years ago when invited to Wembley by the Fa after further details of the abuse suffered by Woodward were revealed.
Woodward was involved in the establishment of the Offside Trust to help victims. White’s group decided to go their own way, investigating whether youth football was doing enough to protect the estimated 4million children it attracts.
They found there is a great deal more that could be done. ‘ The predators and paedophiles are still out there,’ White says. ‘ and they will go where they can get access to children. If, as a club, you don’t have procedures and
systems to make it unbelievably difficult for them to access children, they will do it.’
White, Stewart, Bell and Ackley have established Safeguarding and Victim Engagement (SAVE), a non- profit company which works with sports clubs to assess the effectiveness of their child protection measures. They have learned the system in England, where coaches working with children must get a criminal record check through the Disclosure and Barring Service, is far less robust than in Scotland.
‘You can get a criminal record check today and for three years in football you can continue getting work with that,’ White says. ‘If you do anything in the meantime it is highly unlikely anyone will know about it, unless you end up in prison.’ Scotland’s Protecting Vulnerable Groups system ensures a coach’s criminal record is checked every time he or she goes to a new setting.
SAVE’s expertise has seen them work with British Gymnastics. They met the ECB last month. But they have had to resort to auctioning memorabilia to finance their child-protection work.
White says he is encountering huge youth football clubs without the legally required number of volunteer child-welfare officers. There should be one for every 10 teams. He does not reject the idea that the focus on 1970s and 1980s abuse has bred complacency about risks to children today.
Clubs should ask parents for a contribution towards the cost of child protection, White says. ‘It’s no more than 50p a week per child to do this effectively. Clubs will tell me they’ve spent £8,000 a year on kit and presentation trophies, but protecting the children is much more fundamental. It’s the cost of half a lager a month. That’s your sacrifice as a parent to ensure children are safe.’
His book’s publication last year coincided with Bennell’s trial and lawyers told White he could not discuss it at length, but finally the serial abuser is no longer in a position of control. ‘I hope the book tells people something,’ says White. ‘There’s a lot more to it than the football.’ Shades of Blue: The Life of a City Legend and the Story that Shook Football, David White with Joanne Lake (Michael O’Mara books, £13) www.saveassociation.com
‘Clubs spend thousands on new kits and trophies but not on child protection’