Liverpool face legal threat in tapping-up row

Club alleged to have changed dates on form Family accuse Premier League of inaction

The Liverpool tapping-up scandal was dramatically reignited last night after the club were accused of submitting a “falsified” document to the Premier League when trying to lure a 12-year-old schoolboy from Stoke City.

Liverpool were yesterday facing imminent legal action from the unnamed boy, now 13, and his family, having failed to make amends for leaving him unable to play academy football, as well as putting his parents in thousands of pounds of debt more than three months after The Daily Telegraph first revealed their plight.

Compounding the litany of transgressions over which Liverpool became the first club to be punished under strict new Premier League rules – and the lengths to which they were allegedly prepared to go to conceal them – they have now been publicly accused of altering the date of a signature on his academy-player registration application.

Father and son completed the document on Sept 2 last year, three days before the boy began the new school year at his private school, the fees for which Liverpool had agreed to pay until he was 16.

The club directed the pair not to date their signatures, an instruction the father ignored to ensure the moment was accurately recorded.

The next time the family saw the document – after it had been submitted to the Premier League – all the signatures on it were dated Sept 21. A 1 having been inserted after the father’s initial 2 made it appear he and his son had signed more than two weeks after the school start date, rather than three days before.

“If that is not falsifying a document, I don’t know what is,” the father told The Telegraph last night.

He also confirmed he had informed the Premier League of the unauthorised date change when he originally blew the whistle on Liverpool’s near two-year campaign to tap up his son, for which they were banned in April from signing players from rival academies for at least 12 months and fined £100,000.

The father accused the Premier League of failing to act over the document and questioned why it had also shelved an investigation last month into Liverpool’s tapping up of Southampton’s Virgil van Dijk.

“If this is how it deals with such matters, then the Premier League is not fit for purpose,” he added.

Liverpool refused to deny altering the date of the father’s signature on the document without his consent or dating the other signatures Sept 21 before submitting it to the Premier League.

They said it was standard practice for such documents to be filed within a period of days after being completed and that, because other relevant paperwork was not ready by Sept 2, a decision was made to leave the boy’s registration application undated. They also said the reason for this was explained at the time to the family, who, they even claimed, had consented to it, despite the father’s dating of his own signature indicating otherwise.

They categorically denied the date was changed to make it appear the club had not agreed to pay the school fees until after the boy had begun his new school year.

The Premier League confirmed it had “considered” the date-change allegation as part of its tapping-up investigation, which it said was at an end.

The family wants a court to rule on the matter as part of a lawsuit over the boy’s school fees and £49,000 in compensation owed to Stoke for the four years they spent developing him, which is preventing him joining another academy.

The scandal has left the boy’s family £15,000 in debt and him in constant threat of being thrown out of school for non-payment of his fees.

The father said: “What Liverpool have done brings shame on that club. They have ruined my son’s career and left him in despair. He has been in limbo for a year now, thanks to the £49,000 price on his head, and is being blackballed by other clubs. No one will touch him.

“The Premier League’s handling of this case has only made matters worse. The Premier League is supposed to regulate these clubs but, to me, it feels more like a private members’ club where everyone looks after each other.

“All it and its clubs seem to care about is making sure they keep getting their tens of millions of pounds.

“The fact a 13-year-old child can no longer pursue his dream of playing football doesn’t appear to matter.

“As a responsible parent, I call on the Government to intervene before we have a generation of damaged children.”

The boy, who broke his silence on the matter in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph in May, added: “In the past 12 months, my whole world has crashed around me. Some mornings, I wake up and think it has been a bad dream.

“I miss playing football so much. It was such a massive part of my life. I used to come home from school and could not wait to go to training sessions.

“I gave everything I had to football and thoroughly enjoyed every minute.

“Now I am being punished and I have no idea what for.”

A Premier League spokesman said: “We remain in dialogue with the parties involved with a view to finding a constructive outcome for the young player involved.”