FOOTBALL’S ABUSE SCANDAL
Police expand investigations into more sports Claims Bennell victims took their own lives
AS THE Football Association were urged last night to establish an independent investigation into the unfolding scandal of sexual abuse in the game, The Mail on Sunday have learned that police forces around the country are already aware of other allegations across multiple sports.
Fifteen ‘persons of public prominence’ from the world of sport — well-known coaches and/or players — are under investigation as part of Operation Hydrant, the umbrella investigation into allegations of ‘non-recent’ child sexual abuse.
Offences alleged to have occurred at 26 separate sporting venues, including stadiums and training grounds, form part of the same inquiry. Barry Bennell, 62, a former coach who worked with hundreds of young players, primarily in the Midlands and the North West, has three convictions for multiple sex offences against children dating back to the 1980s.
Andy Woodward, one of his victims, went public with his own story of abuse at Bennell’s hands earlier this month, prompting a flood of fellow victims to come forward.
‘As a matter of urgency the FA have to establish an independent investigation into how they have dealt with these allegations, as far back as they go,’ Damian Collins, chair of the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport, told the MoS last night.
It has not been confirmed how many of the 15 famous people being probed by Hydrant are or were involved in football, but The Mail on Sunday can reveal:
The Professional Footballers’ Association alone, separately from the police, the NSPCC and other agencies, have in the past 10 days already been notified by ‘dozens’ of victims of alleged sexual abuse at the hands of Bennell and multiple other coaches, at clubs including but not only Crewe, Stoke, Manchester City and Newcastle, with Leeds a new name added to the list.
At least one of the agencies working on the fallout from the scandal is examining the possibility that there may have been multiple suicides among players who were coached by Bennell.
The founder of the Stone Dominoes football club, where Bennell was working in the early 1990s when first arrested and convicted of sex offences against boys, has told this newspaper that a lawyer connected to the League Managers Association did ‘due diligence’ on Bennell before they hired him, and after consulting previous employers, including Manchester City and Crewe, ‘cleared’ Bennell as a suitable man to hire.
A Football Association and NSPCC report from 2005 found the FA were then investigating 250 cases of suspected child abuse in the game, including two in the Premier League, but a 60-page report into the matter was not made public then or since. Recommendations made at the time have since been adopted to make the game safer, according to the FA and Premier League.
Graham Kelly, the chief executive of the FA in 1998, when Bennell was first prosecuted in England for sex offences against minors, said ‘nothing relating to sexual abuse allegations came across my desk at all when I was in that role [between February 1988 and December 1998]’. Kelly said reports that sexual abuse victims have ever been ‘paid off’ by clubs in deals that guarantee their silence were not true, to his knowledge.
‘Given the speed at which players are coming forward to tell us about abuse, I would expect that there would be a considerable number of cases eventually,’ Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Profes- sional Footballers’ Association, told the MoS.
Taylor confirmed that allegations of abuse have been made against ‘multiple’ coaches, not just Bennell, and that the complainants so far had involved numerous cases involving Crewe, Stoke, Manchester City and Leeds.
‘We will do whatever necessary to help any player or former player, anyone who made it in the game or who didn’t,’ said Taylor.
‘Andy [Woodward] had 24 counselling sessions at the Sporting Chance clinic [funded by the PFA] before he felt able to talk about what happened to him. He has been incredibly brave and we will support him and any other player.’
The Mail on Sunday have learned that at least one agency involved in the crisis has identified ‘several’ possible cases of suicide by players who had been coached as children by Bennell.
Bennell coached former Wales manager Gary Speed, who took his own life five years ago this week. Speed’s family have said Speed was ‘not a victim’ of Bennell, as far as they are aware. Ben- nell confirmed to a Sunday Times reporter in 2012 that Speed had stayed at his house as a boy, but said he had only abused six boys, and Speed was not among them.
Bennell’s victims are now believed to run into the hundreds. Bennell was first arrested, convicted and sentenced for sex offences in the early 1990s in the USA, when he was working for an English football club that focused on youth players, Stone Dominoes in Staffordshire.
Club founder Bob Bowers said he ‘sought references’ about Bennell before hiring him, and asked a Manchester-based lawyer, Mike Morrison, to ‘check out’ Bennell with former employers Manchester City and Crewe.
Morrison was later the in-house lawyer for the League Managers’ Association (LMA), which at one point carried his biography on their website.
Bowers said: ‘He spoke to Crewe and Manchester City to ask whether this man was suitable to be coaching children. And we got an affirmative. Based on that we gave him a trial run and it went very well.’
The LMA chief executive Richard Bevan says the LMA ‘fully support investigation into [all] allegations [around abuse in football]. The game must do all that it can to support them and ensure that all necessary protec-
tive measures for children are in place.’
Bevan said the LMA had dealt with no issues of this type during his tenure, since 2008.
Morrison said in an email last night: ‘I am bound by a duty of strict confidentiality which prevents me from disclosing any information relating to any person, firm or company with whom I may have enjoyed a solicitor/client relationship. Consequently, I am unable to respond to your enquiry.’
Hamilton Smith, a former Crewe director, told The Guardian that he was so concerned about Bennell’s relationship with boys at Crewe that a meeting of club officials was convened to discuss it. Bennell was allowed to stay. Smith said that in 2001 he asked the FA’s head of child protection to investigate the historical situation at Gresty Road and discuss possible compensation for Bennell’s victims — some of them then known.
Smith says Tony Pickering, the FA’s then head of child protection, wrote three months later to say the FA had ‘investigated the issues and is satisfied that there is no case to answer’.
But a longer, wider investigation then ensued. A 60-page Independent Football Commission report, completed in September 2005 after an 18-month inquiry, said 250 abuse cases were being probed by the FA. At the same time, Pickering claimed the FA had ‘put 60 or 70 people out of the game’ in the previous four years in relation to ‘serious referrals’ around abuse.
Pickering, now retired and living in France, did not respond to a request for comment. The report was never made public. No details were disclosed about abuse cases or who was ‘put out’ of football by the FA, or what safeguards, if any, were put in place to stop them working elsewhere with children.
The FA and Premier League are both believed to have implemented up to 23 recommendations made by the report about child safety.
The Premier League said: ‘The Premier League and its clubs have followed the principles of the NSPCC child protection in sport unit’s national safeguarding standards for over 10 years. Each club employs a full-time head of safeguarding, an academy safeguarding officer, a community safeguarding officer, and nominates a board member as its safeguarding lead. There is no complacency.’
Graham Kelly, the FA chief executive from February 1988 to December 1998, said ‘nothing relating to sexual abuse allegations came across my desk at all’ when he was CEO.
When it was pointed out that Bennell was sentenced in the UK in 1998, Kelly added: ‘I knew there were concerns surfacing around that time . . . but I don’t recall anything being reported to the FA.’
The NSPCC’s hotline is 0800 023 2642 and Child Line for children and young people can be contacted on 0800 1111.
NAPAC, the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, can be contacted on 0808 801 0331.
In the UK, The Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.