Child abuse cases to hit other sports
Police chief expects that scandal will quickly widen FA come under pressure to launch independent review
English football’s child sexual abuse scandal is set to spread to other sports in the coming days, the police’s most senior paedophile hunter warned last night.
Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection, said the number of former players coming forward was likely to grow significantly and that governing bodies from other sports would be dragged into inquiries that are being conducted across four forces.
Bailey delivered his grim forecast after the National Association for People Abused in Childhood revealed it was aware of anecdotal evidence that child abuse had been an issue in swimming, tennis and judo, and had not been dealt with properly.
The Norfolk Chief Constable told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I am not in the least bit surprised that we are now seeing the lid lifted on exploitation within the world of football, and I suspect there will be other sporting governing bodies – again in the next few days and weeks – who will come forward and who will identify the fact that they have similar problems.”
The Football Association was last night struggling to come to terms with the scale of alleged abuse in the game, and was under pressure to commission an inquiry akin to that into Jimmy Savile and the BBC, amid mounting fears of a cover-up. Damian Collins, chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee, called for the FA to appoint an independent panel to investigate how both it and clubs had handled allegations about paedophile coaches.
Collins, a long-standing campaigner for FA reform, spoke out after The Daily Telegraph revealed that clubs had made secret payments to abuse victims preventing them from going public. The
Sunday Telegraph can disclose that those teams included a Premier League side who silenced a former footballer over claims he had been raped by a youth team coach during the 1970s.
The FA was also facing further questions over an investigation a former director of Crewe Alexandra claims it conducted into allegations of child abuse at the club by paedophile coach Barry Bennell 15 years ago.
According to Hamilton Smith, the FA found there was “no case to answer”, and Crewe last night announced they will launch an independent review into the manner in which the club dealt with the abuse accusations. “The club is determined that a thorough investigation takes place at the earliest opportunity and believes an independent review, to be conducted via the appointment of external legal counsel, is the correct way forward in the circumstances,” Crewe said in a statement.
Collins told The Telegraph: “I think it makes a compelling case now for an independent investigation into the way the football authorities have dealt with allegations of child abuse, and other criminal matters, similar to Dame Janet Smith’s report on Jimmy Savile and the BBC. This could be established by the FA but conducted independently of them and with the freedom to investigate and publish its findings.”
The FA is looking into Smith’s claims, although it insisted its top priority remained to assist the police with their inquiries and supporting the victims.
Afriend who works as an unpaid coach in schools football texted yesterday morning in mild despair having taken a call from a Premier League scout he did not know and had never met requesting a contact for a boy in one of the local representative teams.
No impropriety suggested on the part of the scout or the club, but a definite sense of entitlement that this boy needed to be checked out and then, who knows what? A few months spent training with the club? A future scholarship? A professional deal one day? Or back to his rep team a few weeks later as another reject whom the system took a look at but decided, at an age when no one has reached anything near their potential, that he simply was not good enough.
That is elite football for you – a tough school. The game cannot wait until you are 18 to apply the kind of pressure and rigour that makes a top footballer because by then it is too late. The sifting process begins at five and six years old in development centres, and trials and minitournaments, as the big clubs sweep up the first wave of young talent for their under-nines academy teams, and the search never stops for better players potentially to take their places.
The most brutal, engrossing story I have read about the child prodigy being moulded into the elite sportsman is Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open, a benchmark of the genre, in which he describes the lengths to which his father, Mike, went to push his improvement. There are so many jaw-dropping recollections but the seven-year-old Andre hitting 2,500 balls a day from a serving machine modified by his father to fire at a trajectory “as if dropped from an airplane” stands out.
It is that I come back to when considering youth development in football, that even if you are not quite as militant as Mike Agassi, you still have to expose the child to the demands of elite sport much earlier than you would, for instance, the realities of other parts of the adult world. Elite sport cannot wait, it needs the athlete to be working from a young age if they are to make the grade as an adult.
In the past two weeks of revelations about sexual abuse of young boys in football, the consistent theme with the offender Barry Bennell and in the stories you hear of others under suspicion is that their ability to deliver good players protected them from scrutiny. Bennell was under suspicion for a long time before he was eventually sacked in 1992, but it appears Crewe Alexandra kept him on for so long partly because he found talented footballers.
The modern English game has more safeguarding measures in place than ever existed in the years when Bennell offended and, as no one would wish to be complacent, this fresh scandal will contribute to even stricter enforcement. While no absolute guarantees can be given, there is no question that child footballers are now, on the whole, much better protected.
Yet the power of those coaches – the power, ultimately, to abuse – flowed from the commodification of young players, who have a value now just as they have had back to the days when clubs got serious about paying, legitimately or otherwise, for the best junior footballers. Football has a trade in children that requires a strange acquiescence on all sides: the ambitions of the child, the ambitions of the parents, as well as the desire of the clubs to have the best young talent available to them.
Our debate in recent years has always been about how that system is failing from a sporting point of view: not enough good young players coming through, the major overhaul of the Elite Player Performance Plan, more contact hours, tariffs for boys transferred between academies.
Looked on anew in the light of recent events, it can feel like we have missed the main point: that however much financial value elite football may confer on these boys, they remain children.
In few other walks of life, for instance, would there be so much discussion and publicity given to a 13-year-old boy as has been received by Celtic’s prodigy Karamoko Dembélé, whose club and international future has been debated in this column and elsewhere.
There is much concern, some of it justified, about the size of professional contracts offered to the best at the age of 17 and how that might ruin their appetite for success.
Yet these are all minors, not yet old enough to vote, who are simply operating within the system that modern football has created for them. It is not their fault. They know no better.
There is no reason why a 16-yearold teenager should move, as so many do, from a Dutch or French or Spanish club as well as his family home, to join an English Premier League academy other than that it is chiefly a financial consideration on all sides.
The club want the player early because he will cost them much more as a fully-fledged first-team player. The family, presumably, can see the financial advantage, as well, it should be said, as the benefits of the education and development programmes at category-one Premier League academies, which have never been better. But does that outweigh the benefits of developing in a familiar environment, where they grew up, as most 16-year-olds would wish to do?
How we think about children in elite sport is a difficult balance. The game necessarily asks of them great sacrifices to improve and develop in those crucial younger years when so much goes into making the finished adult article, and that has not changed from the days when Duncan Edwards and Jimmy Greaves were the most sought-after teenage prodigies.
But we have also turned them into commodities to trade between rich clubs and there has been a normalisation of that process which, in years to come, we may look back upon – as Agassi did his own childhood – and decide that, yes, that was very strange.
In the past, that commodification of children in football has invested some monstrous individuals with the power to do great harm. Now, as the game tries to learn the extent of historic child abuse and ensure that the same thing never happens again it is worth reconsidering how we view children.
Whether every one of the elements of pressure we apply to them, especially that wrapped up in the consolation of the lucrative pro contracts, is really in their best interests.