How football became a hunting ground for abuse
Like the church and the Scouts, the world of youth coaching provided a system ripe for exploitation, says
It was Barry Bennell’s charisma that first struck Steve Walters. An introspective but gifted 11year-old with a dream of becoming a professional footballer, Walters was dazzled by the captivating young coach, whose sessions were stimulating and whose company was magnetic. Even his home was a shrine to entertainment. He had a jukebox, a pinball machine, a table tennis table; this was a lad’s cave, an alluring den of fun.
But the biggest engine driving Bennell’s magnetism was the promise he insinuated, the hope he dangled. As youth team coach at Crewe Alexandra, he offered Walters a path to his dream; a direct route to stardom. All the lad had to do to reach the ultimate goal was just do what he was told. This was the trap Bennell set time and again.
Because beneath that dazzling exterior, Walters soon discovered, was a foul appetite. Everything about Bennell was abusive. He exploited his position, misused his power, soiled the dreams of young people. After first succumbing to Bennell’s invitation to stay at his place, Walters lost count of how many times he was assaulted or raped. But he didn’t tell anyone. He couldn’t. Consumed by shame, convinced he was to blame, he was cajoled into silence for fear exposure might stall his progress. He came from Plymouth, and from the moment manipulative Bennell spotted the soft, shy youngster win a football competition at Butlin’s aged 11, he began to persuade his family to let him play in Cheshire; miles from home, alone and exposed, Walters was bullied into complicity. For three years, until he matured physically and was thus lifted out of the age range that piqued Bennell’s lust, he was the coach’s plaything.
As a price, he drew a heavy physical and emotional toll.
For nearly 30 years he kept quiet. Despite the trauma of his start, he had made a successful career (he remains the youngest player to be picked for Crewe’s first team). He married, had children, always trying to sidestep his demons and just get on with life. Plagued by doubts about his sexuality he might have been, but he did his best to forget the awful things that happened to him, compartmentalised them and denied, as much to himself as anyone else, they had ever happened. Bennell, even when he was arrested and imprisoned for nine years in 1998 after admitting charges against six boys, aged nine to 15, pretended it was nothing to do with him. When the police interviewed Walters after several former colleagues had suggested he too may have been a victim of what turned out to be a serial child molester, Walters still insisted nothing had happened. Then this week, he read a piece by
football correspondent Daniel Taylor, interviewing Andy Woodward, a fellow Crewe graduate, about the horrors he suffered at Bennell’s hands. For the first time, Walters realised he was not alone. He felt liberated. He did a radio interview, he appeared on BBC Two’s
programme. The catharsis was evident in every stumbled, hesitant word.
“It feels like a 10-ton weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” he told TalkSport’s Mark Saggers.
As he spoke, he found others stepping forward. More from the Crewe conveyor belt, like Chris Unsworth and Jason Dunford; David White talked of Bennell’s manipulative exploitation when he was at Manchester City. But it wasn’t just Bennell. A tearful Paul Stewart, the former England international, revealed to the BBC he had been abused by another, as yet unnamed, junior coach. An anonymous victim told Taylor of vile conduct at Newcastle United. Suddenly a cascade of revelations emerged about paedophiles in the Eighties and Nineties finding positions in the game from which to pursue their ugly agenda. This week, the NSPCC set up a hotline to counsel anyone who had fallen prey to them. It received 50 calls within two hours. It seems a stone has been lifted. And years of ugly maltreatment exposed.
But perhaps we should not be too surprised. As with the Catholic Church, the scout movement and public schools, it would seem unlikely that manipulative child abusers did not inveigle their way into football in order to pursue their lusts. The pattern is the same: a through-flow of impressionable young people, plenty of opportunity for close personal attention mixed with the abuser’s favourite ingredient: the ability to enforce silence by the exploitation of position. The world of youth football was always a fertile ground for abuse. Just as the schoolmaster could threaten punishment or the priest invoke a higher power, so the football coach could deliberately distribute favour. Dunford recalled that at Crewe, after he tried to refuse his advances, “Bennell began to torment me – dropping me from the team, telling me I would play, but on the Sunday dropping me again”.
It is the power that is almost as big a kick for the abuser as the sex. Almost.
What is clear from the experience of Walters, Woodward, White and the many others is that football was hopelessly incapable of addressing the issue. Convinced of its own hardknock machismo, it refused to believe the vulnerable were being exploited systematically under its nose. At Crewe the club proudly listed Bennell as youth team manager on their programme masthead for years. The club’s longserving manager Dario Gradi insisted last week no one there had any idea of his colleague’s nefarious activity until he was arrested.
Yet Danny Murphy, the pundit and another graduate of the club’s youth system, recalls when he was there, there were jokey warnings about not getting caught alone with the coach; for the youth team players Bennell was a comical bogeyman. Worse, an insider at Manchester City told a Channel 4
investigation into Bennell 10 years ago that even though the club had its suspicions when he went to work for them, it never challenged him because he kept on finding such talented youngsters.
“The truth was, he did the business,” the official said.
This omerta is part of the game’s pathology. And it leads to complicity in wrongdoing. In football, malfeasance is rarely, if ever, uncovered by its own processes. It is left to the media to do the policing. When Bennell was finally sent to prison, it came about because a boy under his protection complained to his father of an assault during a competition in Florida, not because anyone within the game was moved to take action. Intriguingly, when Bennell was sent down, his conviction warranted a sum total of 270 words in news reports. This was clearly not an issue that resonated at the time. Which makes you fear how much the present system has learnt from past abuse. For sure, we now live in a society much more alert to the possibility. Since 2001, the FA has brought in rigorous child protection regulations at every level of the game. Its coach education programme flags up safeguarding issues. When I was chairman of a youth football club, we were obliged to put everyone from team managers to volunteers on the tea bar through the checks. Yet there was a flaw in the process: the evaluation procedure remains skewed to criminal records. Until 1998, Bennell did not have one. So under current FA guidelines, until the law felt his collar, he would have been free to coach. Thirty years on from when he first stalked the game, that is the most alarming realisation of this grimmest of footballing weeks.