Power’s People
A vile crime that sums up soccer’s rotten core
SLUMPED forward in his seat, his head bowed and his shoulders hunched, Adam Johnson cut a pathetic figure as he was driven from the court after his conviction for child sexual abuse this week. His career is in ruins, his relationship is over, he is a registered sex offender and he is facing a lengthy jail sentence, after which he will struggle ever to play professional football again.
Cowed in the car that sped him from the court, Johnson did not look like the swaggering sports star who had callously exploited a 15-year-old fan’s infatuation, and who will now pay for that crime with his reputation, his freedom and his future. He looked, for all the world, no more than a chastened, humiliated, f rightened schoolboy himself.
And there is a sense in which that is what he is – still the schoolboy who was plucked from a Butlins skills competition, aged eight, to play in a youth tournament in Wembley, still the 16-yearold who lifted the FA Youth Cup with Middlesbrough, still the 18- year- old professional footballer who was selected f or the England under- 19s, still the schoolboy who only managed to achieve four GCSEs – the equivalent of four passes in our Junior Cert – whose father was a coalminer and whose prospects, without his footballing skill, would have been for life as a poorly paid labourer.
Still the schoolboy who was transplanted into a world of unimaginable wealth, fame and female adulation, and absolved of any responsibility to grow up.
The world of professional football has never much concerned itself with the personal development of the boys it snatches from working class communities and dead-end trajectories and turns into stars. They are simply commodities to be turned over, units of wealth-production to be used up and burnt out, and if they can’t handle their life-altering fortunes, if they drink too much or party too hard or take advantage of underage fans well, that’s their problem.
Adam Johnson, with his beautiful girlfriend, his baby daughter and his €80,000-a-week salary, is not the most sympathetic of criminal types.
He was blessed with a rare skill, one that could have set him and his humble family up for the rest of their lives.
His girlfriend was pregnant when he began grooming a schoolgirl who contacted him on social media, his girlfriend was texting him pictures of their newborn baby while he was texting the schoolgirl, asking to see her naked. He threw away a phenomenal opportunity for a quick fumble with a besotted child in his expensive car and then, the court found, encouraged his fans to insult and traduce her on the terraces.
But a portion of the blame for this young man’s ruin has to fall upon his footballing masters, the clubs who groomed him, in turn, used him, in their fashion, and then cast him aside when it suited.
Footballers these days enjoy the same levels of fame, money and acclaim as pop stars like the One Direction lads, but that’s where the similarities end.
While young pop stars are minded and managed and babysat individually, so as to protect the pop moguls’ investment in their image, young footballers get no such care.
Unlike in America, where colleges play a huge role in early sporting careers, there’s no obligation on the clubs to ensure that their young protégées get a meaningful education.
Neither are they taught how to manage their money or how to conduct themselves in public.
THEY’RE not assisted to achieve any qualification that might give them a fall-back if injuries or indiscretions end their careers – they’re just left to their own devices in the long, boring hours between training sessions and playing matches.
Adam Johnson is going to jail and, instead of being the pampered princess of a Premier League star, his baby daughter Ayla will be the daughter of a convict, a certified visitor to a vague, unfamiliar figure in a prison- i ssue sweatshirt, the child of a disgraced dad and a humiliated mother.
There is no question that he deserves jail for what he did – Johnson knew exactly how vulnerable his victim was, he even googled ‘ age of consent’ on his smartphone before meeting her, and it is no exaggeration to say that girl’s childhood was stolen from her, not least by the process of testifying at Johnson’s trial.
She was just another tasty treat for a young man who behaved like a kid in a sweetshop, who thought he could have whatever took his fancy without worrying about the price, because that was all he knew.
There is no question that this young girl was the victim of a predatory, arrogant, self-absorbed man but, hard as it is to feel sorry for Johnson, he too had something of his childhood stolen from him. That was still no excuse, though, for stealing it from someone else.