Worse than Jimmy Savile. Those four words, uttered by abuse victim Andy Woodward, should send a chill through football. And if they do not now, they will do before long.For there is no way this train just stops at Crewe. Those so much as scratching at the surface of football’s ghastliest secret will vouch for that. They are hearing new names, new locations, receiving new leads, and chasing unsettling horror stories.
David White, a former England international, is the latest, issuing a statement, but the anecdotal evidence is no longer confined to a handful of brave souls who have unburdened and recounted their torment in public.
In private, others are talking, not necessarily of what they experienced, but of what they heard within the confines of dressing-room walls. The rumours, the gruesome banter, too much of it to be without substance.
‘He used to tell them to take their clothes off and give them soap massages… my dad said I couldn’t sign for them, he’d heard some things about their coach… there were always stories, but what could you do, you can’t prove anything… we used to take the mickey out of him, say “the only reason it didn’t happen to you is you were too ugly”… he had a house like Michael Jackson’s place, he lived on his own, but it was set up for kids…’
Football people talk, football people gossip. It’s like showbusiness that way. That is what protected Savile for so long. There were rumours, tales — but so there are about a lot people in the entertainment industry. The more grotesque ones concerning Savile probably got stored in the same mental compartment as the others, relatively harmless, scandals.
Parts true, parts exaggerated, the whole ultimately devalued. It is the same with football. Who is sleeping with who, who is on it, who is off it, who is gay, who got found with the boss’s daughter, who loses six figures in the casino every Thursday. All filed away and, ultimately, forgotten. And then along came Barry Bennell.
That should have been the warning.Woodward, now 43, was one of his victims. Bennell, then a youth team scout and coach at Crewe Alexandra — he also had links to Stoke and Manchester City — was a serial paedophile who first went to prison for his crimes in 1998. And for nearly two decades, football was happy to consider him one rogue predator.
Yet, last week, after Woodward came forward and waived his anonymity, so did a team-mate Steve Walters. And then Paul Stewart. Except Stewart claimed he was abused by another youth coach in the North West, not Bennell. He implied there could even have been a paedophile ring in the area.
And Stewart was, at his peak, a household name. An England international, subject of major transfers to Tottenham and Liverpool. He can’t be as easily, as regrettably, erased from public consciousness as the odd tragic teenager at Crewe; neither can White.
It is no coincidence that Stewart spoke of watching Spotlight, the film about abuse in the Catholic Church, and seeing parallels with his experience.
This, too, feels like momentum is growing; that each day may bring a fresh round of revelations. This, too, suggests more should have been done, as if everyone in and around football — and, yes, that includes the media — should have been more alert to the dangers.‘If you wanted to create the perfect environment for a paedophile, it would be around the youth team set-up of a professional football club,’ one player told me.He then laid it out, step by step.
‘For a start, every boy there is young and fit and wants to be a professional footballer, and the person they need to impress is the coach. They trust him, they want to please him. He has their future in his hands. The parents are the same. They just want their boy to be successful. It is the coach that can make it happen. They want to have a good relationship with him. They feel they can trust him. And the club is the perfect cover, because it gives the coach credibility. He must be a decent guy because he works for them.
‘And football gets played at different times. Could be an early start for a match, could be a late finish, could be a tour. Young boys cannot room alone overnight in hotels. Don’t worry about getting him home then. He can stay with me — or I’ll drop him back later.‘What parent would suspect? It sounds like a generous offer. He seems like such a nice bloke. And then, when it happens, he can frighten the life out of the boy. I’ll see to it that you never play football. You tell your mum, and I’ll ruin your career.’
Stewart said that his abuser threatened to kill his mum, dad and two brothers if he told. He was 11, and believed every word. I knew Paul Stewart, when he was playing. He was part of the Tottenham dressing-room that was managed by Terry Venables and included big personalities: Paul Gascoigne, Steve Sedgley, Paul Walsh.
Stewart says what happened in his youth left him unable to show affection to his family, and there was certainly much of the swaggering, alpha male about him back then. One former team-mate described Stewart as ‘a bit of a bully’ but he may have simply been trying to keep up with the company. That Tottenham dressing-room could be a brutal place and Venables often remarked about the hostility in the banter. ‘They’ll say things about wives, about girlfriends,’ he told me, ‘things that should really be off limits. Then they’ll all laugh. It’s not nice.’
Looking back, maybe one of their number was over-compensating to cover his insecurity.Dispatches broadcast an investigation into Bennell at the time of his sentence.
One victim, Ian Ackley, summed up his warped power perfectly. ‘He’s the one who’s got the contacts,’ he said. ‘He’s the one who can break or make people.’
Another victim summed up the pressure placed on 11-year-olds. ‘If I didn’t go to his house I would suffer,’ he said. ‘I would be substituted, or miss out on the trips to Blackpool or Alton Towers. I wouldn’t be invited to Manchester City.’
The fact that 11 people have already approached the hastily convened investigation unit at Cheshire Police with stories about Bennell suggests the ease with which a paedophile can use a football club as cover is no fanciful construct.
Equally, before recent rule changes, it was possible for a club to take a young player from the other end of the country, and there are fears that this ploy may have been used to remove vulnerable boys from their parents.
Woodward feels that Crewe showed little concern for Bennell’s victims 18 years ago, when he was first found guilty. ‘Not one person from Crewe has ever contacted me to see if I was OK or to say they were really sorry this happened at their football club,’ he said. And while theFA have responded swiftly by installing a hotline for anyone wishing to report allegations of abuse, there is a feeling football is still failing in its duty of care.
Most recently, it failed miserably to respond adequately to the Adam Johnson affair. Johnson is a sex offender, not a paedophile — his victim was under-age, not pre-pubescent — yet Sunderland’s reaction seemed to prioritise his worth as an asset over the welfare of his victim.
Margaret Byrne, their chief executive, ultimately resigned over her handling of the situation, although it hasn’t prevented her working in football as an agent since. Once Johnson’s offence was known — he later pleaded guilty in court — Byrne had to prioritise the victim above the employee, no matter Sunderland’s investment.
Instead, Johnson remained in the team, stayed on the payroll and was allowed to carry out many club duties as normal.Has football done enough?
When Bennell’s behaviour became known, should the FA not have conducted an investigation, to satisfy themselves that he was not part of a wider group?
Might that have thrown up the name of Stewart’s abuser, at least? Should the executive management of Crewe have been scrutinised to see how they could be blindsided by the revelations? Why didn’t they know?
If more footballers come forward privately or publicly in the coming weeks, the right people will at last be running scared.
Yet football as an industry should be scared, too: scared of how it will look if the game did harbour monsters, Saviles in club tracksuits, in their midst, and treated evidence of their footprints like so much bar-room tittle tattle.
© Daily Mail