Child abuse in football isn’t being dealt with in the new football regulator bill

 

 

By Tony Attwood

• Arsenal young players who will be in the team tonight in the far north west
• Preston North End v Arsenal lots of goals and tickets from touts
• Preston v Arsenal; the injury recoveries, the young players, and 2 unbeaten teams

As a writer on topics related to professional football, in recent years have written a number of times about the potential for children to be abused by professional football clubs.

You will of course know about the sexual abuse of children at clubs ranging from Celtic, repeated champions of Scotland to Crewe Alexandra in League Two in England.   But a case has been brought to my attention suggesting there is also an underlying core of abuse of children which could be prevented through a very simple change in the rules.   

If I may briefly summarise my concerns below….

Clubs have to keep medical records of all injuries of players, but there is no demand for backup records to be kept.  Thus if a club is short of players for, maybe, an under 15s match, a youngster who is injured may be told to “man up” and “stop making a fuss” – thus potentially making an injury far worse.

Then if a parent questions this, one may subsequently find the medical record of the child’s injury is strangely “lost”.   It’s something I have mentioned before and all that is needed to overcome this situation is a regulation that says copies of all medical reports must be stored with a central body which can retrieve them if the original is “lost”.  Failure to register a copy of such a record should be a significant crime.

Second, (and much harder to deal with I admit), clubs in modest size towns often attract the local leading personalities onto their board – the biggest firm of solicitors, the leading medical practitioners, representatives from the police etc.  While of course most clubs and such professionals are honest and reasonable, some clubs can use this association of the local hierarchy to ensure that anyone who tries to complain against a club’s behaviour effectively can’t find a local solicitor to help.  The smaller firms of solicitors saying “to take on xyz in this case would be professional suicide for us.”

Yet playing a 15-year-old with an injury because the team is one short, is a form of abuse.

My point here is that clubs from the lower leagues in smaller towns have, through their association with the police, legal and medical services, may well bend the rules somewhat because they know anyone making a complaint is going to find it very hard to push this complaint forward.

Now I must admit I can’t prove this, I just have picked up incidental stories, but I would argue that the possibility and danger of children being abused in football clubs is significant enough to warrant some simple rules.  Most importantly I would suggest the aforementioned copy of medical records being stored centrally, and the possibility of an independent office being available for parents to be able to make a complaint about the way of child has been treated by a local club, without trying to find a local solicitor.

Of course, I recognise I am postulating what some may call a “conspiracy theory” based on one issue (the “loss” of medical records, and a disturbing report from one parent whose son was forced to play when injured), but I do feel from one case I have been examining this could be a significant issue.

However with the local media and local legal services not being inclined to dig into what the local league club is up to (because of the club’s association with the local hierarchy), this is a worrying area, and the simple rule of a duplicate of all digital medical reports being stored by the FA or other body, really could at least start to protect children from abuse in clubs.

If there was then also a central place to which parents could report possible abuse, knowing that their complaint would not simply be copied to the club, that again could help enormously.   In short, I do think there may well be child abuse continuing in football clubs – not at the level of child sex abuse, but at the level of not taking proper medical care of young footballers.

But here’s the problem.  Although we now have plans for an independent regulator of football to be introduced, at the moment it seems pretty difficult to submit either evidence or thoughts on how the Regulator is set up, in order to ensure that the Regulator has the power to deal with clubs that abuse children.

As far as I can tell, at the moment there is nothing in the bill that does indeed deal with the protection of children, and yet that has been one of the biggest scandals to affect football in recent years.  It all seems a bit odd, as if someone high up in football is saying “just leave child abuse out of this”.

If I find out any more I will pass it on.