By Tony Attwood
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I have often in the past mentioned the horrors of child abuse within football. Indeed a quick search of the internet suggests that Child abuse in football in the United Kingdom has been widespread.
In fac,t it is reported that getting on for 500 victims of child sex abuse in football clubs in the UK have reported to the police in clubs as disparate as Chelsea, Southampton, Newcastle United, Aston Villa, Crewe Alexandra, Manchester City, Southampton, Stoke City, and Peterborough United.
In the various reviews that took place there was much talk of “institutional failings” within the Football Association with much comment on “failures to act appropriately on reports and suspicions of abuse within the football community” as the BBC put it.
Eventually, the clubs, the FA and the League issued an apology and agreed to change their ways to prevent it happening in the future. Meanwhile, similar multiple cases were found in Scotland.
The feeling now is that this issue has been dealt with, but I am not at all sure that there has not been a negative side to the events, in that having been frightened by what was found to be happening within their clubs, some professional football clubs are now utterly refusing to recognise that any other forms of abuse are continuing in clubs.
In particular, I’ve had reported to me, and have come across commentaries on social media, about the abuse of children of a non-sexual nature, and what appears to be a cover-up of the same proportions as we saw in the child-sex cases noted above.
And what is so worrying is that not only do we seem to have cases of children being mistreated by football clubs, but that just as with the child sex allegations in the early days, no one wants to investigate.
Indeed “investigate” is the key word here. For obviously I don’t have the resources to look into claims of abuse and see if they are valid or not – but it seems that despite everything that has gone before nor will anyone else – and in this case I include the FA.
What appears to be happening is that the FA say that they will not deal with individual cases, because that is a matter for the clubs. The clubs then claim there is nothing to investigate and that the complainant is simply “vexatious”. The suspicion has to be the clubs are trying to protect their reputations.
We also know that there is still a temptation for clubs to “bend” the rules – as with the case a few years ago in which Liverpool were banned from signing academy players and fined £100,000.
But that was some years back, and since then everything seems to have gone quiet. However the particular cases I have heard about (and I must stress again, that obviously I don’t have the evidence – I just hear reports) involve children and teenagers being put into teams to play even when they have an injury. Then if the injury doesn’t heal up, the children are simply released from the club, possibly carrying the effect of the untreated injury for life.
This is abuse, since all employers have a duty of care towards those working with them, including in all forms of health and safety. If a young player gets an injury he needs to receive proper treatment and not be played. Playing him because the under 16s or under 18s are a player short and “it’s not that serious” (even though a doctor says it is) is abuse.
And I say “it is abuse” simply because those in the club are in a position of power and influence and there is no one representing the child’s interests.
In short, children and teenagers in clubs need safeguarding from all levels of exploitation as well as downright abuse. But where is the body outside the clubs that will ensure this is happening?
This last point – “where is the body outside the clubs that will ensure this is happening?” is the key to all this, because without such an organisation a child and his/her parents are left with no way of appealing against a club’s behaviour by, for example, playing a young player when he/she is injured.
This is such an obvious matter one would think that it would be dealt with straight away. And yet as far as I can see, if the club says nothing is wrong, neither the local FA, the national FA, nor the police will investigate. Indeed even the local media refuses to investigate because it seems they want to keep their good relations with the club. One step out of line and they can fear that their journalists will no longer have access to the club.
And then if the club has a local solicitor on the board to the club, as many do, then the club has instant access to free legal advice, and the chance that other firms of solicitors locally might not take up the case for fear of falling the wrong side of “big brother”..
This is exactly the sort of situation that the FA should be investigating thoroughly – and I say thoroughly because the implications are so serious.
And yet the FA has no channel through which such investigations can be done – which even if there are no substantiated cases of the mistreatment of young players, is weird in itself.
In my view, there really is something very rotten at the heart of a lot of football in the UK.
