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By Tony Attwood
Football in England, in fact, has two over-riding regulators. One was appointed by the current government, and the other is longer established and called the football ombudsman.
The recently set up Independent Football Regulator has been established to oversee financial and governance matters for clubs in the top five tiers of the men’s professional game, while the FA manages other aspects of the sport.
So here’s a question: if a young player is bullied or otherwise mistreated while registered with a Premier League club, and the Premier League club refuses to do anything about it, where do you go?
Not the Independent Football Regulator because he is only there to look at financial and governance matters. And I should add not the FA either, for that body is the governing body of association football in England, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, but doesn’t seem to deal with the cases concerning individuals
Making enquiries, I was told that in football clubs, the club’s Chief Welfare Officer is the primary person who deals with bullying. Other people who might be interested to hearing about bullying of young people in a football club could be the County FA Welfare Officer, the FA, or Kick It Out.
But deliberately playing a child who is injured or telling him/her “not to make such a fuss” when clearly in distress from an injury is not going to be of interest to some of these organisations unless there is a sexual element to the complaint.
County FA Welfare Officers, sometimes called “Designated Safeguarding Officers”, however, can be a source of information for anyone with concerns about the safety and welfare of children or adults at risk in football. Although again, they may be very overloaded and may simply tell the parents to take the child to another club.
This is not to say that such people do not do an excellent job in many cases, but there can be a problem in that their task is defined as ensuring that clubs understand and comply with the responsibilities they have in dealing with children. But the problem we have here is that when a child makes a complaint about the way he or she is treated by a professional football club, the club will assure the Welfare Officer that they are professionals, that they of course have the best interest of the children in their youth teams at heart, beceause it would be crazy for them not to look after young people who could become first team players in a few years.
It may also be the case that the child’s next club will want a reference from the previous club, and that reference may, of course, be unhelpful since no trainer of a junior team wants to be seen as having let a star of the future leave for another club.
And that raises a problem: whose word is to be taken. The club’s head of youth training often has a range of jobs, including coordinating the training and match schedule, organising the team, ensuring the game is organised and played at a suitable location, and providing match reports to the league.
I could go on with more and more job descriptions, but the simple point is that none of the people who have important roles in looking after young players in professional clubs are likely to have been specifically given responsibility to ensure that no bullying of young players takes place.
And this is why there are complaints from parents concerning the way their children are being treated within the youth sections of professional clubs. Worse, if a trainer of a youth team who is a bully gets wind of a complaint being circulated, he can simply kick the child out of the club on the basis that the child was not good enough or not reliable enough. When the child retorts, “it is the trainer who is the bully,” who is to be believed?
As a result, it is not inconceivable that professional football clubs are one of the areas into which bullies who enjoy humiliating children are attracted, just as cases in recent years have shown that pedophiles may also be attracted to a few clubs. In such cases, the final resort has to be to the Independent Football Ombudsman, who can be reached by email at contact@theifo.co.uk. They also have a website at www.theifo.co.uk or you can call 0330 165 4223.
If you are a regular reader, you may know that this site has been interested in how football handles the problems of the way young people are treated at clubs, and if you have any experience of taking matters to the IFO I would be delighted to hear from you. Please email me at Tony@schools.co.uk I can guarantee anonymity.
