Men Against Boys:Football's Darkest Secret

"Men against boys"! It's what football fans say when one team rips another one apart but, in football - as elsewhere, there have been some men who despite in some ways being very obviously all FOR boys ended up ripping those boys' lives apart. These men used their privileged positions and status to abuse, rape, and threaten teen and pre-teen boys for decades and now, finally, after way too long, justice is finally being done.

Football's Darkest Secret (BBC1/iPlayer) is not an easy listen but it is a compelling one. Over three plus hours a selection of former professional footballers, former youth footballers, their mothers, detective inspectors of various constabularies, Daniel Taylor (chief football writer for The Guardian and The Observer), and Victoria Derbyshire, the radio broadcaster and former Newsnight and Panorama presenter, sketch out a story of sexual abuse and a story of misjustice as grave as any in modern British history.

It is, of course, emotional. Within three minutes one former footballer is in tears. He won't be the last. Either side of the television screen. While all sexual abuse is abhorrent and inexcusable, child sexual abuse is a particularly heinous crime. It casts a long dark shadow over the victim's life at a very early age and often that shadow, as brave testament tells us, never fully lifts.

Most men who have been abused as a child can't talk about it until they're in their forties. The shame, the stigma, the guilt, the embarrassment, and the emasculation that the perpetrator of the crime should experience has, it seems, been transferred into the victim. Incessant sustained sexual abuse, such as that suffered by those on Football's Darkest Secret, can, and does, alter a person's psyche. The irreparable damage done can result in self-medication, violence, criminality, inability to build or sustain personal relationships, suicidal ideation, and suicide.

One survivor, now in his sixties, still wonders if, somehow, he "deserved it". He knows he didn't but something still ticks away in the back of his mind even after justice has finally been served. In November 2016, Daniel Taylor was called to meet the former professional footballer Andy Woodward. Woodward had played in defence for Sheffield Utd, Crewe Alexandra, and Bury but it was not the relative merits of 3-5-2 versus 4-4-2 he wanted to talk about.

It was something quite different. Something shocking. Something had happened to Woodward as a boy. While a trainee at Crewe in the 80s, his youth football coach Barry Bennell had raped him. Not once but over three hundred times. Worse still, he was not the only one. Woodward told Taylor that there are hundreds of boys with the same, or similar, stories. Before revising that figure to thousands.

The next to come forward was Steve Walters, another former Crewe player, and then David White and Paul Stewart. White had played for Leeds Utd & Sheffield Utd, Stewart for Liverpool, Spurs, Crystal Palace, Sunderland, and Blackpool. Both had played for Man City and both had been capped for England. 

Their stories are those of working class, football mad, lads in the Manchester area catching the eyes of local talent scouts for teams and getting run outs for feeder clubs like Whitehill FC and Nova Juniors. The elite teams of that area's youth football scene. One of Whitehill's coaches was Barry Bennell and Bennell used his connections, unofficial but close enough to be able to provide kits etc;, to Man City to gain trust with the kids.

He'd been on Chelsea's books so he could play a bit too. Which also impressed the boys. So when he started inviting them to stay over at his house, for "homework", at weekends most of them were happy to do so. Even more so when they discovered his house was a treasure trove of then modern video games and VCRs. On which he'd show films like Nightmare on Elm Street to scare the boys so they moved closer to him.

The boys' parents had no reason to be suspicious and, even if they did, they didn't want to stand in the way of their child's dream. But when Bennell got the boys back to his house it wasn't long before he was sharing a bed with them, attempting to masturbate them, and getting them to masturbate him. Often he'd take two boys to bed with him at the same time. 

Sometimes the older one would be being phased out to make way for the younger one. Boys who refused overnight stays at Bennell's house were quickly moved out of the club and one boy, now a man, says he knew what Bennell was doing was wrong but didn't tell his dad because he knew his dad would be so angry that what he would probably kill Bennell and end up in prison.

Paul Stewart knew of Bennell's abuse not because Bennell had abused him. But because the man who abused him, Frank Roper - former head of Nova Juniors, told him so. Roper told Stewart he had to be receptive to his advances if he wanted to make it is a footballer and if Stewart said anything to his family he'd kill both his parents and both his sisters.

Roper tried to drive a wedge between Stewart and his family. He beat him, he abused him, and he raped him every day for four years. Being on the football pitch, Stewart recounts now, was the only time in his life he felt safe. His innocence, like the others, had been taken away forever.

In 1985, Bennell moved from Whitehill, thus severing his affiliation with Man City, and went to work under Dario Gradi at Crewe Alexandra. It was there he first came into contact with Andy Woodward. As he'd done with other families, Bennell ingratiated himself with Woodward's family and even, quite remarkably, married Woodward's sister.

A wedding Andy Woodward attended. He watched the man who'd raped him hundreds of times marry his own sister! Rumours about Bennell's behaviour was so rife that lads in opposing teams would call Woodward and others "Bennell's bum boys" but when complaints reached Dario Gradi, Crewe manager, and chairman John Bowler no action was taken.

Hardly any notice was taken. Steve Walters was one lad who did tell his dad but his dad took did nothing whatsoever and never mentioned it again. The lack of parental care, or even curiosity, on top of the abuse took its toll on Walters. His career stalled and he describes himself, now, as having gone off the rails.

He wasn't the only one. Despite scoring a Wembley goal in Tottenham's 1991 FA Cup Final against Nottingham Forest, and being widely seen as something of a happy go lucky joker, Paul Stewart was dying inside. He was self-medicating with alcohol, ecstasy, and cocaine and when he turned up for his first ever England team meeting he was drunk.

Perhaps it's why his international career stalled at three caps. He played twenty-six games for Liverpool while, at the same time, taking cocaine daily. We can never know for certain how bright Stewart's star may have shone had Bennell not destroyed him at such an early age. But we do know that Paul Stewart was far from the only victim of that era's football's predatory paedophiles.

When Woodward first spoke out, the NSPCC opened up a hotline which received fifty calls in the first two hours. Many of the calls were from former Southampton and Peterborough players and the name they kept mentioning was that of Bob Higgins who had been a coach at both those clubs.

Higgins had forced young players, including Matt Le Tissier, to line up for naked massages. Like Bennell he was a great football coach (given some credit for the development, on the pitch at least, of Le Tissier and Alan Shearer) and, like Bennell, he had boys stay over. Like Barry Bennell, he raped them.

Higgins seems to have run his youth teams like cults. Players would chant his name, write him love letters, admit to being infatuated, or even in love, with him. In his car, he'd play Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston's 'Greatest Love of All' and, while he did so, he'd force boys heads into his lap - sometimes for two hours at a time.

Even now some recall both the stench of urine and the feel of his erection through his trousers. Which didn't remain on once he got home. Like Bennell, he liked to masturbate in front of the boys and, like Bennell, he liked them to (try and) masturbate in front of him. When his behaviour drew attention to him and senior figures at Southampton questioned him, he angrily resigned and threatened future litigation before moving to Peterborough and carrying on just as he had done at Southampton.

In 1994, Bennell was arrested in Florida for six counts of sexual battery. He had taken the Staffordshire youth side he was then coaching, Stone Dominoes, on an American tour and a thirteen year old boy had reported that Bennell had sexually abused him. Bennell was jailed in America but the case barely registered back in the UK. Raping children, apparently, not a big deal in the Cool Britannia era.

Bennell received a four year sentence for which he served less than two and, back in the UK, two years later, Channel 4's Dispatches ran an expose on both Bennell and Higgins in which one of Bennell's victims, the brave and articulate Ian Ackley, came forward. Dispatches was not shy in saying that these men and others had raped children. Football turned a blind eye and hoped it would go away.

Which it did. There was no media storm (as many had expected), there was no action taken, and some of those who had spoken out found themselves shunned by certain sections of society. Even David White and Andy Woodward, when asked about Bennell, defended him. The shame and, for Woodward, the family situation no doubt informing their decision.   

In 1998, Barry Bennell did receive a nine year sentence at Chester Crown Court when he pleaded guilty to twenty-three of forty-five offences. As one survivor put it, that's less than one day in prison for every rape he committed. Bennell was in prison serving a surprisingly lenient sentence considering the severity and number of his crimes, Higgins was still free, and, in Newcastle, so was George Ormond.

Former Newcastle player Derek Bell picks up the story at the start of the new millennium. Bell, who had left football by then and was working with young and vulnerable asylum seekers, one night noticed a shady figure hiding in the bushes looking to befriend the young boys arriving in Britain. Bell knew straight away that it was George Ormond because Bell had been a victim of Ormond as a young player at the Montagu and North Fenham boys club in the 70s.

Ormond, unlike some of the others, appears to have had no real interest in, or skill for, football. He simply used it as a vehicle to satisfy his lust. He'd abuse children in their own homes and then laugh and joke with the parents minutes later as if nothing had happened. Bell, like so many victims - tortured by his demons, was drinking heavily at the time and one night, fuelled by rightful anger and booze, he went to Ormond's house with a 12" knife to stab him. Luckily for both of them, Ormond was not in. Days later, Bell returned and this time instead of a knife he hid a tape recorder inside his jacket.

Ormond let him in and, on tape, confessed to his crimes. Bell took the recording to the police and Ormond was jailed for six years for a series of sexual abuse crimes against at least nineteen minors spanning twenty-five years. But Bennell and Ormond were seen as individual cases, not part of a much wider problem. 

When Bob Higgins appeared in court in Salisbury in 2018 (following four days of police interviewing in which he refused to utter a single word) he denied all charges and also denied he'd ever been alone with a child in his car (which would have been very unusual in his line of work) but he did admit to getting an erection while massaging boys. 

When the jury took a long time reaching the verdict, the prosecution knew that this meant there was at least one person on that jury who didn't believe Higgins was guilty and, sure enough, the verdicts were, for the most part, inconclusive. Higgins was found guilty on one count of indecent assault, not guilty on one similar charge, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on a forty-eight similar charges. Many others were not even brought to trial.

Higgins' victims became despondent, suicidal even. Bennell, who by that point was using the name Richard Jones, was another who only faced trial for a small number of his crimes. Hundreds of his victims had come forward but most didn't reach court as it was feared that the sheer number was too much for a jury to take in and may in some way have prejudiced the case.

It seemed to many of the victims that football, the FA, were now making the right noises and, in extreme and obvious cases, taking some action. But still nowhere near enough. Most authority figures didn't want to get involved but one MP, Bambos Charalambous (Labour, Enfield Southgate) did take up the case and raised it as a political issue.

When Bob Higgins found himself in court again, in 2018, accused of fifty-one charges of indecent assault, it was the absolute last chance for justice to be done and, finally, it was. Higgins, like Ormond, was found guilty of many many charges (though, in the case of Ormond, not for raping an eighteen year old boy, Dion Raitt - another who bravely spoke out. Not because the jury believed that Raitt consented to sex with Ormond but because they believed that Ormond thought he did - which you'd like to think wouldn't stand up in a rape case).

They were sentenced to over twenty years each and Bennell was found guilty on another fifty counts of sexual abuse and sentenced to another thirty years. Since he's been in prison, further victims have come forward and further guilty verdicts have been reached.

The abusers, these ones at least, are now in prison and are unlikely to ever walk free again. But the chances missed, the times the victims were ignored, means that these monsters were at liberty not for weeks, months, or years but for decades. Football's Darkest Secret raises questions about our judicial system and also about the power structures inherent both within the game and within society.

Did the courts, did football, did we all turn a blind eye, ignore it, deny it, and trivialise it because it was convenient to do so. If that's the case and I don't believe there can be any doubt that it is, then that is the perfect example of systemic institutionalised failure on the part of the football authorities to deal with a problem that completely ruined hundreds, thousands, of young boy's lives.

The full FA acknowledgement of that systemic institutionalised failure came just over a week ago - on the 17th March 2021. That alone is absolutely shocking. The story that Andy Woodward, Steve Walters, Ian Ackley, Dean Radford, David White, Paul Stewart, Derek Bell, Gary Johnson, David Eatock and others told was deeply disturbing but it is one we cannot ignore. One we should never had ignored.

These men who abused them are barely worthy of the word 'men'. They willingly ruined boys lives purely to sate their own basest desires. These were men who were, very much, AGAINST, boys. That many of those boys have grown up to be far finer men than their abusers is, to me, a triumph. But without justice that triumph would have remained hollow.