By Tim Parsons-
Uk football and child sex abuse are now associated with each other in a horrifying way.
Hopefully, this evil association is a thing of the past haunting the present in a most painful and sad way. The offences are now said by police chiefs to have spread to about 148 clubs. It involves 155 potential suspects and 429 victims, of those identified.
The awful scandal has badly rocked football, just when football was trying to make a recovery from its scandals of the past involving money and fraud.
When Bury and Sheffield United Player, Andy Woodward, waived his right to anonymity and revealed he was sexually abused as a youth player, the football world cracked.Especially U.K football. The full scale of the sexual abuses against boys by these nasty men is a kick in the teeth to football fans and all decent people. It highlights an extreme level of perversion among some coaches and scouts in football, not known to exist before now. It makes us wonder if this sort of sexual abuses happens in other parts of the world but has been kept quiet successfully for this long too.
The spread of the allegation to 148 clubs is just unbelievably scary. It opens our eyes to the reality that there can be so many sexual perverts in a loved sport or field without anybody knowing. It wasn’t a long time ago since the sexual abuses of historical proportions committed by Jimmy Saville and his highly perverse cronies was exposed to the world to see. Many were shocked that a well loved man could have a secret so dark we would wish we were never drawn to him. Saville managed to pull the wool over our eyes, and ruin hundreds of lives and continued undetected until his death.
Uk football and football has gone through enough scandal, we did not need another one. His claim to have been raped several times in his teens by former Crewe coach Barry Bennell was too shocking. Immediately, others poured out with their own claims, as football was stuck right back into the pit of mud and disgust once again.
The news that Gary Johnson was paid £50,000 to keep silent over the sexual abuse he was subjected to by Eddie Heath- a former chief scout- was deeply sad and embarrassing. Chelsea football club has apologized to Johnson, but how quickly can apology remove the scar of sexual abuse from the memory? We are now told that the age range of those who suffered abuse is between 4 and 20. 819 referrals have been made to the NSPCC from both the police. It all sounds similar to the Mp sex abuse scandal that once hit us all like a rock before it was cast aside on the basis of insufficient evidence. It all sounds like a fiction story written by an author with a twisted mind, but this is no fiction.
148 clubs is just too many. It appears sexual abusers choose clubs or scouting jobs in order to find their prey. Should we be closely probing scouts of today? Maybe we should. Not all scouts are that way inclined, but it appears that child sex abusers do find a way in to be surrounding by those they wish to abuse.