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Phil Noble/Reuters
England’s Football Association, which remained largely silent for almost two weeks as former players came forward with accusations of sexual abuse by coaches in the country’s soccer development system, announced Sunday that it was broadening an internal investigation into the claims.
The F.A., the governing body for soccer across England, said it had appointed Kate Gallafent, a lawyer with experience in sexual abuse cases, to oversee the internal investigation, which had not been revealed before. The F.A. also said it was working closely with the police in pursuing the claims.
At least six former players have said publicly that they were molested as boys in the youth programs, and the head of the English soccer players’ union said Sunday that nearly two dozen more former players had come forward privately. Until now, the F.A. had made little public comment on the revelations other than to say it had set up a telephone help line for victims of abuse.
“The internal review will look into what information the F.A. was aware of at the relevant times around the issues that have been raised in the press, what clubs were aware of, and what action was or should have been taken,” the association said in a statement Sunday.
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Malcolm Croft/Press Association, via Associated Press
The scandal has grown out of an interview with Andy Woodward, a former player with the lower-league Crewe Alexandra, that was published by The Guardian on Nov. 16. In the article, Woodward said he had been sexually abused by Barry Bennell, who has been convicted of sexual abuse charges in both Britain and the United States. Bennell worked as a scout and coach for a number of clubs, including Crewe, across England’s North West during the 1980s.
Woodward, now 43, said the abuse began when he was 11 and was invited to stay at Bennell’s house. He said Bennell had silenced him during the years of abuse with threats of further violence and of undermining his prospective soccer career.
Woodward said that Crewe had failed in its “duty to protect” those children under its care.
Four more former players have since said that they had been victims of Bennell.
Steve Walters, another former Crewe player, said that reading Woodward’s account had persuaded him to reveal that he had been abused for a year, until he was 14. David White, who would go on to the English national team, and Jason Dunford both recounted abuse, or attempted abuse, while playing for a junior team in Manchester called Whitehill that was run by Bennell. A fourth former player, Ian Ackley, said he had been raped “hundreds of times” while playing amateur soccer in Derbyshire.
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Press Association, via Associated Press
The allegations against coaches have spread beyond Bennell. Paul Stewart, who played for Liverpool and England, said he had been abused by another coach for four years. And on Sunday, Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, the players’ union, told the BBC that as many as 20 players have come forward with information. Many, he said, have chosen to remain anonymous for now.
At least four police forces across the country — in Northumbria, Hampshire and Cheshire as well as the Metropolitan Police in London — have announced that they are conducting inquiries into sexual offenses in soccer clubs. Various clubs, including Manchester City, Newcastle United, Blackpool and Leeds United, have said they will cooperate with any inquiries.
Crewe’s initial response to Woodward’s claims was to offer no comment. The club’s longstanding technical director, Dario Gradi, who worked with Bennell, said he had been instructed by his superiors not to discuss the issue.
Only after a former director, Hamilton Smith, revealed Thursday that he had informed the club of his concerns about Bennell at the time did Crewe announce that it planned to set up an internal investigation to determine what, if anything, the club had known during the period when Bennell was accused of abusing young players.
Bennell worked with Crewe until 1992. He was arrested two years later while working in Florida, and he was convicted of raping a British boy at a soccer camp there.
After his conviction in the United States, Bennell was deported to England and convicted, in 1998, on charges dating from 1978 to 1992, with another 22 charges left on file. He was jailed for nine years. In May 2015, Bennell was ordered to serve two more years for sexual offenses against a 12-year-old boy that the authorities said dated to 1980.
In its statement on Sunday, the F.A. said it had begun its investigation “with acknowledgment that a wide-ranging inquiry may be required in time.”
The accusations of abusing children echo those against other authority figures connected to powerful institutions, including Roman Catholic priests, coaches in U.S.A. Swimming and Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State.
Woodward has suggested that Bennell’s case could prove similar to that of Jimmy Savile, a British television personality who was found, after his death in 2011, to have committed many sexual crimes during a career that lasted decades. A three-year investigation of that case concluded, in a scathing 700-page report, that Savile’s employers at the BBC had done little to stop his abuse of minors despite a history of complaints against him.
