No Hunger In Paradise Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

   1 Poverty Driven Children

   2 The Missionary’s Position

   3 X Factor Every Day

   4 Death of a Dream

   5 Family

   6 Ghosts in the Machine

   7 A Parent’s Warning

   8 Shiny Gobshites

   9 Hope

  10 Education, Education, Education

  11 Ground Zero

  12 Room with a View

  13 Alchemy

  14 Ballers

  15 Feeding Frenzy

  16 Work Hard, Dream Big

  17 Men at Work

  18 Portrait of an Artist

  19 Tropical Fish in Shark Bay

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘What’s your dream, son?’

  A six-year-old boy, head bowed, mumbles the eternal answer: ‘Be a footballer…’ Steadman Scott, football’s most unlikely talent scout, smiles indulgently, and takes him in from the street. He knows the odds. Only 180 of the 1.5 million boys who play organised youth football in England will become a Premier League pro. That’s a success rate of 0.012 per cent.

  How and why do the favoured few make it? What separates the good from the great? Who should they trust – the coach, the agent or their parents?

  Award-winning writer Michael Calvin provides the answers on a journey from non-league grounds to hermetically sealed Premier League palaces, via gang-controlled sink estates and the England team’s inner sanctum. He interviews decision makers, behavioural specialists, football agents and leading coaches. He shares the hopes and fears of players and their parents. He exposes bullying and a black economy in which children are commodities, but he remains true to the dream.

  About the Author

  Michael Calvin, one of the UK’s most accomplished sports writers, has worked in more than eighty countries, covering every major sporting event, including seven summer Olympic Games and six World Cup finals. He was named Sports Writer of the Year for his despatches as a crew member in a round-the-world yacht race and has twice been named Sports Reporter of the Year.

  He is a bestselling author, whose book The Nowhere Men won the Times Sports Book of the Year prize in 2014. He became the first author to receive the award in successive years, when Proud, his collaboration with former Wales and British Lions rugby captain Gareth Thomas, was named Sports Book of the Year in 2015.

  In the same year the second book of his football trilogy, Living On The Volcano, was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize. No Nonsense, his collaboration with Joey Barton, was nominated for the award in 2016.

  For Lynn. The best youth coach I have worked with.

  Acknowledgements

  ONE OF THE enduring privileges of sportswriting is the access to greatness it allows. Household names become familiar figures and, occasionally, firm friends, but generally professional protocol demands a certain distance. I have breached unwritten rules by asking for an autograph only twice in more than thirty years. The first was given, with a salesman’s smoothness, by a childhood hero, Pelé. The second was given, with customary grace, by Nelson Mandela.

  I was in South Africa, preparing to cover a historic Rugby World Cup, when he made a memorable speech at the launch of his children’s charity in Pretoria on May 8, 1995. It crystallised his compassion, dignity and foresight, and began with the observation that ‘there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children’.

  Those famous words lived with me through the hundreds of hours of interviews I conducted for this book, each of which was transcribed by Caroline Flatley, who, as ever, was an invaluable sounding board during the writing process. I met many good people, burdened by the knowledge that, with shining exceptions, football does not treat its children kindly.

  I hope this book will be a catalyst for a debate about how the game can better fulfil its duty of care. I know this may be unfashionable in an age of institutionalised mendacity, alternative facts and fake news, but I have faith in my trade to concentrate minds and challenge consciences.

  The recent sexual abuse scandal confirms that what we still refer to as Fleet Street contains writers who will continue to do justice to such an important subject. Arresting work has already been done by Daniel Taylor, Ian Herbert, Henry Winter, Paul Hayward, Matt Lawton, Oliver Holt, John Cross, Oliver Kay, Matt Hughes, Matt Dickinson and others.

  Developmental football also has important advocates in the sphere of social media. Sites like YouthHawk, Youth Academies and Scouts In Attendance provide an enlightening overview. Individuals like Aidan Roberts (England Youth), Philip Rolfe (Chelsea Youth) and the pairing of Gavin Cooper and Andrew Waldon (MCFC Reserves & Academy) offer insightful, exhaustive coverage.

  I am hugely grateful to all those who agreed to speak to me, on and off the record, during my research. We might not always agree, but I thank Dan Johnson, of the Premier League, for his rigour and professionalism. I am in the debt of Scott Field, Amanda Docherty, Andy Walker and James Webb, FA employees past and present.

  At club level I valued the assistance and advice of Vicky Kloss, Simon Heggie, Alex Rowan, Phil Townsend, Dan Tolhurst, Simon Felstein, Matt Cecil, Paul McCarthy and Bruce Talbot. Tim Rich, Sally Wheatman, Tom Hopkinson and George Caulkin helped me along the way. Dominic Fifield alerted me to the importance of the affirming work being done at the Afewee Training Centre where Peter Armstrong was wonderfully supportive. To get a flavour of Steadman Scott’s character and accomplishments, I would recommend Uncle Steadman, the 2013 film, directed by Stuart Everitt for Marmalade Productions. To gain further insight into systematic challenges, I would recommend the writing of Matt Whitehouse and Martin Calladine.

  My name may be on the cover, but I have a great team behind me. I thank Ben Brusey, Selina Walker and Susan Sandon at Century for their faith and support. Huw Armstrong, Charlotte Bush, Gemma Bareham, Aslan Byrne, Chris Turner, Pippa Wright, Amelia Evans, Rebecca Ikin, Fergus Edmondson, Joanna Taylor, Josh Ireland and Glenn O’Neill, my design guru, have helped enormously. I must thank Razi Mireskandari for his legal insight and Rory Scarfe, my literary agent, for his sagacity.

  I’d like to think fatherhood has informed aspects of this book, so I had better give my children, Nicholas, Aaron, William and Lydia, and my granddaughter, Marielli, the credit they doubtlessly feel they deserve. The canonisation of my wife Lynn, who puts up with my restlessness and distraction during the writing process, can only be a matter of time.

  Michael Calvin, February 2017

  Preface

  When Doves Cry

  THEY ARE MIDDLE-AGED men now, trapped in time. Just as the victims of Pompeii were mummified in their death throes, they were engulfed by a pyroclastic flow of fear, shame and self-loathing. Their courage, in confronting the abuse to which they were subjected as children chasing football’s dream, is cathartic, but their vulnerability endures in adulthood.

  Watching them unburden themselves, tears flowing down faces embalmed by sustained suppression of dark secrets, is a challenge to the concept of a civilised society and to modern sport’s deceitful projection of innocence. Their tales of molestation and manipulation stir the conscience, since they conform to a pattern and merely hint at the scale of the scandal.

  Football’s victims – Andy Woodward, Steve Walters, Chris Unsworth, Jason Dunford, Paul Stewart, David White, Gary Johnson, Matthew Monaghan and David Eatock, to give due respect to some of the pioneers w
ho waived their right to anonymity – triggered an existential crisis in a game that has sagged beneath the weight of its duty of care.

  In years to come Operation Hydrant will resonate alongside Heysel and Hillsborough as shorthand for institutional neglect and the propensity of those in authority to look the other way. At the last count, police were investigating 248 clubs, 184 suspects, 526 victims; there will be others, suffering in the shadows, unwilling to burden their families with the sins of their oppressors.

  Research for this book began more than eighteen months before the Guardian’s Daniel Taylor followed the finest traditions of his craft in November 2016 and exposed the issue through a searing interview with Woodward, the former journeyman footballer ensnared by convicted paedophile Barry Bennell at Crewe Alexandra, the first of his six clubs.

  It is not my intention to dwell on the subject of sexual abuse, since it will continue to be laid bare by more forensic journalists and more knowledgeable specialists than me. But their work chimes with mine, because it seeks to peel back the layers of an industry that can be cavalier with the truth and complacent about the susceptibility of children to the fantasies it creates, and the power it confers.

  Youth football has a frontier spirit, since its coaches, by definition, mould young minds and coax coherence from immature bodies. That is a huge responsibility, an enormous subject. There are few more compelling daydreams in modern society than overcoming the odds and becoming a professional footballer.

  The process incorporates unconditional love and unwise devotion, unacceptable influence and unforgivable cynicism. It has significance beyond the fundamental question of why some players make it, and others fall away into a chasm of apathy or regret. Excesses excused by football’s prominence say as much about us, as parents, participants or supporters, as they do about the game itself.

  Football’s response to cataclysmic revelations of what appears to be a sub-culture of paedophilia has been little different to other institutions confronted by evidence of abhorrent behaviour, such as the Church or the BBC. Selective transparency reveals aspects of organisational culture that those in positions of influence would prefer to remain hidden.

  Grandees blustered and blundered. Their advisers sought to scramble towards the moral high ground. An initial instinct for self-protection took hold because in a compensation-conscious society the prospect of football facing a PPI-style financial reckoning chilled administrators, in both clubs and governing bodies, to the marrow.

  The Football Association sought to reassure parents and the wider public just before Christmas 2016 by revealing that 99 per cent of its 7,814 grassroots clubs, encompassing 62,238 teams, had responded to a deadline to renew their safeguarding policies. Those that had not done so were suspended until further notice.

  The Premier League stressed in a statement that similarly protective principles and practices have been enshrined in its academy structures. Clubs had followed the highest child-protection standards, being obliged to employ a full-time head of safeguarding, an academy safeguarding officer and a community safeguarding officer, all overseen by a specific board member.

  Centres of Excellence operated by Football League clubs are wedded to the same safeguarding policy, which involves constant training and in-house education. The Professional Footballers’ Association was rather less precise in outlining the nature of its response, with chief executive Gordon Taylor suggesting there were ‘approximately forty’ counsellors available to 50,000 current or former players.

  Faltering action had greater impact than fine words. There was shameful initial reluctance to offer formal backing to the Offside Trust, an independent charitable organisation established by Woodward and four fellow victims of abuse to support individuals and families who have suffered similarly. It was neither too early nor too raw a topic for a gesture of appropriate benevolence and contrition.

  The insistence of Martin Glenn, the FA’s chief executive, that there had been no cover-up, was thrown into sharp relief by Chelsea’s apologetic admittance of a £50,000 payment to former player Gary Johnson, to ensure his silence about his molestation by Eddie Heath, the club’s chief scout in the seventies. Heath, who died of a heart attack more than twenty years ago, was also involved with junior teams in east London.

  The timing of the confidentiality agreement, 2013, and its conditions, so stringent that until the club relented all parties involved were not allowed to acknowledge its existence, was startling, yet the culture it represented was familiar. Football abhors loose talk, even as it abides loose money or loose morals.

  Other clubs in Chelsea’s exposed position would certainly have considered the same solution. Nothing has changed, intrinsically, since an interim FA report into child protection in 2004, revealed by the Independent’s Ian Herbert, observed that ‘closure and secrecy were perceived to be habitual’ in a game that was ‘reluctant to engage with professional expertise’.

  Funding was pulled two years into what was intended to be a five-year investigation. One witness statement, which spoke of professional football as ‘an aggressive, masculine environment in which bad language, threatening behaviour and verbal abuse features highly’, concurs with my experience. So, too, does anecdotal evidence that complainants, generally parents seeking a response from politicians and football administrators, were ignored, patronised or directed elsewhere.

  One case, unearthed during my research for this book, has been passed on by those involved, to be investigated by Operation Fremont, which is considering contemporary abuse alongside Operation Hydrant’s investigation into historic offences. It concerns a coach claimed to have been seen behaving inappropriately when under-13 players were in a shower. An official complaint, registered by a fellow coach, was dismissed by a Premier League club following what parents believe to have been an insubstantial investigation.

  The complainant, whose letter I have seen, left the club, together with the welfare officer who was his first point of contact. Both men are held in the highest esteem by their peers, and have given statements to detectives, but are circumspect about publicly acknowledging their role because they have a teaching background. The suspect currently works as a first team coach in the professional game.

  I seek to balance the bad with the good, to offer insight into the people and philosophies shaping the future of English football. The journey begins, and ends, in the sink estates of south London, where sport supplements an admirable struggle to nullify nihilistic gangs. It features absurdly premature wealth and demonstrates the devastation wrought by economic and ethical poverty.

  All human life is there, to quote that evocative old-fashioned tabloid masthead. There are names to remember, misjudgements to forget. I visited pristine training complexes, park pitches, international arenas, non-league grounds and hermetically sealed Premier League palaces; all, in their nuanced ways, failed to sanitise the fear and insecurity generated by the distortion of the power of opportunity.

  Parents raged at their impotence. Boys seemed old before their time, and still radiated the vulnerability of infants. Coaches quietly questioned their consciences. There are good people at work, pursuing enlightened strategies, but too many shadows are cast over what should be a sun-dappled landscape by venality, opportunism and insensitive micromanagement.

  A senior coach speaks of a 9-year-old at a Premier League club being paid £24,000 a year through his parents. A member of the England under-15 squad is understood to have been offered a two-year professional contract worth £45,000 a week. Entire families may be supported through a black economy driven by illicit incentives that include houses, cars and cash, but victims of an overheated system, shaped by political expedience and casual cruelty, are not hard to find.

  The 6-year-old rejected because he has ‘picked up bad habits’. The 8-year-old with a price on his head in what amounts to a meat market. The 9-year-olds called into a squad meeting at the training ground, who only realise they have no future at a Premier League clu
b when they are told to leave the room after seeing the survivors being given next season’s kits.

  The aspiring scholars at another Premier League club who, in an era in which the intensity of youth training is blamed for the average age of players requiring hip surgery falling to 27, are informed by a cost-cutting chief executive they can only undergo scans if their parents have private medical insurance, or are willing to pick up the bill.

  The father of a 12-year-old who feels compelled to keep a log of all conversations with an academy coach he is convinced is ‘exploiting my child by toying with his mind’. The parent who sees a son suffer sustained bullying by an under-13 coach who bawls and belittles, while dispensing tickets for first-team matches to the favoured few.

  The 15-year-old goalkeeper who sustains a double fracture of the jaw in training and is given two paracetamol tablets and the promise of a compensatory one-year contract extension, which is quickly and quietly reneged upon. Another goalkeeper, recruited at the age of 5, who learns he has been released at 16 through the club’s website, which misspells his name.

  The academy manager so constrained by the system he feels he has no official outlet to register his disgust that his most promising player has been lured to a bigger club by an informal offer of £250,000 in cash, accepted immediately after an FA Youth Cup tie by a father who has no compunction in using his son as collateral.

  The reputable independent agent so powerless to prevent emerging players being poached that he sees international prospects spirited away by rivals who use duplicitous parents or close relatives as co-conspirators. The colleague confronted by the father of a so-called wonderkid, fresh from a solitary season in Northern Europe, demanding a personal payment of 5 million euros to approve a transfer to an English club.

  This is a world of fear and loathing, where unprincipled agents stalk pre-teen players on social media, and circulate in training grounds, surreptitiously offering boys cinema tickets as tainted tokens of their esteem. Some have been smuggled through security checks in cars driven by complicit parents. To quote a principled specialist in youth recruitment, who is appalled by the scramble to secure players as young as 6 on pre-agreement contracts, ‘everyone wants a new toy’.