‘System let children in football down’

A former Southampton manager, who reported sexual abuse at the club in the 1980s, says he feels the system let victims down.

It was not until 2019 that Higgins was jailed for 24 years for abusing trainees at Southampton and Peterborough United, and on Wednesday an independent review found that “significant institutional failings” by the Football Association had meant children were not kept safe.

Speaking exclusively to Sky Sports News, Merrington says he feels “personally that the system let us down” even though he reported the allegations and the police were informed.

“I went to court on behalf of the club,” he said. “There was an opportunity then. Had something been done then, other boys wouldn’t have been damaged and that is the sad part.

“We got all the boys together in the dressing room and said ‘is there anything you would like to tell us? We know there was a lot of banter going on, but some of the comments you were making were a bit nasty and very disturbing’.

“I looked at the boys. They couldn’t look at me. They looked around the room, up and down and I could feel the fear in the room. Nobody said anything. We couldn’t get anything out of them. They closed up, I think out of embarrassment.

“You have to bear in mind, these young fellas, all they wanted to be was players. They just wanted to get through and make the grade and make the first team. To say anything about that was extremely difficult for them.”

Despite having very little concrete evidence at the time, Merrington was told to raise the matter with Bob Higgins, so he organised a meeting, which soon turned sour.

“I explained the comments to him and within a short period of time he got extremely angry, very aggressive”, Merirngton recalls.

“He came towards me. I backed off. He pointed his finger at me and started shouting, very aggressively: ‘If anything is said about me, I will sue them’.

“He stormed out of the players’ lounge and within a week or two weeks, the manager came back to me and said he had resigned.”

Higgins was found guilty of sexually touching and groping 24 victims at a retrial years later. The Sheldon Report found the FA did not take issues of child protection seriously until the mid-1990s.

Before that, when much of the abuse of young boys was alleged to have taken place, the FA had not provided any guidance to clubs on how to deal with issues of child protection.

Merrington believes the detailed report means the FA now has an opportunity to lead the football world in child protection, but only if the organisation carries out the recommendations that have been made.

Southampton released a statement earlier this week in which they apologised “to all of the victims and survivors of the child abuse carried out by Bob Higgins at Southampton Football Club in the 1970s and 1980s”.

For further information about child abuse, sexual abuse, or exploitation, for either you or someone close to you, please see the list of organisations listed in the child abuse section on Sky’s Viewer Support page.