Tough read,
‘I lost my career’ – former pro Andy Woodward opens up on sexual abuse
The 43-year-old speaks of the abuse suffered at the hands of former coach Barry Bennell
Daniel Taylor
It isn’t easy sitting opposite Andy Woodward and hearing, close-up, the unspeakable horrors of his childhood and the reasons why, at the age of 43, he finally feels able to tell his story and free himself from the secret – “the massive, horrible burden” – that has shaped his life.
It has been there since the age of 11 when a football-daft kid from a family of Manchester United supporters first came to the attention of the coach, scout and serial paedophile Barry Bennell and it is difficult even to contemplate how much Woodward has suffered before reaching this point where he has offered to waive his anonymity and speak publicly about it for the first time.
He is doing so in the belief there are many others – potentially hundreds, he says – who are living with their own secrets given Bennell’s employment at Crewe Alexandra in the 1980s and 1990s and close association in the past with Stoke City and Manchester City, as well as junior teams in Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire and Greater Manchester.
Bennell was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1998 after admitting 23 specimen charges of sexual offences against six boys aged nine to 15. Woodward was among the victims at Crewe and knows of other former pros who were targeted. Many more, he suspects, never made it as professional footballers whereas his own career, also featuring spells at Bury, Sheffield United and Scunthorpe, ended at the age of 29 because he was unable to cope with the horrendous after-effects of what he had to endure.
Woodward had to fake an injury during one game because he was having the kind of panic attack that became a regular feature in his career. He has been suicidal “on probably 10 occasions”. He has spent his professional life battling depression and anxiety and is haunted by what a man who described himself in legal proceedings as a “monster” told him about some of the other victims.
“My life has been ruined until the age of 43,” Woodward says. “But how many others are there? I’m talking about hundreds of children who Barry Bennell cherry-picked for various football teams and who now, as adults, might still be living with that awful fear.
“We’ve seen with the Jimmy Savile case how people have had the courage, yet I’d say within the football world it’s even harder to speak out. Only now, at the age of 43, I feel I can actually live without that secret and that massive, horrible burden. I want to get it out and give other people an opportunity to do the same. I want to give people strength. I survived it. I lost my career, which was a massive thing for me, but I’m still here. I came through the other side. Other people can have that strength.”
Woodward’s ordeal began when he was playing for Stockport Boys and Bennell invited him to train with one of his teams on Manchester City’s pitches at Platt Lane. Bennell talent-spotted boys, aged nine to 14, around the north-west and Midlands over three decades and Woodward was talented enough to be directed towards Crewe’s youth set-up. “I just wanted to play football. My mum and dad will say that I always had a football in my hands, wherever I went. I saw Crewe as the start of that dream. But I was soft-natured, too, and it was the softer, weaker boys Bennell targeted.”
Bennell arranged for him to stay at his house on the edge of the Peak District. “It was like a treasure trove, a child’s dream,” Woodward says. “When you walked through the door there were three fruit machines. He had a pool table. There was a little monkey upstairs in a cage who would sit on your shoulder. He had two Pyrenean mountain dogs. He even kept a wild cat. It was my dream, remember, to be a footballer and it was like he was dropping little sweets towards me – ‘you can stay with me and this is what I can do for you’. Plus he had a reputation as the best youth coach in the country. So I’d stay at weekends and summer holidays and even take time out of school sometimes. I’d go to all the Crewe matches with him. He liked dark-haired boys. I was a kid, I trusted him to begin with.”
When the abuse started, Bennell used threats and blackmail to make sure his victims did not go against him. “What he’d do sometimes, to show the fear factor and make sure I never told anyone, was get out some nunchucks,” Woodward says. “He was a master with them. He’d tell me to hold out a piece of paper. I’d be physically shaking. Then he’d hit it with enough force to split it in half and make a little comment: ‘You see what I can do, you see how powerful I am?’
“It was either threats of violence or he’d use football to manipulate control. If I upset him in any way, he’d drop me from the team. ‘At any point,’ he’d tell me, ‘you will go, you will disappear and that dream won’t happen.’ It was emotional blackmail, all the time.”
The young Woodward became “very introverted, I didn’t lead a normal teenage life”. Yet there are other parts of this story that make it even more chilling. When Woodward was 14, Bennell started having a relationship with his victim’s 16-year-old sister. “He was so much older he didn’t want people to know at first and told me I would never play football again if I breathed a word of it,” Woodward says. “I was frightened to death because he had complete power over me by that stage. It was like a double whammy and he would try to abuse me sometimes even with my sister in the same house. Later, when their relationship became public, he would come round for Sunday dinner every weekend, sitting with my mum and dad and my family, laughing and joking. I was so frightened of him I just had to suffer in silence.”
The wedding took place in 1991 and Woodward, at 18, had to go through the hellish ordeal of seeing the man who had exploited, controlled and abused him for years become his brother-in-law. “I had to live with that on top of everything else,” he says. “I had to attend that wedding, standing in the church when I really wanted to rip his throat out. It was torture – that’s the only word to describe it.”
Despite everything, Woodward progressed through the ranks at Crewe and made his first-team debut a year later. Mentally, however, he could not cope. “From the age of 11 I had lived with a secret. And living with a secret is probably one of the hardest things you can ever live with. If you look at my career you will see I was plagued with quite a few injuries. A lot of those injuries were actually mental injuries.
“I had desperately wanted to be a footballer. It’s all I lived for. Yet there was so much anger and hurt within me that it was actually football, this game I loved, that took away my life as a child. It felt like I was in two worlds. I’d be training when I just wanted to burst into tears. A coach might be screaming and shouting and all I wanted to do is punch him in the face because ‘you’ve no idea what you coaches have done to me’. There have been lots of dips.”
‘I lost my career’ – former pro Andy Woodward opens up on sexual abuse
The 43-year-old speaks of the abuse suffered at the hands of former coach Barry Bennell
Daniel Taylor
It isn’t easy sitting opposite Andy Woodward and hearing, close-up, the unspeakable horrors of his childhood and the reasons why, at the age of 43, he finally feels able to tell his story and free himself from the secret – “the massive, horrible burden” – that has shaped his life.
It has been there since the age of 11 when a football-daft kid from a family of Manchester United supporters first came to the attention of the coach, scout and serial paedophile Barry Bennell and it is difficult even to contemplate how much Woodward has suffered before reaching this point where he has offered to waive his anonymity and speak publicly about it for the first time.
He is doing so in the belief there are many others – potentially hundreds, he says – who are living with their own secrets given Bennell’s employment at Crewe Alexandra in the 1980s and 1990s and close association in the past with Stoke City and Manchester City, as well as junior teams in Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire and Greater Manchester.
Bennell was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1998 after admitting 23 specimen charges of sexual offences against six boys aged nine to 15. Woodward was among the victims at Crewe and knows of other former pros who were targeted. Many more, he suspects, never made it as professional footballers whereas his own career, also featuring spells at Bury, Sheffield United and Scunthorpe, ended at the age of 29 because he was unable to cope with the horrendous after-effects of what he had to endure.
Woodward had to fake an injury during one game because he was having the kind of panic attack that became a regular feature in his career. He has been suicidal “on probably 10 occasions”. He has spent his professional life battling depression and anxiety and is haunted by what a man who described himself in legal proceedings as a “monster” told him about some of the other victims.
“My life has been ruined until the age of 43,” Woodward says. “But how many others are there? I’m talking about hundreds of children who Barry Bennell cherry-picked for various football teams and who now, as adults, might still be living with that awful fear.
“We’ve seen with the Jimmy Savile case how people have had the courage, yet I’d say within the football world it’s even harder to speak out. Only now, at the age of 43, I feel I can actually live without that secret and that massive, horrible burden. I want to get it out and give other people an opportunity to do the same. I want to give people strength. I survived it. I lost my career, which was a massive thing for me, but I’m still here. I came through the other side. Other people can have that strength.”
Woodward’s ordeal began when he was playing for Stockport Boys and Bennell invited him to train with one of his teams on Manchester City’s pitches at Platt Lane. Bennell talent-spotted boys, aged nine to 14, around the north-west and Midlands over three decades and Woodward was talented enough to be directed towards Crewe’s youth set-up. “I just wanted to play football. My mum and dad will say that I always had a football in my hands, wherever I went. I saw Crewe as the start of that dream. But I was soft-natured, too, and it was the softer, weaker boys Bennell targeted.”
Bennell arranged for him to stay at his house on the edge of the Peak District. “It was like a treasure trove, a child’s dream,” Woodward says. “When you walked through the door there were three fruit machines. He had a pool table. There was a little monkey upstairs in a cage who would sit on your shoulder. He had two Pyrenean mountain dogs. He even kept a wild cat. It was my dream, remember, to be a footballer and it was like he was dropping little sweets towards me – ‘you can stay with me and this is what I can do for you’. Plus he had a reputation as the best youth coach in the country. So I’d stay at weekends and summer holidays and even take time out of school sometimes. I’d go to all the Crewe matches with him. He liked dark-haired boys. I was a kid, I trusted him to begin with.”
When the abuse started, Bennell used threats and blackmail to make sure his victims did not go against him. “What he’d do sometimes, to show the fear factor and make sure I never told anyone, was get out some nunchucks,” Woodward says. “He was a master with them. He’d tell me to hold out a piece of paper. I’d be physically shaking. Then he’d hit it with enough force to split it in half and make a little comment: ‘You see what I can do, you see how powerful I am?’
“It was either threats of violence or he’d use football to manipulate control. If I upset him in any way, he’d drop me from the team. ‘At any point,’ he’d tell me, ‘you will go, you will disappear and that dream won’t happen.’ It was emotional blackmail, all the time.”
The young Woodward became “very introverted, I didn’t lead a normal teenage life”. Yet there are other parts of this story that make it even more chilling. When Woodward was 14, Bennell started having a relationship with his victim’s 16-year-old sister. “He was so much older he didn’t want people to know at first and told me I would never play football again if I breathed a word of it,” Woodward says. “I was frightened to death because he had complete power over me by that stage. It was like a double whammy and he would try to abuse me sometimes even with my sister in the same house. Later, when their relationship became public, he would come round for Sunday dinner every weekend, sitting with my mum and dad and my family, laughing and joking. I was so frightened of him I just had to suffer in silence.”
The wedding took place in 1991 and Woodward, at 18, had to go through the hellish ordeal of seeing the man who had exploited, controlled and abused him for years become his brother-in-law. “I had to live with that on top of everything else,” he says. “I had to attend that wedding, standing in the church when I really wanted to rip his throat out. It was torture – that’s the only word to describe it.”
Despite everything, Woodward progressed through the ranks at Crewe and made his first-team debut a year later. Mentally, however, he could not cope. “From the age of 11 I had lived with a secret. And living with a secret is probably one of the hardest things you can ever live with. If you look at my career you will see I was plagued with quite a few injuries. A lot of those injuries were actually mental injuries.
“I had desperately wanted to be a footballer. It’s all I lived for. Yet there was so much anger and hurt within me that it was actually football, this game I loved, that took away my life as a child. It felt like I was in two worlds. I’d be training when I just wanted to burst into tears. A coach might be screaming and shouting and all I wanted to do is punch him in the face because ‘you’ve no idea what you coaches have done to me’. There have been lots of dips.”
