FA 'cut funding' for child protection scheme launched more than 10 years ago

A flagship project designed to review and promote child protection within football was abandoned by the Football Association more than 10 years ago, it has been revealed.

The FA launched a five-year review of child safety measures at all of its associated clubs in 2001 but pulled funding from the programme just two years later.

According to the BBC, the project was met by “resistance” from figures inside the FA – despite being commissioned by the governing body.

During the first two years of the project, academics in charge of the study interviewed 189 children and spoke to senior coaches, referees and administrators from across all levels of the game. A total of 482 interviews were supposedly conducted.

But funding was cut by 40 per cent in the second year at which point the internet survey work and interviews were scaled back.

Then, in 2003, the final three years were cancelled “because of budget constraints”, according to the report itself.

And an evaluation of the project published in 2007 suggested some FA staff had been bullied into not talking or withdrawing relevant information from those conducting the study.

Out of the 13 members of FA staff contacted by the study’s academics, only four responded. Across the project as a whole, the researchers were said to have been met by a “wall of silence” from some people they tried to speak to.

In notes she wrote at the time, Celia Brackenridge, the report’s lead author, questioned the “stated intentions” behind the project.

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"The whole business has drained me and left me feeling even more cynical about their stated intentions to develop welfare initiatives,” she said.

"England have been warned that they will be kicked out of the European Cup if there is one more pitch invasion or racist incident at a game and that should at least keep the new equity strategy to the forefront but, as for child protection, who knows?"

She later wrote: "It left me asking myself whether some of the senior officers in the game might not be simply using child protection as a kind of ethical fig leaf, to cover their embarrassment at the many problems facing the game - doping, crowd control, bungs and fixes - among others.

"The more the FA could trumpet their work for children, the better they could deflect attention from the uglier side of the game."

MP Damian Collins, who sits on the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, hit out at the decision to scrap the project and said it was “extremely concerning”.

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Speaking on the Victoria Derbyshire Programme on the BBC, he said: “This fuels the impression that many people have that people in football were aware there was a problem in terms of child protection.”

He added: “We have seen reports that things were not followed through as they should have been.

“I think people will now look at this and say this is further evidence that there are some people at the FA that did not want to pursue this as properly as they should have done which may have meant that stories of abuse went unreported and uninvestigated.”