Football's Darkest Secret: Sexual Abuse, Elite Sport, Masculinity and Victimhood

This chapter focusses on the three-part documentary Football's Darkest Secret (BBC, 2021), which examines the child sexual abuse scandal in English football. The documentary aired on the BBC in March 2021. It came in the wake of disclosures made by several men abused by coaches in the 1970s and 1980s, and the subsequent inquiry and report into the English Football Association's failure to protect young boys from abuse by predators at both professional and amateur football clubs. Across three episodes, the documentary presents firsthand accounts from survivors of their abuse and the way football clubs turned a blind eye and failed to protect children from predatory coaches. The series also deals with the justice outcomes from some of these cases. As with similar documentaries examining sexual violence and abuse, witnessing survivors' trauma at close range is an intense and emotional experience for the viewer. The ‘out of place’ nature of male victims and vulnerability is further pronounced in the context of elite sports and its relationship to hegemonic masculine ideals (Connell, 2005) where victimisation and vulnerability jar with the codes of idealised masculinity associated with professional sports, especially considering the status of football and elite footballers in England and beyond. Indeed, the sexual abuse of men and boys is often understood in terms of masculinity, or a loss of masculinity and a male sense of self (Javaid, 2017; Stanko & Hobdell, 1993). The following discussion considers the figure of the professional footballer as the apex of successful and valued masculinity and the implications of this for male victims, whose abuse transforms subjectivity and masculinity and disrupts notions of victimhood and vulnerability. I analyse how this plays out in the documentary exploring male victim's visibility and vulnerability within this representational space and how this contrasts with the historical disavowal of male victims as ‘victimological Other’ by academics, criminal justice, support services and the wider public (Walklate, 2017).