Paul Stewart bares his soul no more than three times a week. The limit is self-imposed for the good of his own mental health because the experience never fails to fire emotions, the content is brutal and the torment for him real and present.
To see the former England international pour his trauma all into one-hour safeguarding session for the benefit of academy scholars of Wrexham, aged 16 to 18, and their staff on a wet weekday afternoon in North Wales is to understand only a fraction of what he must be putting himself through.
The four years of physical and sexual abuse from the age of 11 at the hands of a football coach his family trusted, via the self-destruction of his career at Manchester City, Tottenham and Liverpool among others, to the lasting impact on his family and the rapid decline in the health of his parents since he told them and the rest of the world what had happened to him.
‘Sometimes it can be difficult,’ Stewart admits after the Wrexham session. ‘I talk about my family and it still hurts because I have regret about my actions and how it impacted on them.
‘It takes me the drive home to decompress and to switch back to what I call ‘Stewie Mode’. And that’s something I’ve got to do because I know I’m going to go and do another one in a few days’ time and if I’m not right there’s no point standing up in front of the youngsters trying to give them some advice.
Former England star Paul Stewart has bravely opened up about how he was sexually and physically abused by a former coach
Stewart ran a session for academy shcolars at Wrexham talking about his experiences in the build-up to the FA’s Play Safe weekend
‘I look back at my own career and my behaviour and see how selfish I was. I took so much from the game without realising how lucky I was so it’s probably my way of making amends. I feel like I’m giving something back and that makes me happier.’
Stewart is 59 and has devoted the last seven years to safeguarding. He could happily shoot the breeze on football’s more trifling matters such as whether Spurs might ever win the league again (‘I can’t see it in my lifetime’) or the plummeting fortunes of Manchester United, the team he has followed since childhood, (‘I’m suffering with the rest of the fans’).
But the day-to-day work he does is of an altogether more serious nature, helping to make football a safer environment for young people with these presentations inside academies. He works chiefly with the EFL but other clubs in the Premier League, Scottish football and overseas, and with the police to help children caught up in drugs gangs.
This year, Stewart was proud to receive the EFL’s Contribution to League Football award, now on display in his home near Blackpool alongside an honorary doctorate from Salford University.
His England caps won at all age levels are stuffed in a bin bag in the loft. There are no medals on show. Nor a framed photo of the Wembley goal scored for Spurs in 1991, the last time they won the FA Cup.
‘Looking at them just represents heartache and pain,’ he says. ‘What I went through to achieve those medals and caps was far too expensive not only in terms of my own life but my family as well. I didn’t enjoy my career one bit. The awards for work I’ve done off the field and the book I wrote are far more important.’
Stewart’s book ‘Damaged’ was published in 2017 by Trinity Mirror and its harrowing script form the bones of these sessions.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he tells the room at the outset in a slow Manchester drawl. ‘The last thing you want to do is sit and listen to some fat ex-footballer you’ve never heard of banging on about something that’s not that interesting.’
The former Tottenham and Liverpool player does not even display his caps or medals, such is the pain he went through to achieve them
He bares his soul no more than three times a week, revealing the devastating impact his abuse as a child has had on his adult life
But listen they do. They listen intently as he tells them how he grew up in the 1970s on the Wythenshawe council estate where Frank Roper, the coach of the best junior team in the area and a scout for Blackpool, groomed and subjected him daily to sexual and physical abuse.
He explains how fear took hold as Roper issued threats to harm his family while bringing gifts like football boots and a colour TV into the house and how it haunted him through an adulthood blighted by alcohol and drug addictions, two attempts to take his own life and harmed his relationships with his three children.
‘The abuse when it was happening wasn’t the worst part,’ Stewart told Wrexham’s scholars. ‘As a child I was able to deal with it. The worst part was the effect on my adult life and the worst time was at Liverpool. I was on cocaine every day. I lost all that desire and love for football.’
Nobody in the room utters a word. Nobody fidgets or scans a mobile device. It is a testament to the manners of the young men in Wrexham’s academy but also to the force of the story and its relevance in the modern world.
Football has been on alert to the dangers since shameful scandals from Stewart’s era were exposed in 2016 when Andy Woodward’s revelations about another paedophile coach Barry Bennell gave so many other former footballers the courage to step forward for the first time.
Child abuse has not disappeared, however, and many young players emerge from vulnerable sectors of society.
‘These people haven’t gone away,’ says Stewart, who is backing the FA’s ‘Play Safe’ campaign to raise awareness this weekend. ‘They are still out there just using different methods to access our children.
‘Football has become a safer place, but we need to be mindful these individuals will go elsewhere and if you get complacent that’s when you’re most vulnerable.’
‘When the abuse stops it carries on and affects your life in some way even when you’re older. When the abuse stops it doesn’t stop’
Wrexham’s youngsters paid full attention to his harrowing story, understanding that the battle against abuse is not over
Stewart mentions Dele Alli, who revealed last year how he was molested at the age of six by a friend of his mother’s and recruited to deliver drugs for dealers in Milton Keynes at eight. ‘It all resonates with me,’ he says.
He goes on to discuss the pitfalls of social media, not an issue in his day, and the dressing room banter and bullying, which certainly was, and he asks the young players to keep an eye out for changes in behaviour, listen to their teammates and to ask for help when needed.
‘Look after each other,’ is the message.
Stewart lost his father Bert in April. His mother Joyce has dementia and no longer recognises him.
‘For me it’s heartbreaking,’ he says. ‘I know my Mum’s condition is due to me coming forward in 2016 and certainly my Dad’s health deterioration was just so rapid. It’s hard because you feel you constantly have to tell them it wasn’t their fault.
‘They feel guilty like they didn’t look after you. My brothers the same, they feel guilty because I was the youngest and they think they should have looked after me. You’re constantly trying to say, ‘Look, it wasn’t your fault, you could’ve done nothing about it’.
‘I had to make a decision on whether or not I came forward for my own solace. I think they were pleased I was able to do that. With abuse there’s always something. When the abuse stops it carries on and affects your life in some way even when you’re older. When the abuse stops it doesn’t stop.’
You can contact Childline on 0800 1111 any hour, any day of the week, for free