As turmoil envelops West Ham Football Club & David Sullivan, Johnny Vedmore asks the most important safeguarding question of all.
West Ham Football Club is now about to face a similar reckoning to that faced by many other football clubs and institutions. The culture will be questioned, the safeguarding protocols will be scrutinised, and every skeleton will be outed from the proverbial closet. Many of the West Ham supporters have been knocked for six by the troubling allegations surrounding their club’s owner, David Sullivan. And, however nice blissful ignorance may be, there is no excuse to ignore the history which demonstrates why child safeguarding should be of paramount importance at any football club.
The culture of football clubs during the 1970s, 1980s and much of the 1990s was dominated by alpha male behaviour and organised violence. Football clubs all around the United Kingdom back then were only barely family-friendly. Some clubs could even be described as dens of vice, as glorified in TV and film. However, as I know from my hometown club, Cardiff City, that culture can change, and in the modern world of professional football, priorities have shifted. Modern football clubs must have strict safeguarding protocols in place, as well as standard operating procedures for everything from health and safety to communications and PR. And there are significant and harrowing reasons why safeguarding should be of paramount concern.
What you are about to read will demonstrate what happens when a culture of secrecy quickly crumbles. I will look back at a relatively recent Premier League scandal that proved that one whistleblower can topple any proverbial house of cards.
Child safeguarding is of great importance to me. I was targeted by a paedophile when I was 9 years old, and the abuse I suffered personally lasted almost two years before I told someone. Even though I helped secure a conviction against my own abuser, I was then failed by the court system, the police, and my own parents. I experienced my first institutional cover-up of child sex crimes before I was even a teenager, and this issue has been personal to me ever since.
Historic Abuse Within Football Clubs
When child safeguarding isn’t seen as vital, then predators no longer need to lurk in the shadows.
The United Kingdom is no stranger to abuse cases. In fact, as David Sullivan was starting out as the owner of West Ham United, the Jimmy Savile scandal was breaking. By 2016, the Savile case had widened significantly. Some of Britain’s most beloved institutions and icons were under the cosh. Stewart Hall, Rolf Harris and others went from household heroes to derided villains. Various inquiries were set up to investigate various institutional child abuse scandals. The systematic sexual abuse of teenage girls at the Kendall House care home in Kent was also in the news during 2016. In that case, heroic whistleblowers such as Teresa Cooper forced the system to listen.
And, also in 2016, another abuse scandal rocked professional football in the United Kingdom, and reminded people, at least for a moment, why proactive child safeguarding in organised sport is so vital.
On 16 November 2016, one man dragged the secret abuse which had haunted professional football kicking and screaming into the light. Andy Woodward publicly waived his right to anonymity and exposed the years of abuse he and others suffered at the hands of Barry Bennell in the 1980s. Bennell was a scout and coach at Manchester City, Crewe Alexandra, Stoke City, and other clubs, including smaller feeder clubs. Estimates of his prolificity claim he targeted and abused anywhere from dozens of young boys to hundreds. Both Man City and Crewe were criticised for ignoring the rumours which accompanied Barry Bennell’s abuse. Many of the incidents of abuse occurred in youth academies, feeder teams, holiday camps, and training setups linked to clubs.
Andy Woodward’s voice prompted a plethora of further allegations from other victims, and within the week, a dedicated NSPCC/FA helpline identified 350 more. By July 2018, the number of alleged victims stood at 849, with 300 suspects identified across 340 football clubs. Soon after, more offenders were identified. Bob Higgins was a youth coach at Southampton and Peterborough United. He was convicted in 2019 on 45-46 counts of indecent assault on 24 boys. Eddie Heath abused boys at Chelsea, and in 2015, the club even paid £50,000 in hush money to a victim. George Ormond abused boys at Newcastle United while being part of their youth setup. Other abusers linked to Celtic Boys Club, Aston Villa, Blackpool, Scunthorpe and Grimsby were also exposed by Woodward’s initial bravery.
Clive Sheldon QC examined cases between 1970 and 2005 and found that the Football Association had demonstrated significant institutional failings. Sheldon also noted that the FA “did not do enough to keep children safe” and acted “far too slowly” to introduce child protection measures. After 2016, child safeguarding in football may have been significantly strengthened, but the belief that it was simply a legacy issue has allowed the threat to rise again.
In all of these cases, rumours which could have been investigated were ignored. This is a repeated theme in every institutional abuse scandal of the past 30 years: there were opportunities to prevent the abuse, and they were ignored. This is central to the David Sullivan case: West Ham Football Club has chosen ignorance over safeguarding.
A Culture of Abuse
Good safeguarding is about creating a good culture.
Hearing that may put most people to sleep, but still, it’s true. Culture is everything. Abuse happens because the culture allows it. If you want an institution to have strong child safeguarding, you must create cultures and systems in which risks are prevented, concerns are raised early, and children feel safe, listened to, and supported. In the United Kingdom, this is not only a moral duty but also a legal one.
The culture of the past allowed Barry Bennell and others to systematically abuse hundreds, if not thousands, of children in football clubs around the United Kingdom. The risk of abuse was not prevented in the historic examples we’ve examined so far. Children were left alone with their abusers, and these men were given unlimited access to children. Some children were taken to other offenders outside the football club’s grounds. The culture during this period was one in which children did not feel heard or supported. If they did raise concerns, they were often ignored or purposely silenced. This led to cover-ups and collusion.
Football Clubs in the United Kingdom have written safeguarding policies, usually based on the FA template. This policy explicitly states that child welfare is paramount and covers all forms of abuse. There are trained Designated Safeguarding Officers or welfare officers at club level and the safeguarding policies are shared with parents and players. There is also Disclosure and Barring Service checks, reference checks, and interviews designed to explore attitudes towards safeguarding. However, these same vital checks do not appear to be required for ownership of a football club. Whether or not David Sullivan has any previous sexual convictions becomes irrelevant if child safeguarding measures are not applied to the upper echelons of an organisation.
Since dealing with the Sullivan case, the thing which has frustrated me the most is the culture. As always, we hope that everything changes because better safeguarding protocols have been applied. In reality, abusers don’t suddenly stop their abuse simply because people write words on a page. Abusers will gravitate to where they can gain access to children. As a result, cultures of abuse form where people are most silent.
Most of the people I have spoken to seem to believe that David Sullivan’s history of abuse and West Ham’s current child safeguarding policies are totally disconnected. In fact, the West Ham fans often protest David Sullivan’s ownership of West Ham. However, they are not invoking the significant threat to safeguarding at the club in their protests. I have spoken to various fans behind the scenes who have expressed one thing in particular: they felt they could not openly protest their safeguarding concerns because they expected some form of reprisal or sanction. At West Ham, it isn’t simply that people feel they can’t raise their concerns early; they feel they can’t raise them at all. This is one of many serious red flags suggesting that there is a culture at West Ham which attracts sexual predators.
The Rumour Mill
Rumours remain as rumours until they are investigated.
Throughout the most famous institutional abuse cases, there were rumours. There were rumours concerning Jimmy Savile’s behaviour, there were rumours concerning Jeffrey Epstein’s operation; wherever there is systemic abuse, rumours are an intrinsic factor. Good safeguarding means rumours are investigated. However, when the prevailing culture automatically equates rumours with gossip, it leads to a culture in which people refuse to investigate the source of the rumours.
When I first reported on David Sullivan, I discovered something very telling. Many West Ham fans didn’t have a clue about Sullivan’s history. I was regularly met by frustrated people who were only beginning to process the information about Sullivan’s sordid past, let alone the growing chorus of troubling allegations. Other fans told me that David Sullivan’s past behaviour doesn’t reflect on the football club, while others claimed anything David Sullivan does has no consequence on West Ham, full stop. The majority of those I spoke to were angry that I said anything at all.
A minority became so angry that they simply shouted abuse at me. One West Ham fan described me as “a fake”. He refused to acknowledge that I was a journalist. He ignored the more than a decade of my writing, concentrating on institutional abuse cases. He refused to look at any article. Any site. Anything which gave me any credibility. This is part of every case I work on. When I started reporting on the Epstein case 7 years ago, I was also called all sorts of names. Most people refused to look at the evidence or listen to any information for various reasons.
When people realise that an institutional abuse case is real, it often changes their wider perception of reality. They have to share their concerns with others, and they soon receive the same abuse that I receive for simply reporting this behaviour. This reaction is why people do not feel comfortable raising safeguarding concerns. This is how a culture of silence forms.
The majority of this behaviour can be attributed to the use of a simple logical fallacy, the “shoot the messenger” fallacy. This fallacy sidesteps the actual accusations by focusing on the bearer of the information. It is a logical error where someone attacks, discredits, or punishes a person who delivers inconvenient or unwelcome information. It is the most lethal weapon of a prolific sex offender, as it maintains a culture of silence; ergo, it maintains a culture of abuse.
A Brave New Culture
Changing an entire culture sometimes means standing alone.
The week before I wrote this, I was walking through the city centre of Cardiff with a new camera I’d just purchased. I did a little recording and, as I was about to go home, I saw a man who was clearly drunk or on drugs, with blood all up his arms, bothering young girls. I had been arguing with West Ham fans in the days leading up to this encounter, and the subject of unhealthy cultures weighed on my mind. I watched the man approach various girls, bother them, and leave them visibly uncomfortable, and I decided to record what came next.
I observed the man’s behaviour before I started recording; it was clear that everyone in the vicinity was ignoring what he was doing. He was targeting every teenage girl who passed by. As I watched him, he approached two girls, roughly 13 or 14 years old, who moved away from him as he mumbled at them and got closer. After I told him to stop bothering the girls, he chased me around Queen Street, stumbling here and there while intermittently harassing more girls. Eventually, the police arrived and arrested him.
For me, it seemed simple. If my child were being bothered by an incoherent, mumbling, fully grown man, covered in sweat and blood, I would want someone to intervene. I would want my child to be protected from such dangers. However, for the people online, it was either totally black or totally white. They either believed that anyone should intervene in that situation, or they were totally angered that I dared to intervene. The people who were happy were mostly women, while the people who were angry were mostly men. In my experience, a culture created by women usually makes safeguarding a central pillar, while a culture created by men tends to ignore it by default.
While I am not being so simplistic as to say all women make a certain decision and all men make different decisions. I am saying that men clearly place safeguarding concerns lower on their list of priorities than women. However, in practice, it’s not that simple. While I was being abused by a repeat sex offender when I was a child, I didn’t think about my situation through a cultural lens, or as a situation dictated by the gender or sex of those who cared for me. I simply thought about surviving each encounter.
It wasn’t simply difficult to tell someone in authority what was happening to me when I was a child; it was almost impossible. It was made harder because my abuser pre-empted the obvious. Like any abuser, he knew that the most effective way to keep me silent was to make me think that I would be rejected by others. He told me regularly that my parents would be angry if I told them about what he had been doing. As the years have gone by, I have realised that, even though he was using a tactic to silence me, he was essentially correct. When I eventually told my parents, they were relatively supportive at first. However, they became less and less sympathetic the more they realised what the accompanying cultural backlash entailed. Firstly, they had to deal with the police, support me through a court case, and fight an institution that gave them pushback. My parents went as far as was culturally comfortable before they told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was never allowed to talk about my experience ever again.
My parents went further than most parents would go. They did the right thing even when it became uncomfortable. However, when it became too uncomfortable, they chose silence. After his initial conviction, my abuser was able to continue being around me, unsupervised, and this continued for years. During that time, I had no voice; I had no one left to tell. I was alone. There is a fundamental difference between ignoring rumours and ignoring known behaviour.
Building a culture where safeguarding is paramount relies on creating a forum of trust and transparency, which allows those who have suffered the worst trauma to speak. So, if you are the Designated Safeguarding Officer at a Premier League football club whose owner is awash with rumours of abuse, it is impossible to create a forum of trust and transparency.
True safeguarding, the ability to recognise abuse and to be able to reach the abused while they are trapped within the psychological cage their abusers create, requires a culture of TOTAL trust. Trust like that isn’t created within an organisation headed by the former king of porn, who was once convicted of living off the immoral earnings of prostitution, and who is widely rumoured to be a prolific sexual offender.
Because of my unfortunate experience, it’s easy for me to imagine something that, for many people, is almost impossible. It’s as simple as asking one question:
If I were a 10-year-old being abused at West Ham Football Club, would I feel safe enough to report the abuse?
I can tell you that my abuser would have used any potential weakness he could to undermine my sense of safety. As would any other abuser.
I am very happy that David Sullivan has stepped down. My only wish is that he would have been ousted by West Ham United’s safeguarding team. That would have proved that they had effective safeguarding in place. Regardless. Now, West Ham has an opportunity to reflect, investigate, and learn from the club’s experience, and to put in place robust safeguarding measures fit for a top-tier, family-friendly club.
I will leave you with this.
In November 2025, I contacted West Ham United Football Club’s Foundation Safeguarding Manager, Gemma Chaffey, as well as other key West Ham staff. Although I am legally gagged from revealing some parts of what I wrote to Gemma, with Elon Musk and X’s legal team threatening to delete my account if I do report on it, I will reveal what I am legally allowed to show.
Dear Gemma,
I’m sure you’re probably already aware of my work. If not, my name is Johnny Vedmore. I am an investigative journalist working on historic abuse cases as well as other high-profile cases. I have recently written an article about the many abuse allegations against West Ham’s owner David Sullivan. It is clear that there is a major issue with safeguarding at West Ham, and as the Foundation Safeguarding Manager, I am connecting with you to voice my concerns.
Sometime this week, REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTEDREDACTED. When that happens, you will be the most important person at West Ham. REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. Some of the accusations are from women who were children at the time they claim David Sullivan raped them. Along with masses of circumstantial evidence and other prima facie evidence pointing towards a definitive profile of exploitation, grooming and abuse. I’m not going to ask to speak to you, though; if you decide to, it would be in the strictest of confidence.
However, your world is about to go crazy. You need to be the voice for the children and women at the club. I truly hope that you will stand up, speak up, and take the lead. If you stand up and be counted now, your future will be bright and your confidence intact. Do what you know is right.
Do what is best for the most vulnerable people at the club. Everyone will be affected by this sort of scandal. Please. I beg of you. Do the right thing. Do what you would do to protect your own family and your own children. You have one chance to make the right decision.
I wish you all the luck, love, and strength in the world.
Johnny Vedmore
