Fifty-five league and non-league clubs have been referred to police in the child sex abuse scandal that has shattered English football’s image, a source told The Observer newspaper on Sunday.
The size and scale of the fast-developing scandal has been laid bare in The Observer with already a third of British police forces holding their own investigations which has so far seen only former Crewe Alexandra youth scout Barry Bennell, already jailed three times for child abuse, charged last Tuesday.
“We can confirm that 55 clubs in total have been referenced,” a source at the National Police Chiefs Council — which is in charge of organizing the Hydrant Operation which looks into cases of long ago sex abuse — told The Observer.
In other developments English football’s embattled governing body the Football Association (FA) has been accused in The Sunday Mirror by Russell Davy, a former Charlton Athletic youth goalkeeper, of not replying to his letter in 1986 warning them of abuse by scout Eddie Heath.
Heath had moved onto Charlton after being dismissed by Chelsea — not for child abuse, but for “spending a lot of his time in his office, decorating and cooking meals for the schoolboy players”. The club reportedly made a controversial payment in 2015 to Gary Johnson, a player abused by Heath in the 1970s.
Johnson has since gone public, and the club issued a profuse apology to him on Saturday.

Source: Arab News