Bob Higgins sexually abused 'many more' schoolboy footballers, warns victim

Paedophile coach Bob Higgins would have sexually abused “many more” schoolboy footballers, one of his victims warned on Thursday after he was convicted of assaulting 23 teenagers in his care.

The officer in charge of investigating the serial predator also said others may have yet to come forward as the scale of Higgins’ crimes was laid bare by guilty verdicts in 45 of the 51 counts against him at Bournemouth Crown Court.

Higgins, whose former pupils include Alan Shearer and Matt Le Tissier, is facing the rest of his life behind bars, having been finally brought to justice.

The 66-year-old showed no emotion as the verdicts were read at the end of a nine-week trial in which victim after victim described how, over a quarter of a century, he groped them during soapy massages as well as at his home and in his car.

Higgins had already been convicted in July of indecently assaulting one youngster while running Southampton’s youth set-up in the 1980s, with a retrial ordered after a jury failed to reach verdicts on 48 of the remaining charges.

That youngster, Gary Llewellyn, on Thursday waived his right to anonymity at the age of 50, in the hope of encouraging more victims to go to the police.

“I am convinced there are many more people who have suffered at the hands of Higgins and I hope that they find the strength to come forward,” he said.

Detective Chief Inspector Dave Brown, of Hampshire Police, said others to have suffered at the hands of Higgins may not have yet contacted the force.

He said: “I would encourage anyone who has been a victim of abuse, no matter how long ago it happened, to come forward.”

There is no suggestion either Shearer or Le Tissier were among Higgins’s victims.

When the latest allegations against the coach emerged in 2016, Shearer said he had “no personal experience of the terrible stories that have been described” while expressing his “huge respect and admiration” for those to have come forward.

Le Tissier revealed he had been given a “naked massage” by Higgins that was “very, very wrong” but stressed he had not been sexually abused.

Representatives for the pair did not respond to requests for comment last night on Higgins’s conviction, which came almost three decades after he was acquitted of assaulting one of their former team-mates and charges related to five others were dropped.

That left one of football’s biggest paedophiles free to continue offending – including at Peterborough United in the mid-1990s – until a fresh criminal investigation was launched in the wake of football’s child sex abuse scandal.

During his trial, many of his victims described him as God-like, their mentor and their father figure, as well as speaking about how they feared complaining about him would spell the end of their dream to become a professional footballer.

The court heard how he pounced during warm-down massages, in his car while he played love songs – in particular by Whitney Houston – on the stereo, and at his home on the sofa.

Llewellyn, who accused Higgins of groping him in his car around the time of the youngster’s 14^th birthday, said he was now pursuing civil action against his ex-coach as a result of abuse that had left him suffering flashbacks.

He also accused Southampton of failing to do enough to protect him and other victims.

“You have to point the finger and there was some negligence there but there was only one perpetrator,” he said.

Lawrie McMenemy, Southampton’s manager between 1973 and 1985 – the period of much of Higgins’ offending – told the BBC he had been unaware the coach had been taking schoolboys home.

“It’s horrific what he’s done,” he said. “If we’d have known, he wouldn’t have lasted two minutes.”

Guy Askham, who was the club’s chairman when the first allegations against Higgins emerged in 1989, said: “We believed the board had taken the right decision in reporting the allegations to the police.”

Southampton expressed their “deep regret” on Thursday following the guilty verdicts and offered “support” to all who suffered abuse while in their care.

They also said they had been working closely with the police and the Football Association-commissioned Independent Review into Child Sex Abuse Allegations in Football.

The Higgins’ trial prevented that review from concluding its inquiries into what clubs and the FA knew about him and a spokesman confirmed on Thursday it would now do so.

Football’s paedophile scandal has already resulted in a string of high-profile prosecutions of former youth coaches, most notoriously Barry Bennell, who  was jailed in February 2018 for 30 years for sexual offences against junior players at Crewe Alexandra and Manchester City.

George Ormond, 62, who worked for Newcastle United’s youth team, was given a 20-year prison sentence at Newcastle Crown Court in July for offences spanning 25 years.

Former Celtic youth coach James McCafferty, 77, of Lisburn, Northern Ireland, was jailed for six years and nine months at the High Court in Edinburgh on May 14 for 11 charges against 10 victims.

And Michael ‘Kit’ Carson, who worked at Norwich City, Peterborough and Cambridge United, died in a car crash on the first day of his trial at Peterborough Crown Court, where he denied 13 charges.