It was April 24 last year when Dick Advocaat, in the heat of the relegation battle, was asked how on earth Sunderland could justify lifting Adam Johnson’s suspension when the player had just been charged with grooming and three counts of sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl.
“It’s not difficult to deal with,” the Dutchman said with a shrug of the shoulders. “If he feels OK, he will be part of the squad.”
Not difficult to deal with? Advocaat did not make clear whether he meant from the perspective of the player, the manager or the club, but the issues that he and Sunderland apparently found so straightforward looked rather more difficult to “deal with” after Johnson pleaded guilty to two of the charges at Bradford crown court. Yesterday he was found guilty of a third charge, relating to sexual touching, and not guilty of a fourth, relating to another sexual act.
Advocaat has moved on, replaced as manager by Sam Allardyce, and Johnson had his contract terminated by Sunderland almost as soon as he made his guilty plea. In a statement last night, Sunderland made clear that they did not know of his intention to plead guilty until he did so, adding that, “had the club known that Mr Johnson intended to plead guilty to any of these charges, then his employment would have been terminated immediately” — as indeed it was after he did so in court.
There is no reason to doubt Sunderland’s statement. No, the discomfort surrounds the decision they made last April to let Johnson keep playing. The club statement suggests that this was a straightforward decision based on his intention to defend himself against all charges. Yet Sunderland were made aware by police of the “broad nature” of the allegations in March last year and were given access in May to the content of the messages which Johnson sent the girl — the messages that formed the basis for his admission of grooming.
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Sunderland explained this last night on the basis that they were “not in a position to make any judgment on the outcome of the case”. Nobody was asking them to. What a club such as Sunderland might very reasonably have been expected to do, if they regard themselves as a community institution, is to apply their own code of conduct and decide that, in view of the unedifying nature of the allegations and the evidence, he was unfit to represent them on such a high-profile stage.
All too rarely are such ethical standards applied in football — and when they are, it is often selectively, with sanctions imposed on players whose on-pitch value is outweighed by the baggage and adverse publicity of their actions. Sunderland claimed to have acted “quickly” in terminating Johnson’s contract after being shocked by his guilty plea on day one of the trial. For that, they deserve some credit, but the question remains as to why they were not quicker in banishing him when they received the evidence.