After Adam Johnson had unbuttoned the jeans and had sexual contact with the 15-year-old fan-girl he’d picked up after a Sunderland game, she asked to be dropped off at a newsagents to get “some sweets or pop”.
That he was grooming a minor was never in doubt. Women who want to sleep with footballers don’t usually hang around outside grounds with autograph books. They besiege them in nightclubs, stuff phone numbers into suit pockets. Asking a player to sign your team shirt is the starry-eyed request of a child. And this girl never disguised her age. “Where do you go out?” Johnson messaged her. “I’m not old enough to go out,” she replied.
So why did this gifted player with a girlfriend and baby in his six-bedroom mansion — and a string of adult side-chicks — risk everything for an underage girl? He was immature and arrogant, was his mitigation, his character ruined by the glory of “people screaming your name”. Chosen for a football academy at 12, a professional team at 17, remote from everyone his own age except other over-fêted boys, earning £60,000 a week doing a job that often ends at lunchtime, how could he not be spoilt? But still: why this girl?
Footballers have always been babe-magnets: a perk since George Best and his Miss Worlds. But a friend in professional football for several decades says he’s noticed the behaviour of players change. It’s no longer about pulling a girl or one-night stands — the stuff no one is proud of but doesn’t hurt. Sex has become a team sport: the men hunt in packs. It’s all threesomes and foursomes: the girl is barely human, just a prop.
At Sunderland in 2006 Ben Alnwick, Chris Brown and Liam Lawrence filmed themselves with a woman: Alnwick performing to the camera with a wink, Woods pleasuring himself, Brown the pundit, giving a commentary. At Leicester City, three players, including the then manager’s son, were sacked for filming sex with a Thai prostitute who they racially abused. Then, of course, there’s Ched Evans: summoned by a mate who’d pulled a drunken girl, peering through the hotel window trying to film them, demanding the right to join in.
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Porn made these men: now they make porn. They are the first generation to have seen explicit sex acts before they had their first kiss. Porn’s amorality, its granite-hearted, perfunctory, joyless, perpetual search for novelty has entered their souls. Adam Johnson was notorious even among team-mates for his porn habit, watching constantly on his mobile phone.
So many porn options. Scroll down and down: whatever fetish you’re into. No one’s judging, the menu is endless. Group sex? That girl with five guys, she’s not complaining. And then, just another choice: “Teenage”. Yeah, why not . . .
The lure of Lolita: the triumph of being the first, the uncomplicated, fawning, malleability and wide-eyed trust. The Barely Legal series in which the guy picks up a hitchhiking girl in school uniform is Hustler’s biggest cash-cow.
Cause and effect is too crude: decent men watch porn and treat women well. But for young guys — with no alternative sexual narrative, perhaps living away from parents for the first time — it is a playbook. And for rich footballers — for whom women are happy to dress, undress and play their part, as they have learnt from watching hardcore themselves — porn must seem very like real life. So in your ennui and amorality, since you’re no longer turned on by booty calls, glamour models, or dates with Katie Price bought at auction for £12,000, why not pick up that little girl outside the ground?
Was Johnson a paedophile? Not in the strictest definition, since she was a post-pubescent girl. But by that reckoning Jimmy Savile wasn’t either since he specialised in that age group. And the dynamic was the same: fan and star. Sunderland come out little better than the BBC, letting their valuable winger keep playing after they had read the 834 WhatsApp messages that passed between them: her saying she was 15, him that he would like a reward for the signed shirt, “a little more than a kiss . . . A bit of feeling. Just see. No pressure.”
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I met a young woman this week who was groomed when she was 14 years old. At 15 she bore the man’s child. In a photo holding her newborn she is no “but-I-thought-she-was-16-officer” nymphette: she looked about 11. But to social workers and police she was Arshid Hussain’s “girlfriend”. That he is now serving 35 years for what he and his brothers did to underage girls in Rotherham shows a shift at last in how we view such men and such girls. As does Adam Johnson’s conviction.
But how much truly has changed when on social media angry young male fans defend their hero by naming the girl? (Ched Evans’s victim was forced several times to move house after his conviction.) “She knew what she was doing . . . was asking for it . . . the little slag.” If I had a daughter groomed by a footballer, I’d think very hard before seeking justice and putting her through that.
Meanwhile, the Professional Footballers’ Association is disappointed in Johnson: it runs programmes, it says, to teach players about “personal integrity”. But what is a single course when sexual impunity is endorsed by clubs, agents, team-mates and fans. The moment young footballers are taught the meaning of consent and plain human decency shouldn’t be when they stand up in court.