Kevan Tudor, a former football coach who groomed a boy with a promise of trials at professional clubs, has been jailed for a further ten years after he pleaded guilty to 17 new offences of child sexual abuse.
Tudor was already serving a nine-year sentence for facilitating child prostitution and sexual activity with a child in 2016. The 61-year-old from Birmingham was just one of 10 men who were jailed for their part in the historical exploitation and abuse of two teenage boys in 2002-2003 and 2009-2010.
After seeing a newspaper article about Tudor’s conviction, another individual came forward in 2017 and reported that he had been abused by Tudor in the early ‘80s when he was just 12 years old. Speaking to police in 2019, officers soon reached a breakthrough when they found an original handwritten football club statistic book from 1980-1986 with all teams, matches, goals and coach records meticulously kept by the then team manager of the club where Tudor coached. From this, police were able to trace witness accounts and identify further people who had suffered abuse—including another survivor, who had no knowledge of the others, who Tudor had abused from the age of 10.
Investigating officer Detective Constable Lisa Monahan said: “Tudor groomed the boy and his family into believing he could be a famous goalkeeper, with promises of football scouts and trials at top-flight clubs. Those dreams were used to secure complete freedom of access to the young boy with coaching sessions many times a week, where he was made to perform sexual acts on Tudor until he was 14. Now in his 50s, he emotively describes the time, as a teenager, when he realised that he was not good enough at football to be professional and never was.”
Appearing at Birmingham Crown Court earlier this month, Tudor was sentenced to 15 years in prison as he admitted to 15 counts of indecent assault on a boy under 16 years of age and two counts of gross indecency against a boy under 14 years of age, which police said were against five victims.
Monahan added: “These men were abused by Tudor as boys trying to follow their dreams of being footballers. They were threatened into silence with being dropped from the teams they played for. Tudor was in a position of trust and so cruelly abused his power over boys at such a vulnerable age. The torment from this does not end when the physical abuse stops and I hope that these men can take some comfort from the knowledge that they are believed.”
