
The former football coach Barry Bennell was branded “sheer evil” and the “devil incarnate” on Monday after being sentenced to 30 years in prison for subjecting junior players from Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra to hundreds of sexual offences.
Bennell, now facing complaints from another 86 former players, stared at the floor as the judge, Clement Goldstone QC, gave him prison sentences totalling 454 years, to run concurrently.
There were cries of “yes” from the public gallery at Liverpool crown court as he was sentenced to serve the longest individual term of 30 years, with another year on licence. He will be eligible for parole after 15 years.
The judge told Bennell, 64, he had considered imprisoning him for life because of the “trail of psychological devastation” suffered by the victims and said the severity of the sentence was, in part, because the former coach and talent-spotter had shown no remorse for the 12 former players he had raped and molested over several years.
“In one of your [police] interviews you said that, while it might be fair to describe you as manipulative, cunning and even predatory, you were not evil,” Goldstone told him. “You could not have been more wrong. Your behaviour towards these boys in grooming and seducing them to, in some cases, the most serious, degrading and humiliating abuse was sheer evil.
“You knew that to each of these boys football was their life – the career for which they would give anything. And it was the career for which you would take anything and everything they had to offer. You appeared as a god who had it in his gift to help fulfil their ambitions and realise their dreams. In reality, you were the devil incarnate. You stole their childhoods and their innocence to satisfy your own perversion.”