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A self-appointed football coach told young players he could help them get professional contracts in return for sexual favours. Emmanuel Igwebuike, 35, sexually assaulted seven teenage boys at his unlicensed football academy over an 18-month period.

Some of the boys were also told it was “punishment” for turning up late to training, a court heard on Friday. 

Igwebuike posed as a “community champion” who wanted to help get teens off the street and away from knife crime in the capital but he abused his position of trust.

The creep has now been jailed for 15 years at Inner London Crown Court.

Judge Freya Newbery said there was an element of “degradation and humiliation” in the sexual assaults.

Sentencing Igwebuike, the judge said: “The tale all starts with this – the huge draw of professional football for boys and perhaps for girls as well these days. It’s such a draw.

“It’s the potential for money and status of course but also the pure joy of doing something for a living which is the thing you love, in other words football. The boys have that in common as, initially at least, they loved football.

“They came to you as it were because you were a football coach and you set up an academy which was unlicensed and unregulated but a football academy.

“Some of the training was relatively informal but some was much more formal and a strict training regime and so on, which you did with the aim of helping boys serious about careers in football and push that forward.

“There are lots of things the victims had in common, in particular their desire to be a professional footballer. And so for each of them the sexual assaults took place in the context of football, football training, football trials that sort of thing. Usually during the day and usually where you resided.”

Christopher May, prosecuting, said Igwebuike “ingratiated” himself with the teenager’s families by going over for dinner and also had close connections with the local church.

He would then use his trusted position to get the boys alone and sexually assault them. Igwebuike was not affiliated to the English Football Association (FA) or any local football club.

Mr May said: “He achieved trust and family trust in order to get them alone in private premises where he could abuse them.  He set himself up as a community champion against knife crime and befriended and gained the trust of parents and the local church.
 
“He set himself up as a figure within the community who could and should be trusted by the boys and their parents.”

But Igwebuike, from south London, was convicted by a jury of 22 counts of sexual assault earlier this year.

At the sentencing hearing, Mr May read a victim impact statement from one of the teenagers.

The boy said he told Igwebuike the sexual assaults made him want to kill himself but Igwebuike “brushed this off” and told him it was a way to “build trust”.

He said: “What has happened to me is always at the back of my mind like a permanent scar.

“When I’m out with my friends having a good time, seeing intimacy between different people makes me feel really uncomfortable

“He was very controlling of me and my life. Everything he says goes. I felt as though I was on a leash and I couldn’t get out. I feel as though I’m unable to make my own decisions.”

Mr May said another victim was “scared and embarrassed to tell anyone” and said Igwebuike had “taken his dignity away”.

Another boy said he stopped going to football because of the assault and took up boxing instead.

The boy said: “He tried to kiss my face and he was saying ‘I love you.’ It creeped me out.”

The prosecutor added: “He describes how the defendant was trying to manipulate him, how the defendant would make him feel bad and how he referred to it like it was punishment – and particularly how the defendant tried to invoke religious connotations for what he was doing and how his punishment would make him become closer to the defendant.”

The judge said Igwebuike was “passionate” about promoting football as a way of keeping boys off the streets and did help some young players with their careers by using his “good connections and links”.

But she added: “Those were the boys to whom you were not sexually attracted.”

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