A parent voice article about emotional safety, adult behaviour and what clubs need to understand about safeguarding beyond physical harm.
Editor’s note: This article is based on a real parent submission to the Football Mental Health Alliance Vault. Names, locations, clubs, leagues and identifying details have been removed. It is not intended to identify or criticise a specific individual, club or County FA. It is published to open a wider conversation about emotional safety, adult behaviour and safeguarding culture in children’s grassroots football.
He had a tactics board in the garden. He’d watch YouTube training drills, then go outside and run them himself, cones in position, ball at his feet, narrating it the way his coach did. His coach could do no wrong. For seven years, from the age of five, he gave everything to that team.
He left when he was twelve.
This is a parent’s account of what happened, submitted to the Football Mental Health Alliance. The details have been changed to protect everyone involved. The experience they describe is not unique.
The football itself was genuinely good in the early years. Coaches were committed, the group was tight, the boys improved together and became one of those teams that other clubs noticed. It became part of family life the way grassroots football does – weekends built around fixtures, car boots full of wet training kit, parents on the touchline in the rain.
Then the tone changed. It was most noticeable once the players were old enough to be taken into the changing room without parents present.
Children would come out of half-time team talks visibly distressed. Some in tears. Others frightened. The parent describes a pattern of shouting, swearing, threats to drop players, and moments where the adult responsible for these children was hitting a medical bed in anger. At half-time. Losing 1-0. In a grassroots match. Against twelve-year-olds.
The child told his parents what was happening. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted the football to go back to feeling like football. Eventually, mid-team-talk, he stood up and told his coach he wasn’t going to be spoken to that way anymore. Then he walked away from the team he’d spent seven years of his life building.
His parent is proud of him for that. But they’re also clear-eyed about what it means: a twelve-year-old child removed himself from a harmful environment because the adults around him didn’t.
He won’t play again. His parent can’t give him the reassurance he’d need that it would be different somewhere else. Since submitting this piece, they’ve started a petition calling for better regulation of safeguarding in grassroots football. They believe their son isn’t alone. They’re right.
This isn’t a call for emotional perfection from every touchline volunteer. Grassroots football is human. Coaches get frustrated. Matches are tense. Most are undertrained, under pressure from parents and leagues and their own standards. Nobody needs pristine professionalism every muddy weekend.
But there is a line.
The parent who submitted this was careful to say the coach wasn’t always like this. Most of the time they saw someone dedicated, capable and genuinely warm with the kids. And that’s the part that’s hardest to hold. A coach can be tactically excellent and still be emotionally unsafe. A coach can give hundreds of hours to a team and still need to be challenged when his behaviour frightens the players in his care.
Here’s the bit grassroots football finds hardest to say out loud: the person a child admires most can also be the person whose disapproval they’re most scared of. Those two things coexist. They have to be addressed together.
This child didn’t want to go. He wanted the behaviour to stop, not the football. That distinction matters far more than it might look in the moment.
Too often, safeguarding in sport is understood narrowly. Physical harm. Sexual harm. Criminal behaviour. The most severe end of the spectrum.
Those concerns must always be acted on. But emotional safety is safeguarding too.
A child who is repeatedly shouted at, humiliated, threatened or made to feel disposable isn’t just experiencing a tough sporting environment. They may be experiencing emotional harm. And even where behaviour doesn’t cross a formal threshold, it can still be poor practice, damaging practice, practice that has no place around children.
Grassroots football has to get better at naming this. Not every raised voice is a crisis. But when a child is regularly frightened of an adult who holds power over their place in the team, their friendships and their relationship with the game, it has to be taken seriously.
The phrase ‘team talk’ can’t become a shield for behaviour that wouldn’t be tolerated in a school, a youth club or a childcare setting. Volunteering isn’t a free pass. The adults in children’s football deserve better support and training than most clubs provide, and closing that gap matters. But you close it by improving what’s available, not by lowering what’s acceptable.
One of the most uncomfortable details in this submission is where the behaviour appeared to change: once parents could no longer hear what was being said.
Clubs and welfare officers need to sit with that.
Changing rooms, corridors, closed-door team talks are all potential blind spots in grassroots sport. Most of the time nothing harmful happens in them. Many coaches use those moments brilliantly. But when an adult loses control in a private space, a child is left carrying the burden of proof.
Children wonder whether they’ll be believed. They feel disloyal for speaking up. Parents hesitate, especially when the coach is popular or seen as important to the team’s success.
A policy document on a website doesn’t help in that moment. Your safeguarding culture does. And culture is only tested when the issue is inconvenient.
The family raised concerns more than once. The response they describe was not, by any reasonable measure, an investigation. The club welfare officer declared a personal connection to the coach at the outset and stated she was protective of him. What followed appeared designed to reach a conclusion that protected the adult. Blame was externalised onto the child. Similar reports from other parents were set aside.
Clubs and welfare officers reading this don’t need to assume every complaint is automatically proven. Fairness matters. Nobody should be condemned without process.
But a fair process has to be child-centred. It has to ask what the child experienced, how they felt, whether there’s a pattern, who else witnessed anything, and what immediate steps are needed to keep the environment safe while concerns are considered.
The default cannot be: protect the coach, protect the club, manage the parent, move on.
The default must be: listen properly, record properly, seek advice where needed, keep the child’s welfare at the centre.
A welfare officer with a personal connection to the subject of a complaint needs to declare it immediately and step back. Not because of bureaucracy. Because a conflicted welfare officer doesn’t protect the club. They expose it.
The family also found the County FA had limited power to enforce anything when the concern didn’t involve physical or sexual harm. That gap is real. It makes what happens at club level even more important. In many cases, you are the only line.
The parent suggested audio recording as a way to create accountability during team talks. It’s understandable. When a child’s account is dismissed and no other adult was present, families want evidence that can’t be ignored.
But clubs should only consider this with specialist advice first. Recording children properly requires consent, written purpose, secure storage, access controls, and retention and deletion policies that comply with data protection law. It’s not a shortcut.
The deeper issue is this: children shouldn’t be in situations where, if something frightening happens, their word against an adult’s reputation is all they have. Better supervision, clearer expectations around adult conduct, welfare officers with genuine independence, and a culture where children’s concerns are taken seriously – those things reduce the risk before it becomes a crisis.
If you’re reading this on the Vault, you’ve chosen to think about this. That already puts you ahead of most.
But thinking about it doesn’t help if the culture around you defaults to protecting the adults when things get awkward.
A coach who regularly loses emotional control around children needs support, clear boundaries, and, where the behaviour continues, removal from situations where they’re causing harm. That’s not anti-coach. It’s pro-child. And it’s the only thing that actually helps the coach, because leaving people to implode in front of children while everyone avoids the conversation solves nothing.
The best coaches in children’s football don’t need fear to create standards. They don’t need humiliation to generate effort. They know a player can be challenged without being crushed, and corrected without being shamed. That’s a learnable skill. Clubs should be helping coaches develop it, not assuming they’ll figure it out.
Your club should know what it expects from adults during team talks, substitutions, defeats and high-pressure moments. Written down. Talked about. And enforced when someone crosses the line, regardless of how long they’ve been at the club or how many trophies the team has won.
Children also need routes to speak that don’t require them to be articulate or brave enough to approach a welfare officer directly. Some will tell a parent in the car on the way home. Some will quietly mention something to another coach. Some will just stop wanting to come to training and not say why. Pay attention to those signals.
The child in this story wanted to stay. He wanted the behaviour to change. He only left when it became clear it wasn’t going to.
Reporting routes and further guidance
The resources and support provided in The Vault are designed to promote mental wellbeing and provide general guidance on mental health related to grassroots football.
However, the content is not intended to serve as specific mental health advice or replace consultation with a trained professional. If you or someone you know requires personalised mental health support, we strongly encourage you to consult with a licensed mental health professional and/or seek appropriate services in your area.
