A football coach was arrested for abusing eight minors and promising them contracts

National police arrested football coach from Logroño as the alleged perpetrator of five criminal acts of corruption of minors and three more of sexual abuse because he touched a minimum of eight boys between the ages of 15 and 18, to whom he promised sports contracts.

According to Eduardo Esteban, head of the Provincial Judicial Police Brigade, the 38-year-old detainee is an “alleged sexual predator”, who is also accused of child pornography and three other crimes of sexual harassment of minors on the Internet or “child grooming”.

Esteban appeared at a press conference this Wednesday to report on this operation together with the government envoy in La Rioja, Beatriz Arraiz, the superior of the National Police in La Rioja, Manuel Laguna; and inspector of the Department of Family and Women Care (UFAM), Zita Cascallana.

The investigation began in June 2022, following a report of sexual abuse of a minor, allegedly committed by his coach, after which he was arrested in August last year and his cell phone and tablet were confiscated, in which he had almost 63,000 multimedia files of a sexual nature with minors.

During the ten months that the investigation lasted, which is still open for acts allegedly committed between 2019 and 2020, seven more victims were identified after the first report was filed, and all of them were adolescent girls from La Rioja.

The police do not exclude the appearance of a larger number of injured minors, since the arrested person worked as a sports coach for years. The accused used his position as a coach at a sports club in Logroño and as a scout for football players to establish connections with young people, he emphasized.

sports wishes

So, he said, he used the “professional sports wishes of minors to become someone in the world of football” in order to have private conversations with the boys “of a sexual nature”, outside the training field.

After gaining the trust of young people, he contacted them through social networks or messaging applications, and then he asked for pictures of their private parts or dates to see in private and even offered someone money in exchange for sex.

The agents confirmed that he even touched some of them, and convinced one of them to do so moved with him to another city under the false pretext of signing a contract with a professional teamand there he suggested going to the hostel to have sex, which the minor refused.

Some of the young men agreed to the coach’s demands out of “fear” that if they refused, they would not be able to fulfill their professional expectations in the world of football, he added.

Fear of social stigma

At the time of the coach’s arrest, in Ventas Blancas in Rioja, where he did not reside, his mobile phone and tablet containing more than 29 gigabytes of multimedia files were taken from him.

Several minors appeared in these documents that they were unable to identify, but the police claim that due to fear of “social stigmatization” they may not dare to report these facts. In this regard, the Government’s envoy stressed that “we must never remain silent” about this type of “serious” criminal acts, in which minors participated.

Cascallana specified that before these events there were two applications, in 2015 and 2021 for “similar episodes”, which were submitted to the court, but he does not know if they happened in the same football club.

After his arrest in August 2022, this alleged child abuser went to court and was released, with an obligation to appear in court periodically, he said.

Finally, Laguna evaluated the work of the Judicial Police Brigade and UFAM in this “painful” investigation, in which they had to review those almost 63,000 files, and that on a “delicate” issue, in which it is “very difficult” for the victims to come forward and convictions.