Two former Chelsea youth players have told BBC News they were regularly subjected to racist abuse by a former assistant manager.
One said that at the age of 12 – on his first encounter with Gwyn Williams – the coach made racial remarks about his facial features.
Williams had called him racist names, asked him if he had been “robbing old grannies”, and said it was a “rarity” that he went to school.
Williams denies all allegations.
Training sessions
The two former youth-team players were speaking out for the first time since Chelsea published a report into the scandal in August.
Neither of them gave evidence to the inquiry, which found that young black players had been subjected to “a daily tirade of racial abuse” in the 1980s and 1990s.
Williams, the former academy director, was described as the “instigator” of racial abuse at the club.
Anthony – not his real name – told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme he had been subjected to racist abuse during training sessions.
First encounter
“I remember the first time I met [Gwyn Williams] he said how big my lips were, how big my nose was.”
He said Williams had also made a racially charged comment about the size of his penis.
“And that was my first encounter. I was 12 years old.”
A second player, Kieran – also not his real name – said Williams regularly referred to him using racist language.
“I was coming in [to training] scared to make a mistake,” he said.
“Even on the pitch it affected me because I couldn’t relax. I was thinking if I have a bad game everyone is going to say ‘you black this’ or ‘you black that’.”
‘Toxic environment’
Williams joined Chelsea in 1979 as a youth development officer and rose to assistant manager, leaving the club in 2006.
His lawyer wrote to Chelsea denying “any and all” allegations of racism.
He claimed the extracts of the report shown to him were “biased, untrue, unfair and artificial”.
The report, commissioned by Chelsea and written by the charity Barnardo’s, heard evidence of a toxic, racist environment.
‘Racist language’
The report also looked into allegations against another Chelsea coach – former England international Graham Rix.
It found while he “could be aggressive and bullying”, on the evidence presented to them he was not racially abusive.
Anthony and Kieran said they did not give evidence to the inquiry because it had been paid for by Chelsea and they had worries about its independence.
But they both told BBC News they had heard Rix use racist language.
Anthony said Rix asked him if he had gone out and had sex with “any of our white girls” at the weekend.
“I thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this’, and I said, ‘Yeah, I did’,” Anthony told the BBC.
“And he said, ‘If that was my daughter I would lynch you’.”
