An alleged victim of Barry Bennell has told a jury he knew “there were hundreds out there” with similar stories and recounted one trip away with the former Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra coach when one of his young team-mates woke to find a severed sheep’s head in his bed.

Former footballer Chris Unsworth, 45, remembered by Bennell as “like a little teddy bear”, said he was eight or nine when the man he hoped would make him a professional player scouted him for Manchester City’s youth system and later took him to Crewe. Bennell allegedly started sexually abusing him while driving him to training.

Unsworth, who previously waived his anonymity in 2016, alleged the abuse happened virtually every time he was picked up and escalated into more sexual assaults – “over 100 times” on overnight stops, often with other boys in the same bed, and more serious offences, including rape.

On one occasion Unsworth said he and his team-mates were taken on tour to a place they called “the Haunted House” because of Bennell’s habit of playing horror films before bedtime, allegedly to frighten them and make them more receptive to being comforted and abused.

“I still do not know where it was. It was a big house in the middle of nowhere, hills and mountains all around, with a single-track driveway, a lake on the right and a wooden gate leading to a big house and gardens” he said. “I can recall one of the boys in a dormitory, full of bunk beds, waking with a sheep or ram’s head in the bunk bed or maybe even in the sleeping bag. Everyone was petrified.”

The horror films, Unsworth said , worked for Bennell because “you’d be frightened and probably move up close to him so he could hug you. No one could see because it was in darkness apart from the light of the TV.”

Bennell, described by the prosecution as a “devious paedophile”, has admitted seven charges of sexually abusing three boys but pleaded not guilty to a further 48 counts relating to 11 alleged victims from 1979 to 1991. He has already served prison sentences in England and the US but says he is the victim of a malicious campaign motivated by attention-seeking and compensation claims.

In police interviews played to the jury, he said his “target age” was boys of 13 and “nine-year-olds scared me because they were still attached to the [mothers’] apron strings. I use that saying ‘apron strings’ – I know it’s not nice but it’s the truth.”



In further interviews, he recalled the nine-year-old Unsworth as being “a little kid, such an innocent – so naive, he was just happy” and described him as “lucky enough to be bypassed” because there were other boys who were the coach’s favourites. Bennell, now 64, was asked what attracted him to boys of 13 and replied: “Everything.”

He remembered the “haunted house” being in Llanrhos, near Conwy in north Wales, and other incidents frightening the boys, including mysterious knocking at doors.



The jury was shown photographs of one of Manchester City’s junior teams, wearing the club’s away strip, and heard that another of the players coached by Bennell, then in his late 20s, lashed out at him on one trip to Butlins in Pwllheli, where he ran a soccer school. Unsworth said he was in the same bed, pretending to be asleep, when the incident happened.

“I think he [the boy] hit him,” he said. “He waved his arm out and caught him. He [Bennell] didn’t like that at all.”

On the third day of the trial at Liverpool crown court, the same complainant told the jury that Bennell’s house in the Peak District – described by Bennell as “a kids’ paradise” – had a pool table, a fruit machine, a jukebox and was filled with sports equipment, but said there was excrement everywhere from dogs.



The abuse, he alleged, started to ease off when he hit puberty at the age of 13. The alleged abuse included around half a dozen occasions when he was raped. “The first time, I’ll never forget it,” he said. “I was just crying with pain. It felt like it was hours but it was probably two or three minutes. I made it stop because I was crying so much.”



Eventually, he said, it led to him giving up football but he stayed quiet as a child because he was so desperate to make it as a professional. “You knew where you wanted to get to and thought that this was just something you had to go through. One, they wouldn’t believe you and, two, I’m going to jeopardise where I want to get to in professional football.”



Unsworth decided to come forward after seeing the former Crewe Alexandra player Andy Woodward on television in the week after he had told the Guardian about being abused by Bennell. After watching the programme, he sent his then partner a text message: “I’ve never told anyone this but he did rape me. Didn’t even tell Mum or Dad.”

The man told the court he then made contact with Woodward. “I knew there were hundreds out there,” he said.

The trial continues.