A former youth team coach at Crewe Alexandra subjected a teenage boy to a string of sexual assaults over a three-year period in the late 1980s, a court has heard.

Paul McCann, who coached Crewe’s under-16s, is alleged to have groomed the teenager by showering him with gifts, taking him on football tours and letting him drink alcohol under-age on holidays.

McCann, 57, formerly of Crewe, denies six specimen charges of indecently assaulting the teenager between 1987 and 1990, when the alleged victim was aged 15 to 17.

On the opening day of the trial at Chester crown court on Monday, the prosecutor Owen Edwards said the allegations dated back to when the accused was in his late 20s and a part-time coach in Crewe’s youth system.

“Paul McCann was coaching the Crewe under-16 football team and he would quite regularly have young boys staying at his house in order to attend football matches and training,” Edwards said.

McCann kept bunkbeds at the house to accommodate the children, and the alleged victim told police McCann would come into the room at night to abuse him on the top bunk while another boy lay in the lower bunk, the court heard.

“[McCann] was very methodical and calculated and presumably enjoyed the risk,” Edwards said. “To the outside world, Paul McCann was a decent young man … sadly it was too good to be true and his interest was sexual.”

The prosecutor said the abuse first happened on a skiing holiday after McCann had paid for the boy’s flights and accommodation and let him drink alcohol. “Thereafter, Paul McCann took every chance he could,” Edwards said. “He [the boy] was effectively groomed by a man who was meant to be a father figure.”

On other occasions McCann would allegedly take the boy for a game of squash and then molest him either in the changing rooms or the showers, the court heard. “He seemed to enjoy the risk that they might be interrupted,” Edwards said.

When the police interviewed the boy’s mother, she led them to some old photographs allegedly taken by McCann that showed her son in the bath and naked in the shower. These photographs “could only have been taken by a man with a sexual interest”, Edwards said, and the mother was ashamed she had not realised sooner.

The jury was also told that McCann allegedly made his house available for the boy and his girlfriend to have sex for the first time, and “seemed to have an unhealthy interest in the whole affair”.

In his police interviews, McCann, of Great Sutton, Cheshire, said he could not remember taking the nude photographs and it was possible another boy might have borrowed his camera. Asked about a note in biro on the back of one photograph saying the teenager was “baring all”, he denied it was his writing.

A job took McCann abroad when the boy was 18 and contact ceased, the court heard.

A number of former Crewe players from the late 80s are expected to give evidence at the trial, which is likely to last until the middle of next week.