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The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/ExtensionAd8134 on 2024-05-28 14:58:24+00:00.
Original Title: [The Athletic] Jimmy Aggrey about the culture of racism and bullying at Chelsea "I arrived for my first day at Chelsea and my first encounter with Gwyn Williams. His first words were, ‘Who’s this lanky f***g cn?’. That was my welcome to Chelsea. I was 12 years old.”
“I’d never experienced racism before,” says Aggrey. “I knew it existed. I’d seen it on TV and heard my parents speaking about it, but nothing had ever been said directly to me. Then I arrived for my first day at Chelsea and my first encounter with Gwyn Williams. His first words were, ‘Who’s this lanky f****g c*n?’. That was my welcome to Chelsea. I was 12 years old.”
“How does a 12-year-old boy react to an adult in that position of power? He (Williams) calls you a lanky black b*****d. He refers to how dark you are. ‘Can you run like Linford Christie (the British sprinter)? Do you rob grannies on your estate? Are you keeping fit so you run drugs round the tower blocks?’. He would look at me in this way I’d never experienced from anyone. I didn’t know how to deal with it. All I wanted was to play football.”
Williams joined Chelsea in 1979, running their youth system for 20 years and taking huge influence at all levels of the club. He was racist, hard-faced and so divisive there were times when he arranged whites-v-blacks training matches. It was, to quote one player, like a “mini Apartheid state”.
Yet Williams somehow managed to keep it away from some of the key personnel at Chelsea even when, in Aggrey’s words, “we had a manager (Ruud Gullit) rocking dreadlocks”. Williams went on to become assistant manager to Ranieri and formed part of Jose Mourinho’s scouting staff before leaving Chelsea in 2006.
“I used to dread getting picked up for training,” says Aggrey. “We would go into the changing room. He’d walk in: ‘Hey, look at the f**g blackies in here … f**g rubber lips’. Let me tell you something, that was the most demoralising feeling you could ever have.
“I remember walking to the training ground and I’d be thinking, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing? I can’t wait for this day to be over’.
“It was relentless, and it got physical, too. Gwyn would give you a slap. He’d flick your scrotum. Or if he was really mad and thought you’d had a bad game, he’d give you a crack round the side of the head. It was hard, a man hit. ‘You little black b****d… you wg’. I was 13. It took a lot out of me. He addressed me that way every single time he saw me.”