Hundreds of attacks
“Victim bred for abuse” – prison for ex-football coach
The ex-coach is said to have disguised his abuse of young footballers as physiotherapy treatments
© DPA
The abuse scandal in Munich is coming to an end: an ex-football coach was accused of 153 rapes and 488 sexual assaults. For this he now has to spend seven and a half years in prison. The public prosecutor had called for a harsher punishment.
“It’s crazy when you imagine it,” says presiding judge Stephan Kirchinger. The scale of the crime shocked even hardened investigators: On Thursday, the Munich I regional court sentenced a former soccer coach to seven and a half years in prison for hundreds of sexual assaults and 153 rapes. Different from that As requested by the public prosecutor, the court did not impose subsequent preventive detention against the 47-year-old. He had confessed to having sexually assaulted young footballers from his club for years.
The court – also unlike the public prosecutor’s office – did not see the crime as sexual abuse of those under protection because the victims were not entrusted to the defendant “to monitor their lifestyle,” as Judge Kirchinger says.
The public prosecutor’s office, which had demanded eight years in prison, had accused more than 800 cases of abuse and sexual assault. However, the court classifies the acts as sexual assaults, not as abuse of those under protection, in 488 cases. However, Kirchinger speaks of “absolute borderline cases” in the acts that took place, for example, in the training camp, far away from the young people’s parents.
Abuse disguised as physical therapy treatment
The former head coach and sporting director of a club in the Munich district had admitted in court that he had sexually assaulted the teenagers during alleged physiotherapeutic treatments and had also raped them in numerous cases. According to the public prosecutor’s office, he carried out sexual acts on the young footballers according to a pattern that was always the same on a massage table in the football club’s dressing room, at the training camp or in his house and stated that this allegedly served to improve blood circulation in the muscles.
The confession was part of a so-called deal between all those involved in the case, who had agreed on a maximum sentence of eight years if the defendant admitted the crimes.
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The defendant abused the trust that the young footballers placed in him and his position in the club, acted “methodically and systematically and perfidiously”, and created a “perfidious system”. “He groomed victims to abuse them,” the prosecutor said in her plea.
Request for preventive detention is rejected
He was “a dangerous serial offender” – that was how she justified her demand for subsequent preventive detention. He reminds her “of a cult leader.” He is a “classic, gifted and power-hungry man-catcher.” There is – she based her opinion on an expert’s assessment – a possible danger that his own sons will one day become his victims.
The defense firmly rejected this assumption. Judge Kirchinger said: “We still see the defendant’s dangerousness as a given.” But he emphasized: “We don’t see this hurdle having been reached yet.” The court believes that the prison sentence can ensure that the man is no longer dangerous afterwards.
The former coach himself apologized to his former players in his last word. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “I definitely want to work through the whole story as part of therapy.” His defense lawyers had argued for a prison sentence of seven years and against preventive detention. “I would like to have a future and a perspective that I can live with my family,” said the defendant. “I just want to be there for her.”
In a similar case, a 27-year-old soccer coach was sentenced to 4 years and 3 months in prison at the Potsdam Regional Court on Wednesday. The man had forced some boys into sexual acts in a community in Brandenburg for years in his role as a trainer.