This week Raith Rovers signed the rapist footballer David Goodwillie, which was a morally indefensible decision -:
Without question, the finest moment in their 139-year history, which reached its plainly avoidable nadir on January 31st, was November 27th1994 when, against all odds, Raith won the Scottish League Cup 6-5 on penalties after a 2-2 draw with Celtic. As a result of this amazing victory, Raith secured a place in the following season’s UEFA Cup. Their debut saw Faroese champions Gøtu Ítróttarfelag journey to Kirkcaldy, where they lost 4-0. Holidaying in the nice part of Fife, Crail to be precise, I was lucky enough to be in the crowd that August evening. Other than following Raith’s subsequent UEFA Cup win over Íþróttabandalag Akraness at the next stage, before their narrow loss to Bayern Munich in round 3, the club did not impinge on my consciousness until they signed David Goodwillie from Clyde on January 31st. This was the darkest day and most nefarious act in the club’s history.
Goodwillie, a ponderous journeyman striker in the mould of Conor Sammon, has played for Raith Rovers before, on loan from his first club Dundee United during the 2007/2008 season. Following a lengthy spell at Tannadice, Goodwillie moved to Blackburn Rovers for £2.8m in 2011, signed by that redoubtable failure, Steve Kean. Goals proved hard to come by for the cumbersome target man and he was loaned out, without real success, to Crystal Palace and Blackpool, as well as making a brief return to Dundee United. When he moved permanently, after 3 years at Ewood Park, it was back to Scotland with Aberdeen, who then loaned him to Ross County before he moved on a free to Plymouth Argyle in July 2016.
While on-field successes and goals in particular proved elusive for the striker in the first half of his career, legal problems dogged him at every step. In June 2008, Goodwillie was convicted of assaulting a man in a Stirling nightclub, and was fined £250. In September 2009 Goodwillie was arrested after a nightclub doorman was knocked unconscious. Two months later, Goodwillie was convicted of assault and received a £200 fine. In 2012, Goodwillie was convicted of assault for repeatedly punching and kicking John Friel after Friel attacked Goodwillie's teammate Danny Swanson in a Glasgow takeaway in 2010. He was sentenced to a 12-month probation order and ordered to carry out 80 hours of unpaid work. Such drunken, boorish, anti-social behaviour was redolent of the mistakes made by many young Scottish men, including professional sportsmen such as Duncan Ferguson back in the day, but Goodwillie was soon to be exposed as far worse than a run-of-the-mill bar room brawler. Rather he was proven to be a sinister, sociopathic, predatory monster whose evasion of criminal proceedings remains a stain on the record of Police Scotland and whose latter career is arguably as much of a disgrace as the sordid revelations of Jim Torbett’s actions at Celtic Boys Club.
Goodwillie and his teammate David Robertson were accused of raping a woman in January 2011. Goodwillie was charged with rape, but the Crown Office did not pursue a criminal prosecution due to Police Scotland failing to secure sufficient evidence from the scene, subsequent to the incident. Despite this failure on the part of the constabulary, The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority determined that the woman had been raped and awarded her £11,000 in damages. Remember, Scottish Law is very different in both procedural and terminological ways to English Common Law.
Five years after being raped, the victim took civil action in 2016 against Goodwillie and Robertson, in the first case of its kind in Scotland. The judge ruled that they had each raped her and ordered them to pay £100,000 each in punitive compensation. The civil case was judged on the balance of probabilities and did not need corroborative evidence for the verdict, unlike in a Scottish criminal case. As this was a civil case, the victim did not have the right to anonymity, unlike in a criminal case, meaning her name is in the public domain. For reasons of morality and in support of her, I have chosen not to identify her. Soon after the case concluded Goodwillie left Plymouth Argyle, while Robertson retired from football. In November 2017 three appeal judges at the Court of Session upheld the ruling against Goodwillie and Robertson. Therefore, it is perfectly permissible to refer to both Goodwillie and Robertson as rapists.
After the verdict in the civil case, but before the subsequent failed appeal, Goodwillie signed for Clyde in early 2017, to only minor stirrings of discontent among the Clyde fanbase and wider Scottish society. Indeed, the unchallenged utterances of then Clyde chair Norrie Inness, from more than five years distant, seem preposterous, bigoted and morally unacceptable. Whether they were seen that way at the time is a moot point, as is any debate as to whether public opinion has moved forward in our wish to condemn misogynistic bullshit like this during the past 6 years -:
"I think we have to beware of those who seek to use these matters for political and personal benefit and we should seek what is in us to be authentic and true and make the right decisions, even if it isn't universally or politically popular… David is a free man with a financial charge on his head, this arising from the civil action against him… He is appealing and this will eventually establish a status and end point, but to be clear, Clyde FC will play no part in this. It is down to others to deal with… There is no positive purpose or societal gain whatsoever to wish ill on him and allow his talents to stagnate and waste… Football and society would be failing if this was allowed to happen. If he ultimately has responsibilities to honour through any final binding decision, he should use the skills at his disposal to earn and honour it. Is it not right to create the conditions for him to potentially service society's demands on him? I have helped people in need in the past and it can be testing and challenging, especially when they - sometimes - let you and themselves down, but I will not change. If the opportunity arises to do so, then we should all embrace this approach."
On the pitch, in almost 5 years with the Bully Wee, Goodwillie scored 92 goals in 140 games. Without question, his time at Broadwood has been the most successful period of his career, which may now be coming to an end. He received a hat-trick of personal accolades at the club's Player of the Year awards for 2017–18, winning another award the season after. The team then won promotion to League One in 2018–19. At the PFA Scotland awards, he was shortlisted for Player of the Year and named in the Team of the Season for League Two for 2018–19. Named club captain ahead of season 2019–20, Goodwillie became the first Clyde player to score five goals in a single match in 68 years and the first to score a hat-trick of penalties in one match. Both feats came in a 6–1 win over Stranraer. In April 2020, Goodwillie, with his 78th goal, moved in to the top ten of the club's all-time leading scorers. And then, all hell broke loose when he signed for Raith Rovers on January 31st, 2022.
Questions of individual or collective moral responsibility in regard to the evil that men do are a vexed problem in football. It seems clear that criminal acts by a single person, generally a player, are far easier to comprehend, condemn and counter than the ongoing nefarious corporate conduct of owners or sponsors. Stalin’s observation that the death of a single man is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic, comes into play when one is asked what is worse; Joey Barton stubbing out a cigar on a team mate’s eyelid or the Saudi Arabian state carpet bombing Yemeni civilians? Marcos Alonso and Lee Hughes were both convicted of causing the death of innocent passengers when at the wheel of their cars, yet both returned from criminal convictions, including gaol time in the case of the latter, to play at the pinnacle of the professional game, their convictions apparently spent and debt to society repaid.
We haven’t got time to delve into the litany of players convicted for beak and booze fuelled brawls in pubs, takeaways and taxis over the years, but one principle seems to assume primacy when judging lapses in the personal morality and conduct of footballers. Male on male violence and serious driving offences are tolerated, being seen as unfortunate but acceptable errors of judgement, and sexual assaults on adult women, regardless of the severity, can be intellectually plea-bargained away by relying on grotesque victim blaming, if there is any hint of the involvement of alcohol or drugs in these incidents. Witness the lack of condemnation of Bernard Mendy, which is not an example of the media and football fans understanding the principle of sub judice for the first time ever. Also, consider the words of Ralph Records regarding Mason Greenwood. Despite immediately suspending the player, there were no words of sympathy for the victim in this case; only confirmation that Jesse Lingard wouldn’t be allowed to move clubs as Greenwood’s absence left the squad a player light. That, in essence, is the corporate, business model response to personal tragedies; not “how does this effect the victim?” Rather, “how could this effect our profits?” Football is a microcosm of society; racism, homophobia and misogyny are as ingrained in the game as they are in the attitudes of politicians, journalists and the police in society as a whole. How else can we explain the continued employment of Ched Evans by Chesterfield, Sheffield United, Fleetwood Town and Preston North End, regardless of the decision of the Court of Appeal to quash his rape conviction? He has admitted to sordid sexual conduct, but at the end of the day, he scores goals.
Indeed, it appears that sexual assaults are considered to be deserving of outright condemnation when they involve females under the age of consent. Such circumstances result in the same kind of hysteria that the tabloid press reserves for every day, common or garden beasts, nonces, short eyes or whatever epithet you chose to label them. Adam Johnson rightly did three years in stir for his gross, sexual exploitation of a schoolgirl. He was punished, but his club sunderland, who benefitted from Johnson’s services for almost a whole year between being charged in March 2015 and sentencing in February 2016, suffered neither official censure nor material condemnation, despite it being common knowledge that Johnson had admitted to sunderland in May 2015 that he had kissed the girl and sent her sexually explicit messages.
In Scotland, Heart of Midlothian unbelievably appointed Graham Rix as manager in 2005, despite the fact that Rix had been sentenced to 12 months in prison in 1999 for having underage sex with a 15-year-old girl. He was placed on the sex offenders’ register for ten years and banned by the FA from working with youth players under the age of 16, but this was not seen as an impediment to being appointed boss of Scotland’s fourth biggest club. Hearts again showed appalling judgement in the case of full back Craig Thomson, who was also placed on the sex offenders' register for five years and fined £4,000 in June 2011 after pleading guilty to two counts of indecent behaviour, related to "sexual conversations" that he had engaged in online with two underage girls, aged 12 and 14. Despite calls for Thomson to be dismissed, Hearts opted to allow Thomson to stay at the club, acknowledging that his actions were unacceptable but claiming that there were sufficient mitigating circumstances. Hearts' decision was criticised by the mother of one of his victims and a children's charity, while a water supplier withdrew their sponsorship of the club. Days after their decision to retain Thomson, Hearts loaned him to FBK Kaunas, another club controlled by then-owner Vladimir Romanov. Thomson was not released by Hearts until 2013, despite further sordid revelations that he was arrested in November 2011 and charged with "trying to lure a 12-year-old girl into meeting up with him.” This case was dropped for want of evidence, and Thomson subsequently signed for Edinburgh City, playing for a further five seasons. His last brush with the law came in late 2013, when Thomson bizarrely faced a police investigation for working as an unlicensed window cleaner. Recently, former Celtic striker Leigh Griffiths was questioned by Scottish police after it was discovered he had been engaging in online conversations with a 14-year-old girl, though the communication was deemed not to have been sexual or in any way improper. It does however show that the free agent’s discussions with Falkirk over a potential move are not the first time he’s chatted with the Bairns…
There can be no doubt that the board of Raith Rovers committed a grave misjudgement in signing David Goodwillie. Their fans and sponsors, especially Val McDermid who combines both roles, as well as the wider Scottish football community, are to be commended for the vehemence and acuity of their protests that have forced Raith’s directors into a shamefaced climbdown. I’m not particularly interested in humiliating these naïve and ignorant men further; what I would love is a societal change, whereby sexual, domestic or any kind of violence against women, is unreservedly condemned like all other forms of hate crime. Only when society as a whole accepts that women victims of male sexual violence are always the innocent parties, can football learn from previous errors and move on.
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