AS a 10-year-old, I carefully placed Paul Stewart’s headshot in my Panini Football ‘90 album. When he was 11 years old, Paul Stewart was being sexually abused by coach Frank Roper.

Stewart was a wonderful footballer, a no-nonsense midfielder who also scored goals. He scored Tottenham’s first against Nottingham Forest in the 1991 FA Cup final. Watching him lift that famous trophy as a 26-year-old, who would have known the horrors he had faced as a young boy growing up in the North West.

In the same way I looked up to footballers like Paul Stewart as a child, Stewart probably looked up to Roper. But Roper took away his childhood. Stewart will never see justice served because his abuser died in 2005.

A far cry from the player idolised by young North Londoners, Stewart looks haunted at 52, grey and hollow having carried with him what Roper did 40 years earlier.

Talk of enquiries and investigations as the number of victims in this scandal grows daily is all a bit too little, too late. But what else can the likes of FA chief executive Martin Glenn realistically do? We are in a different age now where child safeguarding is as important as the football itself at grassroots level. But vile people like Frank Roper still exist, despite regulation and legislation doing their best to limit their depravity to thoughts rather than actions.

The floodgates have opened thanks to the bravery of players like Paul Stewart, Andy Woodward and Chris Unsworth. If only they had felt able to reveal their ordeals all those years ago. The culture of football in that era, though, was one of masculinity, bravado. Any sign of weakness would single out a player in the dressing room. Sexually abused? Gay? Not possible in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, an era that moulded the thinking of Eric Bristow, not to mention those in football who still want to bury their heads in the sand. There is a deep-rooted culture in the game that refuses to face up to what was happening under the noses of so many.

Bristow is no better than those who have declined to acknowledge what the likes of Stewart went through. A man so disengaged with the modern world that ‘poofs’ and ‘paedos’ are the same thing and who branded victims ‘wimps’ for not ‘sorting out’ their abusers when they became ‘older and fitter’.

That’s the mentality male sport can create and, in part, why the likes of Paul Stewart stayed silent for so long. If football learns anything from real men like Stewart and Woodward then it must be how to cultivate a whole new culture in the game from the grassroots up. A culture where image, machismo and fear of showing weakness are replaced with the honesty, integrity and courage shown by Stewart.

This change is as important for football as it is to those for whom the game means so much. Football didn’t let down Paul Stewart and all those other men, but a world of blind eyes being turned did.