Did this special football talent kill himself because of Barry Bennell?

It doesn’t take long, listening to the stories about Mark Hazeldine, to understand why there are still people involved in football today who find it difficult to understand how someone with his rare talent could be lost to the sport.

Mark played for one of the junior teams affiliated to Manchester City, the club he grew up supporting. Blue Star FC even wore the red and black stripes that Malcolm Allison, City’s assistant manager, introduced in the 1960s, inspired by the great Milan sides.

Blue Star had a reputation for bringing through elite footballers and the official team photograph, taken at City’s old training ground, tells its own story. Gary Speed is on the back row. Paul Warhurst, another future Premier League player, is to Mark’s right. Mark was six months younger than both of them but, at the age of 12, a lot of people at City thought he was the outstanding prospect. “He was the captain,” the coach, Ray Hinett, says. “He was a lovely lad – you couldn’t find a nicer boy – but more than anything he was a really talented footballer. He was definitely one who had a great chance.”

Mark was so highly regarded that when he was injured in one game he was told to report to Maine Road, City’s old ground, to be seen by the first-team medical staff, waiting in the treatment room with Joe Corrigan and Dennis Tueart, two of the greatest players ever to wear the club’s colours. Blue Star helped to nurture a generation of City stars – David White, Paul Lake, Steve Redmond, Ian Brightwell, Andy Hinchcliffe, Garry Flitcroft and several others – and Mark, by common consensus, had all the attributes to join the list. “He even used to score goals direct from corners,” one friend says. “It was his party trick – at least, until everyone got wise to it and started putting an extra man on the post. But that was Mark. He was an incredible footballer.”

He was also City-obsessed, born in the year, 1970, that Joe Mercer’s team won the European Cup Winners’ Cup and growing up listening to the stories about Colin Bell, Mike Summerbee and Franny Lee. Mark was brought up in Ashton-under-Lyne, on the outskirts of Manchester. He had posters of Asa Hartford on his bedroom walls and Blue Star’s links to City meant he and his team-mates had complimentary tickets to see his heroes.

All of which made it difficult, to say the least, for his friends to understand what it was that turned Mark against the club he loved.

“I always remember him telling me one day that City wanted to sign him,” Anthony Etches, his oldest friend, says. “But something had changed. ‘I’m not signing for them,’ he said. I asked him why and this is the thing that sticks in my mind. His exact words were: ‘They’re a bunch of fucking weirdos.’ This was a City-mad kid, remember. We both were. And you’d have given your right arm to play for the club you supported.”

View image in fullscreen

It is the same question Mark’s mother, Margaret, his brother, David, and sister, Sandra, have been asking themselves since the Guardian started investigating the story that has now led to Barry Bennell, the coach and scout who was known at City as “the star-maker”, being convicted of 50 offences against 12 boys from the junior systems of City and Crewe Alexandra. What has never come out until now, however, is the story of what happened, in 1982, when Bennell arranged a trip to Spain and, for reasons that have never properly been explained, it ended up with him going alone with only one of the club’s young prospects.

“Mark was 12,” Margaret says. “We were told it was a football holiday for all of the boys and, of course, he wanted to go because he would have done anything to play football. I asked who else was going and I was told some names of the other boys. Mark was so excited and I said: ‘Yes, of course you can go.’ I got him a temporary passport and it was the day before they were due to go when I suddenly got word that nobody else was going – only Mark. There was no real reason why everyone else seemed to have dropped out. All I knew was Mark still wanted to go.”

Her photographs of that holiday – pictures taken by Bennell himself – seem perfectly normal. The family have both been through them all, looking for clues. But there is nothing to show anything is wrong. Mark is smiling, playing football with the locals. “To me, he was no different when he came back,” David, the older brother by eight years, says. “He just said he’d had a good time and that was it.”

There was so little media coverage when Bennell was sent to prison 12 years later the family had no idea one of Mark’s old coaches had been arrested for raping and molesting English boys on another football tour to Florida. Likewise, they did not hear about his subsequent convictions in England and all the other horrors that make it clear why the American authorities once wrote to Fifa and the Football Association to warn them Bennell should never be allowed to coach again.

Anthony noticed a change in his friend when he came back from Costa Brava but initially put it down to the fact his parents had split up a couple of years earlier. “I’d known Mark all my life. He was quite shy and introverted when we were kids. He always had a big smile on his face – and his mum worshipped him. But he wasn’t the same after that trip to Spain. I almost fell out with him because he had changed that much. He started bullying people. We’d sit on the top deck of the school bus and he would pick on anyone he could. I didn’t like it. One of my friends pulled me and said: ‘Your mate’s a bully.’ I said: ‘No he’s not, he’s just had a bad spell, his mum and dad have split up.’ He said: ‘Well, so have mine, but I’m not bullying anyone.’ That always sticks in my mind.”

View image in fullscreen

At 16, Mark signed for Burnley in the old Fourth Division and within a year the teenager – two-footed, strong in the tackle, capable of playing in midfield or defence – was in their first-team squad. He was there when they famously beat Leyton Orient to avoid dropping out of the Football League on the final day of the 1986-87 season and the following year he was at Wembley when they played Wolves in front of 80,000 people in the Sherpa Van Final.

Then, one Sunday afternoon, he had a kick-around with his mates at a park in Ashton, landed awkwardly trying an overhead kick and limped home, not realising he had ruptured the cruciate ligament in a knee. Mark had already had his knee cartilage removed, keeping it in a jar by the side of his bed. In total, he had 10 operations until, finally, at the age of 19, he was given the news he had been dreading. His career was over before it had really begun.

For a boy whose life had been shaped around football, the transition must have been hard. While four of his old Blue Star team-mates – Speed, Warhurst, Jason Beckford and Chris Lightfoot – were setting out on their own professional careers, Mark took a job fitting signs on petrol stations. With Saturdays free, he started watching City again and, like many Mancunians of that time, there were some lost nights at the Hacienda. He moved into the scaffolding business and he met the woman, Vickie, he would marry. Anthony, a friend since nursery, was best man at the wedding and the two mates were godparents to each other’s children. They had season tickets and followed City around the country.

Yet there were still occasions when the people closest to Mark wondered what was gnawing away at him inside. “When Mark was stone-cold sober he’d be the nicest guy in the world,” Anthony says. “But once the drink got hold of him you could see him getting angry. You would stay out of his way. It never stopped me being his best mate, I just wished he wouldn’t do it because I knew what a nice guy he really was.”

Margaret remembers one occasion, alone with her son, when she thought he seemed troubled and had something he wanted to say to her. Another friend, Mick McCarthy, recalls something similar from one night out when Mark, drunk, started to cry. At Sandra’s 40th birthday party he was emotional again.

Then, on 18 February 2006, six days after Mark’s birthday, Sandra woke at 4am with a sudden jolt. She didn’t know why, she just knew something was wrong and it was enough to leave her sitting bolt upright in bed.

The previous night, Vickie had gone out with some friends. Mark sent her a text at 9.20pm reminding her not to be late as he had to be up for work early the next morning. He let her know their four-year-old daughter and baby son were asleep. Then, for reasons that will probably never be clear, he packed a bag with his best clothes and his shaving kit, got in his car and set off from their house in Audenshaw to Manchester airport.

The details from that point are not entirely clear. Mark checked into the Radisson hotel at midnight, put his bag in his room and went downstairs to the bar. He had two pints, drinking alone, and the barman later recalled Mark telling him he wanted to get a plane, any plane, first thing in the morning.

At some stage, however, Mark realised he had picked up the wrong passport – Vickie’s, not his – and would not be flying anywhere. Mark went to a cashpoint and withdrew £500. He arranged for two escorts to visit his room and, together, they stayed up through the early hours, drinking from the minibar. Then the women left and he was alone.

As morning came up, it was FA Cup fifth-round weekend and City had a tie, live on television, at Aston Villa the following day. There was still no sign of Mark and his family were starting to panic. Vickie had come back from her night out to find the children in the adults’ bed rather than their own rooms. Her first thought was that Mark must be hiding but she soon realised it was no game. Margaret was the first to call the police, frantic with worry.

7:38

At the Radisson, meanwhile, the hotel staff had started to go about their usual routines. For one member of staff, that meant wheeling a drinks trolley to each room to check whether or not the minibars needed stocking up. But when he knocked at Mark’s door there was no answer. He knocked again and let himself in – and that was when he discovered the body, just inside the entrance. Mark had hanged himself. He was 36.

The poem David read out at his brother’s funeral is now framed on the living-room wall at the house where he lives with his mother. It has eight verses and one passage, in particular, stands out.

All your friends, ‘Nutty’, old and new Cannot comprehend what has happened to you You took knocks, you were strong and tough But your mind at that moment wasn’t strong enough.

Maybe your male pride stopped you talking to us Nobody’s perfect You think you can handle anything life throws at you But without knowing it things overwhelm you.

David could make so little sense of why Mark would kill himself, with no apparent history of depression, no suicide note and no real clues, he asked the police whether it might have been a murder that had been staged to look that way.

Eleven years on, he can recall how strong Mark was when they used to play-fight as children and desperately wants to believe his younger brother might have been able to fight off Bennell. Yet the family are not kidding themselves about the other possibilities. “Something must have happened,” Margaret says. “He took it hard about his father. He took it hard about his football. Whether Barry Bennell was in his head, or whether he fought him off, we’ll never know. Even if he tried it on, that would still be a trauma. There was all sorts going on in his head.”

View image in fullscreen

Margaret recently found out Bennell named her as the under-15s’ team secretary in the letterhead when he wrote to parents about Adswood Amateurs, another of City’s feeder teams – a front, undoubtedly, to give the impression that a woman was involved.

She knows now that City received warnings about Bennell, that other coaches and scouts had misgivings about him and that there was at least one complaint from another parent.

Something else troubles her. “We had a hoedown to raise money for the club. Ken Barnes [City’s then chief scout] and a few others came from City and I remember seeing Barry Bennell sitting with a young lady. I didn’t think anything of it until somebody said: ‘Oh, that will be his cover.’ It went over my head at the time. But this is what hurts me: nobody told me they had suspicions. If they had suspicions, why didn’t they warn me? Why didn’t anyone say: ‘I wouldn’t let him [Mark] go if I was you?’

“I can’t see how he [Bennell] got away with it for so long and, by that, I mean with the professionals at the club. I’m angry with Ken. I’m angry with a lot of people. I feel these people are responsible. They need holding to account. He [Bennell] was bringing them stars, making them lots of money, and it feels to me like they turned a blind eye. A lot of hurt could have been prevented if the club had not chosen to look the other way but that’s business, I suppose, and that’s money.”

Mark is now commemorated in the City Circle feature outside the Etihad stadium with a metal disc engraved with his name and the message “True Blue, Forever Young”. His friends at the Corporation Arms, the pub in Guide Bridge where he used to drink, raised £14,000 for the family and Margaret has a framed City shirt, signed by them all, on a wall at home.

Anthony’s message on that shirt takes a line from an old City song – “To Nutty, the best mate in the land and all the world” – and it does not need long in his company to realise he has never properly got over his friend’s death. As much as he would like not to believe it, he cannot help but fear the worst. “Mark never told me what happened on that trip to Spain. That’s what upsets me the most – that he couldn’t speak about it to his best mate. There will never be any certainty unless he [Bennell] actually says it has happened, but I know in my mind it has. Everything adds up now.”

Margaret also knows enough about Bennell by now to realise it is almost inconceivable nothing happened in Spain. Anthony has been around to visit the family. Other friends, too. There have been some difficult, emotional conversations and, always, they come back to the same thing. They all want the truth but, in another sense, they are all terrified by it. And the hardest part – or at least one of the harder parts – is that they all realise they will probably never get it anyway.

What they do know is that the police tracked down one of the escorts and discovered there had not been any sexual activity. Mark simply wanted to stay up talking and drinking from the minibar – a version of events corroborated by the tests on his body – and the escort had no indication whatsoever that he was thinking about taking his life.

As if the family didn’t have enough to contemplate, they also know now that Frank Roper, the coach of Nova FC, a Blackpool-affiliated side where Mark briefly played, was another paedophile – abusing, among others, the future England international Paul Stewart.

It leaves so many questions and so few answers and, for Margaret, immeasurable hurt. “Since all this came out, my world just fell apart. I heard the name Barry Bennell and my heart sank. I just collapsed. I thought: ‘Oh my God, has this happened to Mark?’ And that is what I will have to live with: that I let him go, alone, with that man.” It is a mix of emotions you would not wish on your worst enemy – aching grief and confusion, anger and helplessness. She is 76, and it will always be there.

Together, we sit at her table and look through Mark’s photos and all the trophies and medals he accumulated when everything seemed so innocent. Margaret still likes to talk about her youngest son, figuring it is better that way rather than bottling everything up. And, despite everything, she will always remember what he was like with a ball at his feet – and how happy it made him.

The story, for example, about when David used to play for the Lord Napier, a pub team in Ashton, and took his younger brother to training. David was 17, one of the team’s younger players. Mark was nine. “By the end, the other players would say: ‘Don’t bring your Mark again, he’s better than any of us,’” Margaret says, and briefly she can smile. “He was magic, he really was. It was just in him. He walked at eight months and that was it – he wanted a ball, all the time.”

In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.

The NSPCC’s football abuse helpline can be called 24 hours a day on 0800 023 2642.