The settlement was first reported on Friday by Inside World Football. It resolves a civil claim filed in November 2025 over an alleged historical assault at the Cliff, United’s former training base in Salford.

The alleged perpetrator, Billy Watts, worked at the Cliff for years in overlapping roles as caretaker, kit man and groundsman. He left the club in 1989 after an internal disciplinary hearing and died in 2009.

The Cliff, November 1986

The claimant, who has not been named, was 14 at the time of the alleged assault. His civil action was launched last November and reported at the time by ITV News, and it went to settlement four months later.

Manchester United have not admitted liability. The financial terms have not been disclosed.

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Named in the Sheldon Review

Watts had already been named in the 2021 Independent Review into Child Sexual Abuse in Football, the FA-commissioned inquiry led by Clive Sheldon KC. The review examined non-recent abuse in football between 1970 and 2005 and identified 692 survivors and 240 suspects across the sport.

Manchester United passed a number of complaints about Watts to the review team. According to the report, the caretaker was accused of making inappropriate comments of a sexual nature, of physically pulling one individual into an office against his will, and of following another into the sauna at the training ground. Youth-team players were said to have referred to him as a “pervert”.

At the time the review was published, Manchester United said the club had cooperated fully and that information relating to the former caretaker had been included in its submissions.

A wider reckoning

The civil claim is part of the long tail of English football’s non-recent abuse scandal, which broke into public view in November 2016 after former Crewe Alexandra youth player Andy Woodward waived his anonymity to describe being abused as a boy. Hundreds of other survivors then came forward, and the FA commissioned the Sheldon Review the following month.

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Kate Hall, an abuse law specialist at Simpson Millar who represents the man who brought the case, said in a statement on the firm’s website that her client “has shown enormous courage in coming forward after so many years”, adding that he had had to relive painful memories to pursue the case.

In the same statement, issued while the civil action was still being pursued, Hall was critical of how the club had handled the legal process. While Manchester United had contributed to the Sheldon Review, she said, its approach to the civil claim had been “disappointing”, and survivors deserved “meaningful engagement and accountability” as well as sympathy.

The club has not issued a public statement on the March settlement. Other survivors named in the Sheldon Review, or represented separately by Simpson Millar, retain the option to bring their own civil actions.

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