More Premier League clubs carry out consent training

After a breathless summer of sport involving the European Championship and Paris Olympics, the UK’s Premier League will kick off today with its usual fanfare. Last year, Tortoise surveyed every club in the league to confirm they had undertaken mandatory sexual consent training, brought in by the league ahead of the 2022/23 season following lobbying by campaigning groups and a number of police investigations into high-profile players. Only ten clubs then were prepared to confirm they had completed the training. This year tells a better story. Conducting the same survey for the 2023/24 season, Tortoise received confirmations from 14 clubs that the training had been carried out.

Since July, Tortoise has contacted every Premier League club from the 2023/24 season to establish if they had carried out the training. We asked four questions:

1. Has the club carried out the mandatory sexual consent training?
2. If so, when did this happen?
3. How many players and staff have received the training in total?
4. What did the training consist of?

By this week, we had received 14 responses from the 20 clubs – still far below 100 per cent, but an improvement on last year’s ten. There were also improvements in the nature of the responses. Last year the replies were in the most part blunt (the most extensive reply was 82 words). This year we received responses that included dates of when the training took place, what the training consisted of, and a confirmation from one club that it was already scheduled for the forthcoming season.