Football heads in court for child player neglect

Two heads of the Valencia CF football Academy, who travelled to Egypt to play a children’s football tournament in August 2019, will be tried for recklessness in caring for a child, since, when he fell ill, they refused to take him to the doctor and they administered an ibuprofen-type anti-inflammatory, which could have caused a perforation in the duodenum.

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The Prosecutor’s Office asks that they compensate the child for the injuries suffered with 120,000 euro and for moral damages with 30,000, as well as that they be sentenced to a fine and one year of disqualification from the exercise of the position of director of a sports entity in relation to minors. The facts will be judged on Friday at the National Court as the situation developed abroad.

It all started when one of the children began to feel unwell, with vomiting and diarrhoea, and they communicated it by phone to their parents, who had also travelled to Egypt but were staying in a different hotel, in accordance with the policy established from the club, according to the brief of provisional conclusions of the prosecutor.

After going to visit him, they were dissuaded from taking him to the doctor on the grounds that it must be a virus because there were other children like it. The parents even offered to cover the medical expenses.

Seeing that the days passed and he did not improve, the parents insisted that they take him to the hospital, but the club managers, says the prosecutor, “asked them to leave and not to worry anymore, that a doctor has already seen him and that they are crossing the line, they even warned them of the consequences that their behaviour can have for the minor within Valencia CF”.

Faced with the tense situation, they finally go to their hotel, and thinking that perhaps they were exaggerating, but above all to avoid possible reprisals, they send several messages to those responsible, apologising if they had been excessively concerned.

Finally, on August 31, 2019, the parents returned to Valencia on another flight, as stipulated by the club, and did not see their son again until September 1, when he landed at the Manises airport.

They saw him walk out the door looking “ghastly” and “literally held up” by the defendant, JDLS, and as the father carried him to the car, the mother asked the club manager for an explanation, “who just said that her son was fine and that all that was needed was to give him a soft diet”.

The parents then took him to the doctor who informs them that the child was critical, suffered from severe dehydration and kidney failure, for which reason he had to be taken urgently to Hospital La Fe.

After being admitted, the medical team told them that his sodium level was 119, “which can cause brain damage, cardiac arrest, multiple organ failure and even death” and for this reason he had to be under observation for 24 hours.

During those 24 hours, the child felt a lot of abdominal pain and, when they did a CT scan and an ultrasound, they decided to take him to the operating room as the tests suggested a perforation, which they had to locate and close.

After two hours of intervention, the surgeon explains to the parents that the perforation was in the duodenum, and that it could have been due to two reasons: due to a bacterium, but the biopsy was negative, or due to ingesting certain medications in large quantities, such as ibuprofen, suspecting that it was surely this possibility.

The parents say they are unaware of the medications the child had taken, but later their son informed the medical team that in Egypt the club officials administered several doses of ibuprofen (specifically 400 mg every 4 hours).

It was determined that in Egypt he suffered from salmonellosis which, treated with NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs), such as ibuprofen, and loperamide (to control diarrhoea), produced a duodenal ulcer that required surgery and admission to the paediatric ICU. He also had esophagitis from vomiting.

In total, he needed 85 days to heal. As sequelae, there is a scar at the abdominal level, derived from the performance of the laparotomy, being a slight aesthetic defect.

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