It is pervasive and has been going on for years, yet no one seems to be able to do anything about the corruption of young boys in football nurseries.

It may sound like hyperbole, but families who have been through it say it is “worse than paedophilia”.

The things parents do to get their children in the team include certain mothers throwing themselves at the coach just to get their sons in the first team.

At a football game at St Aloysius College, a current minister (name provided but withheld) yelled at the referee who had just sent out the minister’s son for swearing.

A talented boy is “bought” by another team but he never gets a chance to play: it seems the sole purpose of the transfer is to put him out of circulation.

Fathers are reported to have passed considerable sums of money to their sons’ coach to keep them in the team.

All this cannot be alleged about each and every nursery: there are some nurseries which are run very well, but there are some others that are downright bad while in others a good nursery is sometimes undermined by the intrusion, and worse, of the committee.

One issue that many parents with young boys do not seem to know is that when they enrol their children at age 10, they are contracting them to that team for at least the next two years and the parent must fork out Lm150 a year to obtain the release.

In some cases, a release can cost anything up to Lm600. And if people think this is big money, one needs to remember that some talented youngsters have been transferred for Lm50,000.

In the most ordinary cases, children with great talent and potential lose it all when they are subjected to rough treatment by their coaches, not just with shouting right through the games but also with threatening them with exclusion, and all this amid much swearing.

One other corrupting influence is the children’s early exposure to bribery, as well as their early exposure to physical violence, of which there is a fair share in youth football, and which goes completely unreported by the media.

Children are generally not informed of their rights and parents too are sometimes to blame for not making a thorough inquiry into the state of things at the nursery they want their children to join. While some teams go out of their way to involve parents in all major decisions, other clubs are more cagey: parents get no say at all and the club sometimes seems to look on children as just an investment, for the money they can earn the club.

Then there is paedophilia, in isolated cases. In one case a person who was found guilty of paedophile charges was sacked by his team but joined another team and started coaching young boys once again.

Parents whose children have been victims of what goes on in nurseries do not know if there is anyone who would want to clean the stable. The former Commissioner of Children Sonia Camilleri had once spoken of breaking the stranglehold the clubs have over small children but nothing came of it.

There are talented children in Malta but it would be an exception and certainly not the rule if they make it to a top team that develops their potential.