Kristyna Janku picked up the phone to a police officer in 2023, bracing for news she could barely fathom. Rumors had swirled about her former coach, Petr Vlachovsky—a man once voted the best women’s football coach in the Czech Republic after nearly 15 years at FC Slovacko. Now arrested, the truth unfolded in a police station. “I had to look at tapes, records, pictures, conversations he’d had online,” Janku recalls. “We were shocked. It was like something you only see in films.”
Vlachovsky had secretly filmed Slovacko players in their changing room for four years. Police also found him in possession of content related to child sexual abuse. Last May, he received a one-year suspended sentence, a fine, and a five-year ban from all football-related activity in the Czech Republic. But with his federation membership lapsed by the time criminal proceedings opened, no further punishment has come from the country’s football authorities. The Czech FA has not filed a complaint with FIFA’s ethics committee, which could impose a worldwide ban, though it is discussing changes to its safeguarding policy.
“I couldn’t believe it had been going on for such a long time,” says Janku, 31, who now plays in Poland. “He was our coach for a long time, we had a good relationship with him, he was a person you could trust.” Nothing stops Vlachovsky from showing up in an opposition dugout there. “I don’t even want to think about it,” she adds. “It’s really crazy.”
This case is far from isolated. In February, outrage erupted in Austria when a man received a seven-month suspended prison sentence and a €1,200 fine for taking secret videos and photographs from the changing room, gym, and showers of the Altach women’s football team. He was ordered to pay each victim €625 in compensation. Alex Phillips, secretary general of the global players’ union Fifpro, calls the Czech scandal “the tip of the iceberg.” “The majority of people don’t speak up, cases don’t go anywhere, players don’t know where they can report to or they don’t trust where they can report these cases,” he states.
Janku’s life has been permanently altered. “I look at some situations differently, with coaches or members of staff, and I’m more careful about some conversations,” she explains. “I can no longer take some jokes as just jokes too. I maybe analyse situations a little bit more, but I didn’t and don’t want to let it have an impact on the trust I have for any coach or any man.” Noncontact sexual abuse carries devastating long-term effects. While Janku describes herself as “one of the luckier girls” psychologically and hasn’t needed therapy from the Czech players’ union, she scans for cameras in every dressing room. “You can’t shake this new bad habit of always looking around,” she admits. “I’m more careful and hide more when I’m changing before games and after games. I make sure that doors are closed.”
Other players weren’t as fortunate. Some experienced vomiting, others changed clubs, and a few will never return. Alex Culvin, Fifpro’s director of women’s football, highlights the harm of inaction. “The perceptions around severity – where people are like: ‘Well, they haven’t been raped so is it actually that bad?’ – are harmful,” she says. “One of the players spoke about having some degree of body dysmorphia now as a result of this case, when a player’s body is their whole economy; that’s how they generate income.”
For Janku, therapy comes from speaking out. “I see the chance for change,” she notes, emphasizing that all Vlachovsky’s victims deem his punishment too lenient. “It’s a joke because that experience will stay with us for a lifetime. A lot of things have changed in our lives or in our careers as a result of this. It was never about money or anything like that – as female footballers it’s never about money for us – but we didn’t and don’t feel OK with the fact that he can come back to coaching. Even now he can coach abroad and he can coach kids, young girls.”
Phillips points to systemic failures. Education and prevention initiatives are “higher up on the agenda of the football governing bodies,” he says, but “in the case of investigations and sanctions, what is needed is a funded international entity that is independent of the sports governing bodies.” Part of the problem, he argues, is that sexual abuse isn’t viewed as a priority in many countries. “They also have no interest in doing much about it because there’s no obvious gain,” Phillips adds. “At least that’s how it appears.”
He cites historical precedents: “All the big abuse cases in football – Haiti, Gabon, Afghanistan – only came out because journalists, sometimes with unions, brought the stories into the public eye, even though the federations already had the information.” Culvin draws a parallel to the Me Too movement. “It was like: believe women. There’s an element of deprioritisation of women’s players, especially the ones who are deemed less valuable, not the top players or the players who’ve got an actual platform. They are vulnerable. They’re not believed.”
She references Spain and the Luis Rubiales kiss scandal: “Players were speaking to issues for years, saying: ‘Our coach made us leave our hotel doors unlocked and removed our mobile phones’ – and it’s not treated as a big issue until someone gets sexually abused live on TV. So, just believe players. That is the fundamental backstop of all of these examples. It starts and ends with that.”
The numbers tell a grim story. Vlachovsky’s four-year filming spree resulted in a mere suspended sentence, while the Austrian case led to minimal fines. With no global watchdog in place, players like Janku remain at risk. “I make sure that doors are closed,” she repeats, a simple act born of profound betrayal. As football grapples with its safeguarding crisis, the call for independent action grows louder—one victim’s voice at a time.
