What struck people most about the infamous footballer enjoying a solitary drink in his local was just how ordinary he seemed.
Casually dressed, his face half-obscured beneath a baseball cap, his gaze never left his smartphone. After finishing his drink, he drew his head tortoise-fashion into his coat and left carrying a bag of groceries.
A woman having lunch in the pub that day recalled: ‘It was only when he left that my sister said to me, “It’s that footballer! You know, the one who went with the 15-year-old”. I have seen him a few times round here since then, mainly with his family, and he seems a regular guy, a Mr Average type.’
Average was once the last word associated with ex-England, Manchester City and Sunderland star Adam Johnson, now 38.
Once he lived in a £4million mansion that had previously belonged to former Manchester United striker Cristiano Ronaldo. Once he earned £80,000 a week, drove supercars and dated glamour models. Fans revered him.
None more so than a besotted schoolgirl who wore a Sunderland shirt bearing Johnson’s name and who waited after matches for a glimpse of her idol, better still a selfie.
Eventually, they befriended each other on Facebook. Despite knowing she was only 15, Johnson swapped more than 800 messages with her and, after giving her a signed shirt, creepily demanded ‘more than a kiss’ in return.
What happened next ensured he would never play professional football again.
Adam Johnson in a Premier League match for Sunderland in 2014
In 2016, Johnson admitted to grooming the girl and to one charge of sexual activity, and a jury found him guilty of sexually touching the girl who, it later transpired, took an overdose of tablets after two days of cross-examination and, said the judge, suffered ‘night terrors’ and needed therapy.
As for Johnson, then 28, his glittering career was over. And so it seemed was his relationship with the glamorous mother of his child, Stacey Flounders, who had initially stood by her man – arriving hand in hand with him on the first day of the trial – only to dump him as the evidence unspooled in humiliating detail.
‘I knew then that Adam was an arrogant man who had lied and lied,’ said Ms Flounders. ‘He’d known this girl’s age. He’d sent her hundreds of messages. It was horrific.’
Ten years have elapsed since the day he was led away from court to prison. It was a spectacular fall from grace for a footballer who played for his country having honed his skills as a boy on the streets of a Durham pit village.
There had never been a footballing morality tale quite like it and it stirred debate about whether the sport itself had created a monster.
On Johnson’s release after serving half of a six-year jail sentence, he hoped he might resurrect his career, though it never happened.
When a few months later he was pictured stumbling out of a Middlesbrough nightclub after chatting to an 18-year-old woman, some must have felt he was perhaps beyond redemption.
Yet it might surprise many to learn he is now, in the words of one ex-teammate, ‘a typical suburban dad’ with a new sense of ‘calm and acceptance’ and, what’s more, one who, according to another friend, ‘has finally been tamed’.
Johnson’s partner Stacey Flounders, who dumped him in 2016 after his trial, is reportedly back with the former footballer
Johnson, then 28, leaves Bradford Crown Court during his trial in 2016
Who, then, is this stabilising influence, the woman who has brought him to heel? It turns out to be none other than Stacey Flounders.
Johnson’s aunt, Irene Welsh, 66, told the Daily Mail: ‘Adam is happy and he’s been able to rebuild his life after everything he has been through.
‘He has been back with Stacey for a while now and they concentrate on their children. He keeps himself busy and has a lot of friends.
‘He likes his golf and being with his family, and he has a close family around him.’ How though does Ms Flounders, now 36, reconcile their life today with the public humiliation she endured and which, to an extent, still shadows her?
Even now, people stop and stare in the street or in shops. And more to the point, how could she forgive him? How can she ever forget?
It helps she never believed that her partner was a paedophile, the label that has clung to him ever since his arrest. His trial judge accepted expert opinion that he posed no risk to children.
Taunting him even now, rival fans use the term in an expletive-filled chant sung to the tune of Slade’s 1973 hit Cum On Feel The Noize.
‘To be honest, I don’t see Adam as a paedophile,’ Ms Flounders told the Daily Mail in 2019.
‘For me, a paedophile is somebody who abuses tiny young children. I think that he was a sex addict. He told me he was a sex addict.’ A psychiatric specialist told the trial that Johnson, who remains on the sex offenders’ register, had ‘a cognitive distortion due to being a footballer and the attention he received from women as a result’.
In short, he thought he could have sex with whoever he wanted and when he wanted. By his own admission, his life of entitlement – in which everything was laid on for him – rendered him arrogant. Experts deemed him ‘socially and psychologically immature’.
While Johnson alone was responsible for his actions, his status as a footballer was cited as an aggravating factor. For as Dr Philip Hopley of the Priory Hospital told the court, if Johnson was not a footballer his ‘sexual preoccupation may not have developed in the same direction and this may not have happened’.
It was said that Johnson was in the ‘clandestine habit’ of meeting girls after training for sex, and that he saw the teenage season-ticket holder as ‘just another girl, another opportunity, she was attractive enough, another one to get with’.
That at least is how Ms Flounders, a former air hostess from Hartlepool, has characterised the episode, and while it remains difficult to forgive and forget, she has come to terms with it.
As a friend from her schooldays explained last week: ‘Stacey knows her own mind and grew up in a very close family and, if anything persuaded her to give him another chance, it will have been to give their children a stable upbringing.
‘After he was released, it didn’t look as though they were going to get back together, but the pandemic struck a year after he got out and that gradually changed things.
‘He was anxious to make up for lost time with his daughter, having missed the early part of her life in jail. He’s a committed dad and that’s why they were able to try again. They now have a second child and they are very much a happy family.’
Ms Flounders, a former air hostess from Hartlepool, with Johnson in 2016
These days Johnson fills his days playing golf at the club near their North-East home, a detached house he bought for £470,000 in 2021.
It probably represents the most vivid expression of his downfall. Prior to his incarceration, he and Ms Flounders lived in a £1.8million gated property, set in over two acres of woodland, boasting six bedrooms, Italian stone flooring and a spiral staircase to a mezzanine level.
He’s a regular on the school run, though parents report he rarely mingles at the gate, preferring to remain in his BMW.
While his disgrace cost him around £10million in earnings and sponsorship deals, he had made enough already to ensure he would never have to work again.
Indeed, a relative says today that their enviable lifestyle has helped Ms Flounders overcome doubts about the relationship.
‘Money will have played a part,’ said the family member. ‘He hasn’t worked since he ended his football career. He put away enough money during his playing career that they can live a very good lifestyle without worrying.
‘They have a nice life, the children won’t want for anything.’ In 2012, he was earning £80,000 a week at Manchester City, but when his career began to stall, he joined Sunderland. Back in his native North-East, he had met Ms Flounders, who insisted she was attracted to the man rather than the lifestyle.
‘He was clean-cut, with good manners,’ Ms Flounders once recalled. ‘He would do things like open doors for me. I felt like he knew how to treat a girl. He was everything I’d ever wanted – the way he looked at me, cuddled me and constantly touched my hair. I could never have imagined he’d do what he did.’
Ms Flounders became pregnant in 2014 and it was around this time she suspected he was cheating. It was on New Year’s Eve that year that Johnson and the teenage girl began communicating. From the start she made her age known, telling him that she was a Year 10 student just one month past her 15th birthday.
The ex-footballer’s mugshot. He was sentenced to six years in jail, serving three
In a series of exchanges, which Johnson told her to delete, he asked her to send him a topless picture. And he made clear ‘this thank you [for giving her a signed shirt] had better be worth it’.
She replied: ‘Depends on what you are after.’
Johnson: ‘I don’t know, it depends what you are up for… a little bit more.’
Girl: ‘Like?’
Johnson: ‘A bit of feeling, just see no pressure, lol.’
They met again on January 30, 2015 as Johnson joined his team ahead of a match the next day.
Having kissed ‘with tongues’ again, it is then that they engaged in sexual activity.
Within minutes of parting from the girl, Johnson was messaging both her and Ms Flounders. He told the girl that ‘next time’ they should go in the back of his Range Rover, adding: ‘It was class. Just wanted to get your jeans off.’
Some 30 seconds earlier he had received a picture from Ms Flounders of their baby daughter. He had replied: ‘She looks class.’
In the weeks that followed, news of the girl’s liaison with Johnson spread among her friends. In the end, she told her parents and police were informed. However hard Johnson tries to bury the episode, there are always reminders.
Avoiding clubs and bars in towns where he knows he will be recognised and taunted, he tends to socialise in quiet country pubs.
And even at his golf club, he is said to have faced disquiet. Some members reportedly felt uneasy at his presence in the bar.
Nobody seemed to be complaining last week, though.
But pinned to an otherwise bare noticeboard in the men’s locker room was a booklet bearing the club’s logo and the title: ‘Children and Young People Safeguarding Policy and Procedure’.
Johnson’s past, it seems, will remain with him for a long time yet.
