A PREMIER League footballer will die if clubs don’t wise-up to the increasing security threat from gangs bursting into their homes and stealing from them, an investigation has warned.
Experts have told talkSPORT that players are spending as much as £30,000 a month on ineffective security measures and for every five reports of theft there are 100.
It comes days after Man Utd ace Chris Smalling, 31, and his wife Sam, 35, were held at gunpoint.
Alex Bomberg, CEO of Intelligent Protection International, said: “I think the clubs have got a duty of care.
“Footballers, politicians and people like that, they’re always representing their brand, their club. So there isn’t really an off time.
“Footballers are an asset to the club. They essentially are the property of a club. So really the club should be taking the lead in this.
“Whichever way you’re looking at, whether it’s from a legal duty care point of view or even just from an employment point of view, I think it’s down to clubs to turn around and say, ‘Right, this is what you need to do. We need to get security risk assessments done on all our players find out when they’re most exposed and find out how we can protect them’.
“Because it’s only a matter of time before a family member gets killed or a player gets killed. I absolutely believe that.”
Last week SE revealed Chris was forced to hand over £100,000 worth of jewellery while he and Sam were held at gunpoint in Rome.
The former Page 3 model had her bracelet ripped from her wrist by the armed raiders.
She later slammed them as “rats” and admitted she and the family were “shaken”.
Chris was the latest footballer in a long list of stars who have become victims of crime.
Last May, Spurs ace Dele Alli, 25, was robbed at knifepoint and punched at his home.
Everton manager Carlo Ancelotti’s home was burgled by “two masked men who stole a safe” in February.
And his goalkeeper Robin Olsen’s Greater Manchester house was targeted by a masked gang armed with machetes who stole jewellery.
talkSPORT’s investigation, which airs today on the Jim White & Simon Jordan show, found that football’s ‘security problem’ is much worse than realised.
Asked if threats had gone up, Simon Roberts, the Director of Operations at Security Alert UK which looks after a Premier League club, said: “Massively, massively. I would say for every 100 attempts, five will make the media.
“Personal theft and the home attacks are getting higher and higher and higher. They’re increasing.
“A lot of them never makes the press or the papers because it’s dealt with internally by a private security company or by lawyers.”
It also found that big stars are paying as much as £30,000 a month on ineffective security at their homes.
Alex Bomberg said: “Very often you’ll find with footballers is their say, ‘I’ve got a really good CCTV system and alarm system’.
“And I say, ‘Great. So that CCTV will tell you whether somebody on your premises and in your house? Yes. It’s already too late. If someone’s in your house or on your premises, unless you’ve got an immediate physical response, as in a security guard or residential security team or close protection team, it’s already too late.
“We had a client we took over a couple years ago who’d spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on a state-of-the-art CCTV system that’s monitored 24/7, but these people lived in the middle of Oxfordshire and the police response time was about 20 minutes.
“Someone only really needs a few minutes in your house and the damage is already done.”
The security experts recommend dogs that players, including Dele, have spent thousands on to guard their homes.
Simon Roberts said: “The dogs has got a next level.
“You get a couple of guys masked up, hoodied up, that are going to come and try and do someone over. They’ve got two security guards — they’re going to try and have a go.
“And then it’s 50-50. It’s man on man.
“With the dogs, they’ll go nowhere near a dog. The smell, the sight, the hearing is far greater than human beings.
“So where we could maybe see a perpetrator from, in the daylight, 150 to 250 yards, a dog, at night, will pick somebody up three, four or 500 yards away, which then gives us an extra 30, 40, 50 seconds to be in place with the dog units to stop any attack or physical threat.
“So for me, dogs in personal protection has just gone through the roof for us.”
