Where are all the Gay Football Players?
Image source: LA Galaxy.
The world’s most popular sport is played by 250 million people in over 200 countries, with approximately 65,000 of those being professional football players. Studies show that approximately 93% of men self-report that they identify as completely heterosexual, 5% identify as somewhere on the bisexual continuum, and 2% of men self-report as homosexual.
Yet the number of professional soccer players who are openly homosexual are few and far between. Statistically speaking, there are bound to be gay players in all of the top national leagues. Where are they, and why haven't they come out?
NOTABLE GAY PLAYERS EXIST
Wikipedia’s list of gay professional football players is shockingly short, and there is a notable lack of real household names. There is also a very clear lack of gay football players who are currently active. Anton Hysén plays in the Swedish fourth tier. Collin Martin plays in the American second tier, with no promotion system that could take his club into the MLS. Andy Brennan currently plays for semi-professional Hume City in Australia’s second tier, again with no promotion system available to his club.
That said, there have been some high profile football players who have come out as gay.
Justin Fashanu was a pioneer in several ways. During his move from Norwich to Nottingham Forest in 1981, Fashanu became the first black player to command a £1,000,000 transfer fee, six years after Italian Guiseppe Savoldi became the first player to break the seven figure barrier.
On October 22nd 1990, Justin Fashanu became the first professional football player to be openly gay after coming out in an exclusive interview with controversial tabloid The Sun. Several former clubs had known that Fashanu was gay: most had tolerated or ignored it, while Nottingham Forest’s legendary manager Brian Clough was…less tolerant.
“‘Where do you go if you want a loaf of bread?’ I asked him.
’A baker’s, I suppose.’
’Where do you go if you want a leg of lamb?’
’A butcher’s.’
’So why do you keep going to that bloody poofs’ club?’”
Though he was just 29 at the time, it would effectively put an end to Fashanu’s top level footballing career, making just 12 top division appearances between coming out and his retirement in 1997. In the spring of 1998, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 17 year boy old in Maryland after a night of drinking. Fashanu fled America after being questioned by police, fearing that he would be unable to get a fair trial since homosexuality was still illegal in the state. Yes, in 1998.
Justin Fashanu was found hanged in a deserted car garage in London a month later, protesting his innocence in his suicide note and maintaining that the sex was consensual.
American Robbie Rogers is one of very few footballers to have played professionally after coming out. Making a name for himself at Columbus Crew in the late 2000s and representing the United States’ national team 18 times, Rogers then joined Leeds United in The Championship, England’s highly competitive second tier.
His spell in England was marred by injuries, and Rogers only made four appearances for the club before being released from his contract in January 2013. On February 15th 2013, clubless and hampered by injuries, Robbie Rogers retired from football and came out as gay. “I always thought I could hide this secret. Football was my escape, my purpose, my identity,” said Rogers, who was just 25 years old at the time.
This made Rogers the first professional football player based in Britain to come out since Justin Fashanu 23 years earlier. Then, after speaking to an audience of 500 at Nike’s BeTrue LGBT Youth Forum in April, Robbie Rogers had a change of heart.
“These kids are standing up for themselves and changing the world, and I’m 25, I have a platform and a voice to be a role model. How much of a coward was I to not step up to the plate?”
Signing a contract with LA Galaxy in his native California, Rogers became the most high profile gay male athlete in team sports. Winning the MLS Cup the next year, Robbie Rogers further signed his name into the history books by becoming the first openly gay male athlete to win a major professional team sports title in the United States. He retired permanently in 2017 after further injury woes.
Thomas Hitzlsperger, undoubtedly, is the highest profile footballer to have come out as gay to date. Making over 300 career appearances and scoring 45 goals in the process, he played for top level clubs like Aston Villa (where he gained the nickname Der Hammer), VfB Stuttgart and S.S. Lazio. Hitlzsperger was also a mainstay for the German national team from 2004 to 2010, making 52 appearances for Die Mannschaft and playing in the 2005 Confederations Cup, the 2006 World Cup and Euro 2008, helping his nation to bronze, bronze and silver, respectively.
Der Hammer retired at the age of just 31 in 2013 despite offers to resume playing. Four months later, in January 2014, Thomas Hitzlsperger came out as gay in an interview with German Die Zeit: “It has only dawned on me in recent years that I would rather live with a man”. He would later reveal that he intended to come out as gay while playing for VfL Wolfsburg during the 2011-12 season, but was advised against it.
Hitzlsperger has rejoined VfB Stuttgart, for whom he played for five seasons, and now serves as their Head of Sport. He remains the last high profile player to have come out as gay.
WHERE ARE ALL THE GAY FOOTBALL PLAYERS?
If there are 65,000 professional football players and 2% of men - excluding bisexual men for the sake of argument - self-report that they are gay. Simple math tells us that there should be around 1300 gay professional footballers in the world.
Robbie Rogers himself said that he hoped him coming out in 2013 would pave the way for other professional football players to come out as gay. That never happened. In a 2016 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Rogers expressed his disappointment: “I'm at the stage where it's kind of stupid. What's going on? (...) It's a little disheartening.”
Justin Fashanu, Robbie Rogers and Thomas Hitzlsperger remain the only football players who have played at the highest level of the sport and come out as gay.
Why?
One popular theory revolves around self-selection: young gay athletes may self-select themselves out of the playing pool when they experience homophobia, from fearing that they will experiencing abuse and discrimination, or through a reluctance to hide their true selves from teammates. Talented gay athletes willl have stopped playing the sport they love because of how they were treated, or how they feared they would be treated.
Self-selection must be a part of the reason, but exactly how big of a part it plays is wholly impossible to measure in any meaningful way. There are almost certainly fewer than 1,300 gay professional footballers in the world, but self-selection alone cannot account for the fact that only three gay footballers have made their way to the highest level of football in the last 40 years.
If the first explanation for the lack of successful football players is that they simply do not exist thanks to self-selection - bar Fashanu, Rogers and Hitzlsperger - then the other option must be that they do exist, and choose not to come out as gay.
Cyd Zeigler, co-founders of Outsports.com and author of Fair Play: How LGBT Athletes are Claiming their Rightful Place in Sports doesn’t believe that a homophobic dressing room culture is to blame for a lack of gay athletes in team sports. Zeigler believes it may be rooted in sexism instead.
“It's not the constant uttering of (homophobic slurs), it's the constant conversation about women and sex with women. If that changed in a locker room … that would change the dynamic for gay athletes. (It’s) something a gay athlete has no relation to. He's totally excluded from that conversation and it marginalizes him from what is a major part of men's sports locker rooms”, says Ziegler.Wade Davis, an openly gay former NFL player, has a different view and believes that sexism and homophobia is two sides of the same coin. “I think the root of homophobia is sexism, it's so insidious and pervasive, it's everywhere. Anytime you exist in a space where you understand that being gay is correlated to being weak and like a woman, anytime you hear sexist language, it almost feels the exact same way.”
FOOTBALL’S HOMOPHOBIA PROBLEM
For a sport nicknamed the world’s game, football sure does have an awful reputation and track record of homophobia and racism. Football has traditionally mostly been played and watched by the working class, and discrimination has been a part of the sport for as long as it’s existed.
Measures are being taken to curb homophobic abuse, though. The Premier League, for example, is partaking in Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces program to promote equality and acceptance for LGBT people. Players wear rainbow coloured laces, captain’s armbands are rainbow coloured, and so are the corner flags. Sadly, social media posts by clubs in support of Rainbow Laces have previously garnered tens of thousands of negative reactions.
Sadly, the problem extends beyond the fans themselves. Striker Andre Gray (now at Watford) has found himself in hot water over homophobic tweets. Graeme Le Saux, who is straight, faced constant homophobic abuse in the Premier League, most notably by then Liverpool forward Robbie Fowler. Le Saux was targeted simply because he was liberal, well educated and would frequent art galleries.
Croatian Barcelona midfielder Ivan Rakitić once stated in an interview that he respected homosexual players, “but I do not want those people in the locker room”, adding; “I would not leave a team for that, because I respect a homosexual equal to a black, a fat or a dwarf, but if possible I prefer not to have gays in my life”. Rakitić was 24 years old and playing for Sevilla at the time.
WAITING FOR THE NEXT OPENLY GAY FOOTBALLER
There must be professionals at the highest level of football. Most likely there have been hundreds since Robbie Rogers and Thomas Hitzlsperger came out in 2013 and 2014 respectively, and thousands in the almost 30 years since Justin Fashanu bravely came out as the first openly homosexual footballer.
The culture around football has shifted significantly in the last decades, and there are some indications that football is starting to take its first baby steps towards more inclusivity. But as the sport expands into billion dollar deals in the Middle East and other less liberal cultures, coming out as gay may be harder than ever.
Several world class players have made comments about the possibility of seeing an openly gay footballer in the last two years. Olivier Giroud and Hector Bellerin - both at Arsenal at the time - have voiced their opinions that they see it as “impossible” due to the toxic fan culture. Both have also been victims of homophobic abuse from fans. Real Madrid star Toni Kroos has echoed their sentiments in a June 2020 interview with Spanish newspaper Marca.
“I don’t know if I’d advise an active footballer to declare come out as gay. Certain words are often used in the game and, taking into account the emotions that exist at the stands, I could not guarantee that he would not end up being insulted and belittled.”
Watford F.C. captain Troy Deeney recently spoke with Louis Theroux and said that he believed there is “probably one gay or bi person in every football team. They're there, they are 100 percent there”. And I believe he may be right. Deeney also says he believes that as soon as one football player comes out as gay, more would follow his lead.
Thing is, that’s what Robbie Rogers thought would happen when he came out 7 years ago.
