So, former Premier League footballer Thomas Hitzlsperger has revealed that he is gay. Kudos to the man. In football, that still takes ‘cojones’. What was great to see was so many team-mates being so supportive, so many fellow footballers applauding his bravery. Individually, it is probably the case that the majority of footballers consider their teammates’s sexuality irrelevant. But, in a team culture, it is quite different. Homophobia has a tight grip over the ‘beautiful game’.

It starts from the grassroots. Try harder. Don’t just lie there. Don’t cry about it, you ‘poof’. Go down to any non-league game (or league, for that matter), and you can expect such witticisms. It’s not necessarily simply a matter of insulting, heckling or abusing your opponent. A fluffed pass, a limp tackle, a moment of lost concentration: all these could draw chidings from your teammates. Homophobic slurs were common-place in all of my school sports teams, not just football; an early rugby coach made me so nervous about proving I wasn’t a ‘poof’ that I began to hate rugby. I am probably no different from other young sportsmen – nobody is safe from homophobic comments.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, sport is, in many ways, a show of physical superiority. Wrongly, physical superiority is still linked to masculinity. Thus, a demonstration of your weakness is deemed a demonstration of non-masculinity. Hence the homophobic gibe; because clearly, real men don’t fancy other men, right?

Grow up.

Consider Gareth Thomas. Former captain of Wales and the Lions, with 100 caps earned and 40 tries scored for his country. Thomas took a huge leap for mankind in coming out. His personal life is not up for grabs, but supporters will nonetheless find any tiny detail and use it as ammunition.

In a game where any limp tackle can see you derided as a girl, and a tackle that lingers too long can be mocked as an attempt to feel your opponent up, Thomas’s move is a hopeful glance towards a new era. As the man himself states: “I’d love for it, in 10 years’s time, not to even be an issue in sport, and for people to say: ‘So what?’”

This seems a forlorn hope at the moment. For now, homophobic slang remains just another way of putting somebody off their game. Coaches may even justify heckling their own players because it will make them play harder, better or stronger. Maybe this works; maybe it forces some players to play up and play the game, if only to escape the stigma. But when players leave the pitch, some of the abuse is going to stick, and it is all too possible that they feel weaker as a result of the experience. The irony is not subtle, but neither is the abuse. The inability to recognise another’s personal choice is a violation, and all the talent in the world means nothing, if you fail to respect your fellow man.

Time for some maths (all credit to Bill Edgar of The Times for these figures). Assume that the proportion of gay footballers is similar to the percentage in broader society, at 1.5% (a conservative estimate). Of the 13,600 players to have played in the League in the past 20 years, the chances of none of them being gay is probably

1 in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

That’s a lot of young men feeling that they can’t speak honestly about their sexuality, and who have been made to feel so insecure through the toxic trinity of the ‘old-fashioned’ coach, team culture in general, and the whole set-up of English football. John Amaechi summarises it quite wonderfully:
“Football is toxic and not just for gay people - it’s toxic for Asians who want to play the game, it’s toxic for women who want to be executives, it’s toxic for black people who want to do anything but play.”

Football’s homophobic culture is ugly, dishonest, and quite frankly, represents the worst of our country.