A new survey has found that 73% of British football fans have no issues with international players coming out of the closet. But as t-shirts branding players ‘faggot’ and ‘gay’ are sold for the World Cup in Brazil, it’s no wonder Rob Buchanan is skeptical.

Results of a recent poll of 30,000 football fans, carried out by gay rights group Stonewall, showed the majority of them supported the idea of gay international football players coming out. No figures were provided for Ireland, however 73% of British football fans said they had no issues with the idea of gay international players. The top areas for positive results were Denmark and Sweden (both at 79%), followed closely by the UK, and then Portugal (69%) and Italy (68%).

Call me a sceptic, but I don’t fully trust these figures. There is a constant undertone of homophobic abuse at league level in the UK. Gay slurs are not only the first tier of insults hurled, they are also tolerated by the powers that be and go unpunished. Football supporters, who would never dream of using the ‘N word’ in the stands, happily call players faggots and queers, without reprimand.

The fact that this survey was sponsored by Forza Football, an online betting app, also calls its validity into question. It would hardly be a PC selling point for a business to associate itself with negative, homophobic results, thus labeling its own customers bigots. I’d be curious to see if the survey was in any way branded online as being in association with a gay rights organisation. If it were, this would imply that participants who chose to take the survey were already leaning towards the liberal end of the equation.

‘Pair of Woofters’

Only a few days ago Terry Venables, when commenting on a photo of himself and former Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough holding hands as they walked out on to the pitch at the 1991 FA Cup final (pictured above), said they looked like a “pair of woofters”. This was met with uproarious laughter from presenter Chris Kamara. I would be curious how Kamara, a black former player, would have reacted to a comment that degraded people racially?

To have a respected the ex-England manager make a reasonably low-grade homophobic comment live on Sky Sports Goals is perhaps more upsetting than genuinely shocking. It is the casual nature of the prejudice, more so than the actual silly word, which shows that underpinning all the PC bullshit there is a seismic culture change needed at the bedrock ofmodern football.

As football fans prepare for the start of the World Cup next month in Brazil, it seems we will not have to wait till Qatar 2022 before we see a poisonous showcase of homophobia in sport, last displayed the Russian Winter Olympics. In Brazil branded clothing companies, not just bootleggers, are selling t-shirts bearing slogans labeling famous players as ‘gay’ and ‘faggot’. These t-shirts might seem like innocuous fun, but they show how in the minds of some football fans the idea of being an effective player, worthy of respect, goes hand-in-hand with the fantasy of virility being an exclusively heterosexual male domain.

But the ones I blame most for homophobia in modern football aren’t the mindless bigots, or the outdated dinosaurs. It’s the raft of closeted gay players throughout every level of football whose continued silence props up the myth in the minds of children and adults alike, that the football pitch is no place for queers.

For football’s sake, it’s time for gay players to start coming out.