The football world must work collectively to abolish the homophobia embedded in its culture
By Jack Kelly
It seemed that things were changing in the football world when Josh Cavallo came out as the only openly gay professional top flight footballer, to an overwhelmingly positive response. Blackpool teenager Jake Daniels did the same when he became the first male professional footballer to come out as gay since Justin Fashanu. These two young men were trailblazers and there was a refreshing absence of people hounding the two men. Their openness had a somewhat trickle-down effect within the football world as we also saw Scottish referees Craig Napier and Llyod Wilson speak openly about their sexualities, and, also in Scotland, Gala Fairydean Rovers striker Zander Murray became the first Scottish footballer to come out as gay.
It seemed that football fans and its media were beginning to change, and the LGBTQIA+ community were beginning to wonder if the game was becoming a safe place for them.
Then came Sunday 9th October. For a couple of hours, Iker Casillas [World Cup winning goalkeeper for the Spain men's national team in 2010] became the most famous gay footballer in the world following a tweet from his account saying ‘I hope you respect me: I’m gay. #happysunday’.
Those words represented a watershed moment for football. If true, Casillas would have been the most high-profile player in football history to open up about their sexuality but what followed was bizarre, enraging and upsetting.
Firstly, came the replies to the tweet with many voicing their support and congratulations. This was juxtaposed with many fans making homophobic jokes, calls for Casillas to be dropped by Qatari broadcaster beIn SPORTS and a reply from former national teammate of Casillas and Barcelona legend saying ‘It’s time to tell our story, Iker’ which he signed off with a kiss emoji. This tweet was followed with more slurs and memes.
Any good habits portrayed by the football world during the Cavallo and Daniels stories seemed to have vanished. Casillas’ coming out was soon the topic of discussion on BBC radio and the subject of articles across numerous news and sports websites, including an LGBTQIA+ one.
The tweet itself seemed short and shy in detail for something so personal and sensitive but then, as it turned out, Casillas wasn’t coming out at all. Prominent figures in the Spanish press said that the tweet was a joke in response to Casillas being linked to several women working in the media.
Two hours later, the tweet was deleted. Casillas replied with a follow-up tweet saying ‘Account hacked. Luckily everything in order. Apologies to all my followers. And of course, more apologies to the LGBT community.’
After reading Casillas’ response, it is quite difficult to begin to process the events. Do you wonder why the hackers only put up one message to Casillas’ 9.7 million twitter followers? Or was it a miracle that he was able to regain control of his account just in time to clear up the information and apologise?
Puyol soon cleared things up by putting up a more honest version of events, apologising for his comment and admitting that he posted the immature joke gone-wrong. He tweeted ‘I made a mistake, sorry for a clumsy joke with no bad intentions.’
Casillas and Puyol, two Spanish football icons, showed that they feel people’s sexualities are fine to joke about. Try saying that to a countless number of LGBTQIA+ football fans who thought that they were witnessing a landmark moment and a possibly transformative event for football culture only to find out they were the punchline for two footballers’ jokes. Lots of people in the football world have been vocal about how football and the dressing room culture is ready for male players to come out, but this gave the opposite impression.
The worry for those who work to make football a more inclusive sport for all is that neither Casillas nor Puyol know what it’s like to be an LGBTQIA+ member of football or society. The twitter exchange between the former Spain internationals fed into the idea that football isn’t serious about making the LGBTQIA+ community welcome.
The fan reaction to the tweet was bleak. Of course, there were the fans who voiced their support, but the hate, mocking and disgust that filled the replies section to the tweet was predictable and depressing. Fans hurled abuse and vowed that Casillas and Puyol would burn in hell. Memes and gifs were used as vehicles for homophobia. Why is society and, more specifically, football like this?
Without getting too high falutin, the idea of humour as an assertion of superiority goes all the way back to Ancient Greece. Identifying individuals or groups of seemingly lower status and targeting them for a laugh is something we still see, and it is now commonly known in the comedy world as ‘punching down’. Whether done consciously or not, humour often reveals power structures in communities-who is deemed a legitimate target or not.
Casillas and Puyol have apologised, and people will defend this episode as being ‘just banter’ but the fact remains that this is another example of the LGBTQIA+ community being used as material by the ‘comedians’ in the world of football.
Similarly, it was just a joke when Brian Clough [Manager of the European Cup winning Nottingham Forest team of 1979 and 1980] appeared on the short-lived mid 1990’s ITV panel show Sport in Question and made a cheap joke about the sexuality of Justin Fashanu- the world’s first £1 million black footballer and the first openly gay British footballer, who killed himself in 1998 aged 37. In a now widely shared clip in which Clough, who is a few years out of management at this stage, is asked by an audience member if he feels responsible for transfer fee inflation. He replies by saying ‘I feel responsible for Justin Fashanu. It took me about three months to twig him. But I twigged him!’ A gag that was met with a cackle of laughter from the audience and no obvious hint of disgust.
Likewise, during the 90’s, when the uber-machismo drinking culture was still as prevalent as ever in football, there remained a relative outlier. Graeme Le Saux was a Blackburn Rovers, Chelsea and English international footballer who happened to have an interest in avant-garde music, art exhibits and The Guardian newspaper. Le Saux is a heterosexual man with a wife and two children and every week he was subjected to a tirade of homophobic abuse from the terraces.
The abuse he was subjected to had grown out of an immature training ground jibe and reached an apex when Chelsea hosted Liverpool in Stamford Bridge in 1999. Le Saux and the Liverpool striker clashed and as Le Saux was stepping up to take the resulting free-kick, Fowler bent over, clasped his buttocks and began goading the Chelsea defender. The horrific abuse Le Saux experienced throughout his career was the result of the kind of ‘lads' banter’ we have seen in football during this time. Maybe this was just indicative of this era?
Fast forward to 2022 and not only do we have football immortals making jokes to millions about homosexuality but there are also large parts of the game, where there is little interest in change. Three weeks ago, the FA and other federations wrote to FIFA asking for permission to wear a rainbow armband at the upcoming World Cup: an inoffensive and somewhat ineffective gesture but a gesture, nonetheless. This column, currently, understands that FIFA has yet to respond.
Incidents like what happened on Twitter on 9th October are less prevalent than they were before. However, as much as it’s hard to imagine a high-profile manager throwing around slurs about ‘twigging' people on national television, homophobia is still embedded in parts of the football culture. As recently as 2016, in a column in The Guardian, 8% of those asked said they would stop supporting their team if they signed a gay player.
Prejudice can also show itself in more subtle ways. Dangerously, it can manifest itself in silence. As we have seen this year; silence seems like an option for some: get given an opportunity to change but turn the other way.