Yes! But also, and I say this as an bi fan who is active (and out) in the ~~organized fan scene and knows a lot of LGBT football fans irl, I think it’s way less on the fans than most people think and actually football fans are a lot more progressive than people give them credit for? Your mileage may vary, of course, and it does depend on a lot of stuff, like club/country etc. and a lot of this also has been a development of the last ten years.
There are homophobic fans in football (because there are homophobes in real life - as long as those exist we’ll never get them out of football), though twitter isn’t representative. But you know what else there is? Gay ultras. Gay casual stadium-goers. And like… normal people who are anti-homophobia.
My club, Union Berlin, is not particularly gay friendly (also not particularly unfriendly, but we’re definitely no St. Pauli). I have experienced homophobia a few times, but it was literally just stuff like people calling a referee “gay” when they didn’t like him. Also, these people were always quickly called out by people who weren’t me (and who were probably straight men). I have never felt physically threatened at my club in any way or have experienced anything that felt more severe than the ~casual background homophobia that I also know from every other part of life, which is obviously still not good, but also not particular to football. Other people’s experiences seem to match mine in that regard. I’ve literally been to the stands wearing pride clothes.
You’re a Bayern fan - I live in Munich and I know a few of Bayern’s “gay ultras” from Pride events etc. When they were founded, they asked the Schickeria (aka the Ultras) if they would think there’d be problems if they stood there with openly gay stuff. Schickeria’s answer was “if there are, you tell us, we’ll handle it.” There were no problems. Now there’s a Pride flag in the Südkurve - and has been for years.
And there are clubs that are not just non-homophobic but incredibly, outspokenly anti-homophobic, such as St. Pauli. They don’t have any out players either.
Obviously, making statements and everything is good. Players and clubs should do it. But I don’t think it’s helping anyone to not acknowledge that a lot of these statements exist already.
For example, Hertha BSC had an openly gay over-40 player (senior league) named Marcus Urban, who was called “schwule Sau” (gay pig) by an opposition player. This happened over two years after Urban came out and was, according to him, the first act of football-related homophobia he experienced. Hertha immediately responded by openly supporting and siding with Urban and made sure charges were pressed against the opposition player.
There are some uneducated fans, but at least here, they’re not less educated than any random sample of people you’d find at, say, any given office building. AND there’s a vibrant community of LGBT football fans and fan communities willing to support LGBT fans.
My point is, it’s not as easy as saying “make statements!!! educate fans!!!”, because people are already doing that and have done so for years (the first explicit gay football fan club was Hertha Junxx, founded in 2001). We also need to take complicated factors into account - for example, Thomas Hitzlsperger named the intense media interest in the player’s private life and the fact that a lot of “top football” has a vast amount of input from countries that are extremely homophobic.
I’m simply not buying that people aren’t coming out because they’re afraid of twitter - if they did, no footballer would ever transfer to a rival club. I’m willing to bet that the fact that virtually all top clubs are sponsored by and regularly hold professional trainging camps/visits in countries like Qatar plays a much bigger role and no amount of “rainbow laces” and “rainbow cornerflags” and “rainbow jerseys” are gonna change that.
Because the thing is, gay players exist right now and they are out in the Amateur leagues, they are out in the women’s leagues and they are out after their pro careers. Do you know what the difference is between them and the men’s pro league? It’s the money.
And NO anti-homophobia work in football is going to change anything as long as that’s not addressed. Will a gay player be called up to the national team if they play a World Cup in Russia, or will the national FA simply not nominate him to not cause a fuss? Will a gay player at Bayern/PSG/whatever join in the training camp in Qatar? Would Qatar allow their sponsorship money to go towards buying him? Will a club be willing to hurt their shirt sales in China if they take an openly gay player along on their promo tour? Or will coming out at a top club mean being booted out and coming out at a lower club mean the death of every chance to ever get further?
Those are more realistic concerns than St. Pauli players being afraid of the reaction of their fans…
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