Football’s Coming Out

Neil Beasley is a player with Birmingham Blaze, National Gay Football Supporters Network League champions and Midlands Unity League champions.

His book, Football’s Coming Out, written with Seth Burkett, is on the longlist for the 2016 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.

In this extract from the book, Beasley shares his experiences of homophobia within the game and looks forward to the day when a Premier League star comes out…

I recently completed an FA coaching course and the tutor certainly wasn’t doing much for race relations. There was a Chinese man on the course, and the tutor spent the whole week referring to him as Jackie Chan and making kung-fu noises whenever the ball went near him. Of course, the black man on the course was referred to as Denzel for the entire week. They both played along and everything was done in good humour but was it really? This is an FA course run by FA people for goodness’ sake… How is this acceptable?

I compare that to my police training. There was another person training alongside me who kept on using ‘gay’ in a derogatory way. Oh, this is gay, that’s gay. Eventually I got fed up and reported him. Just like that, he was kicked off the training. Yet in football it’s totally acceptable and that needs to change. You only ever effect change when something is made law. Make homophobic abuse a bookable offence, for example. We’re happy enough to reward people for minor change, or for saying they’ve changed, because, to be honest, anyone can be a saint when there’s money or some FA certificate involved. We’re not happy to bring in rulings which would have a major effect, however.

You wonder what happens in the academies at professional football clubs. Each club must have hundreds of young players on their books. How many of them are going to be gay? There’s bound to be some, but how many of them are not going to progress because they think it’s not necessarily a safe environment for them?

Attitudes filter down eventually. If a current Premier League star came out as gay, I’m sure they’d be well supported and I’m sure it would help to change the football culture. It’d be interesting to see if a player plying his trade in League One or Two would get similar support. I suspect not, and to be honest it’s unlikely. Players at that level are effectively self-employed. They don’t have the luxury of a long, lucrative contract. Coming out as gay without such luxury would be …

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