What is the reason for not having openly homosexual footballers in the Premier League and other top clubs? Football, Homophobia and Me presented by Rylan could be the closest thing to a day that will change that forever but it still feels so far away.
This documentary is an efficient piece which builds one solid argument on another without fuss. The first point made directly hits its target: Rylan Clark, once a camp joke act on The X Factor and now a glossy, razor-cut presenter of chatty radio, fluffy reality and This Morning, likes football. Of course he does. “I come out of Stepney Green,” he says at a West Ham game, looking around him. “If you cut me open I bleed claret with a bit of blue.”
Walking round his old streets near Upton Park, Rylan remembers how west Ham-obsessed everybody was in the neighbourhood he does a good over the shoulder “uh” to show how dismissive he used to be of any rogue Arsenal fans on his road. He also remembers being on a swing as a kid when somebody put their hand on his back and pulled him off it then booted him in the head as hard as they could. He woke up in an ambulance having been kicked and stamped on all over by a gang of boys who hated him for being different. If credentials were needed for fronting this film about homophobia in football then Rylan has them both ways.
His first interviewee is Rio Ferdinand who gamely takes questions about appearing on Chris Moyles’s Radio 1 breakfast show in 2006 when he used an anti-gay slur. Trying to explain rather than excuse himself Ferdinand says those words were common currency in dressing rooms back then and sets up one of Football, Homophobia And Me’s main strands when he says “There’s alot of uncontrollables” meaning thousands of supporters at Premier League games, millions of comments on social media.
Former Aston Villa and West Ham midfielder Thomas Hitzlsperger who came out in 2014 after retiring says it wasn’t fans, the media or even his own fear of them that stopped him from doing it while he played. Other players were the problem but he makes a good grim point about how deep-rooted or at least widespread bigotry still is/was. Never mind any openly gay men playing for Premier League clubs now; there are none known to have come out since Hitzlsperger did so after quitting. No one feels confident enough to do it even then.
When this show moves on to talk about repressive Middle Eastern regimes gaining more control over football, the hour looks blacker than before. Qatar hosting a World Cup won through a dubious bidding process, and the mega-bucks Saudi Pro League being able to lure an LGBT ally like Jordan Henderson into going there, feel like landmarks passed while driving the wrong way up a road.
However, hope springs from the grassroots. “That’s what a gay manager looks like,” says Rylan, standing on the touchline at Thetford Town in Norfolk, as player/manager Matt Morton organises his team. “Like any other manager.” Morton’s story about how Thetford’s old-school, no-nonsense chairman Nigel Armes reacted when he came out Armes collared Morton in the club car park, put two hands on his shoulders and tearfully told him how proud he was to have him at the club is a tale to warm the cockles.
“More people are good than we give them credit for,” says Morton, who adds that he also received no abuse from opposition fans, though he concedes that games at this level attract only a few hundred people, so it’s easier than it would be at Premier League grounds to spot and shame bigots.
What doesn’t happen after this constructive experience is a rundown of out gay or bisexual footballers because they do exist; they’re just not high-profile figures in English men’s football: Josh Cavallo at Adelaide United; Jake Daniels at Blackpool; Jakub Jankto at Cagliari; Jahmal Howlett-Mundle at Sevenoaks Town. During a workshop session at St Mirren FC where youth players are being taught about homophobia by former professional footballer Zander Murray, Howlett-Mundle reflects that such an event would have been unthinkable when he was their age.
Rylan is his usual open-hearted self in pieces to camera. His closing words attempt to downplay the effect that his contribution to this debate might have had; instead he stresses that he’d rather not have made the documentary and asks when society will grow up enough to achieve its most basic duty of not caring who footballers love. This question is indeed enraging and alarming but this programme points firmly in one direction.
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