The “game of kings” has not yet managed to overcome a barrier that society has already overcome in all areas: Jakub Jankto, on loan from Getafe to Sparta Prague, is the first active player in the European elite to declare his homosexuality: ” I want to live my life in freedom. I don’t want to hide.” One study indicates that there would be just over 42,000 federated LGTBI footballers, of which 142 would do so as a professional.
«I also want to live my life in freedom, without fear, without prejudice and without violence. But with love. I’m gay and I don’t want to hide anymore.” The statement was made by a professional football player: Jakub Jankto, international from his country Czech Republic, where he plays on a rental basis from Getafe. He is the first active in the European elite to take the step To this day, no one with a contract in Europe’s first divisions could have done that with any team. Justin Fashanu – who eventually took his own life – announced that he was gay in an interview in the The Sun newspaper when he played for England’s Leyton Orient, Jake Daniels made the move last year with the Blackpool shirt – a second-tier football team from England, Thomas Hitzlsperger, an international with Germany, did it when he retired from the field and there are also examples in the United States, with Collin Martin and David Testo, Australia with Josh Cavallo or Brazil with the Brazilian Emerson Sheik The latter, in the ranks of Corinthians, uploaded a photo to I nstagram as he kissed a friend on the mouth and his own fans received him on the training field with banners reading, “Kiss the whore you gave birth to” and “This It’s a man’s place.”
“There are still many who write him private messages and threaten him. It’s terrible that this still happens. Strangers interested in the lives of others,” Jankto’s ex-wife, Markéta Ottomanska, told the Czech website Idnes.
Football has not yet been able to overcome a barrier that society has already overcome in all its fields and today the taboo against homosexuality remains. “This step will help a lot of people. The biggest thermometer of all that remains to be done is precisely the very low visibility of LGTBI athletes out there,” said Víctor Gutiérrez, a water polo player and the first male team athlete to come out in Spain. The current PSOE LGTBI Policy Secretary and author of the book ‘Yellow Ball, Rainbow Flag: Top Sport Comes Out’ believes posts like the Czech footballer’s are essential “because they teach the world that we are occupying spaces in which we are historically insulted and discriminated against”.
“Hopefully this cabinet that still exists in men’s football starts to burst; This case is very positive and it will be a benchmark and a spearhead that we hope will serve so that other colleagues of the so-called ‘royal sport’ can make themselves visible as they are,” said José Luis Lafuente, a member of the media. indicates in an interview with this medium of the Executive Committee of the LGTBI+ State Federation, which delves into the fact that this is a “great” example for adolescents and young people who enter the world of sports “so that they don’t have nothing to hide.”
“Football is the last redoubt of manhood,” says psychologist and sociologist Alicia López Losantos in a conversation with this medium, pointing to a “fresh” environment for homosexuals in football, exposed to radicals in the stands: “It is not the same for someone to insult you individually than for more than 30,000 people to do it at the same time, peer pressure is very important to the person and there is a significant number of fans with an unacceptable level of cruelty,” he laments. The expert believes that there should be “educational work from the clubs themselves, but also from high institutions so that harassment is not normalized” and homophobic attitudes are punished, so that athletes, especially football players, can be facilitated to express their condition . sex without fear.
In football, the homophobic insult remains multi-faceted and the ‘faggot’ is still easily heard as a chant that goes unpunished in every stadium: from the 1980s with Míchel to the recent case of Cristiano Ronaldo in a Clásico in 2016, via Guti , Guardiola or Piqué, among others. Occasionally it is one. “You have to be very prepared psychologically to face thousands of people every weekend throughout your career who insult you. It is important that this kind of behavior is punished,” said Gutiérrez, victim of the first homophobia sanction in the history of the sport in Spain (April 2021) after another water polo player called him “faggot”.
The new sports law, passed by Congress on Dec. 22, criminalizes discrimination against the LGTBI collective. To establish proper sanction mechanisms, the 2007 Law Against Violence, Sexism, Racism, Xenophobia and Intolerance in Sport was amended to explicitly include “discrimination based on sexual orientation, sexual identity or gender expression”. In this way, the protection of the entire LGTBI collective is achieved by giving the Anti-Violence Commission the capacity to act against this type of discrimination. The law will allow matches to be suspended and even facilities evacuated, although there is a stretch between words and facts to date.
In a recent interview on radio station RAC-1, LaLiga president Javier Tebas assured that his organization had denounced racist or homophobic slurs no fewer than 15 times. However, to date, no first or second stadium has been closed due to these types of events. “If we really have homosexuals among our footballers, and we probably are in percentage terms, it would be good if they think they’re getting in the way of their personality. It would seem perfect to me if a player did that. But not because it’s good for society. What couldn’t be done is that they had to hide it,” said the head honcho of the Spanish league.
In 2021, the government of Pedro Sánchez put a number on the gay footballers of our football. He did this by presenting a non-statutory proposal introduced in Congress to end behaviors that violate sexual freedom, especially in football. In this initiative, the PSOE proposed a 5-minute suspension of the game when “intolerable acts against the LGTBI community, racism or violence against women” occur. Likewise, it considered courses to train managerial, technical and sports personnel in respect for diversity in general and the realities of LGBT people in particular. The proposal indicates that there would be just over 42,000 federated LGTBI players in the world of football, of which “142 would do it as professionals”, according to a study conducted by the Universities of Córdoba and Seville, led by David Jesús Moscoso and Joaquin Piedra . 6% of the European population declares themselves openly gay, so even if only by statistics it is clear that there must be gays in football teams.
“If a superstar were to announce it, a lot would change,” says Losantos, who is grateful that these cases serve to “normalize this issue more,” but who finds it difficult for others to follow Jankto’s path because of the costs involved. for them, because he is an unpopular player who does not stand out as a reference, for which – he regrets – he would continue to be regarded as heteronormativity (a state in which heterosexuality is considered normal) within the football world. Heteronormativity is the set of cultural assumptions we have in the collective imagination that designate affective, romantic, or heterosexual relationships as “normal or natural.”
The sociologist is skeptical of the calculation made with regard to gay football players, as in this case there is a cultural issue imposed by families or environments in which the person develops as a child. “It may be that they enjoy other activities from an early age because of the ‘social role’ established by sport, at least until not so long ago,” he says.
“I don’t know them. I’ve never met a gay player. I’ve watched the players all my life in a dressing room and I haven’t met any, otherwise they would have been very well hidden,” said former national coach José Antonio Camacho in an interview in 2014. “If I say what I think, there’s a mess. If there are cousins in the dressing room? It’s their problem and it doesn’t affect me, but I hope not…”, said the ex-Madridista Antonio Cassano in 2012. Homophobic statements for which he was fined by UEFA.
In the German edition of GQ magazine, Toni Kroos, the current midfielder of Real Madrid, seems to hit the nail on the head why more top athletes, especially in football, are not coming out: self-censorship, exaggerated masculine identity in this sport and social support. “Of course my common sense tells me that everyone should be free to live their sexuality in the 21st century, but I don’t know if I would advise a footballer to come out. Insults are sometimes thrown on the pitch and given the emotions of the fans in the stadium there is no guarantee it won’t devalue the player’s mettle. This should not happen and the footballer would receive a lot of support from those around him, but you have to personally decide whether it will be an advantage or a disadvantage for you on the field. I don’t think today is an advantage.”
Lafuente points out that the FELGTB “many years ago suggested to a player the possibility of coming out, and when the environment was analyzed it was better not to do it because the consequences outweighed the benefits.” The spokesman for the organization recalls how the extinct magazine Zero – icon of the gay movement – had the opportunity to put a football player on the cover and make some reports with some of them, but once the case was analyzed and it seems that because of another censorship and pressure at the time, it was decided not to make it public: “I don’t know if the same thing would happen today; In the past, one of the great fears was losing sponsors, but now the problem of sexual diversity is the order of the day within the business community and it is easily made visible,” he emphasizes.
In the same way that Real Madrid’s German midfielder points to Milan’s French striker Olivier Giroud when he points out in an interview with Le Figaro that sports in general, and football in particular, have not progressed enough for orientation. taken for granted: “It is impossible to declare yourself homosexual in football,” says the France international, always aware of the LGTBI case and who has publicly stated his position in favor of opening up the sport on several occasions. According to the newspaper Público, Paco Jémez assured in a 2013 interview that Spain “is not ready for a gay footballer” and that if there were, he would “have to retire”, because “it would be a reason for mockery”.
In The Times, Spanish Héctor Bellerín, current Sporting Lisbon player, spoke about the homophobia that means this sport is not yet ready to assimilate footballers confessing their homosexuality. According to his own statements, “It is impossible for someone to be openly gay in football. The problem – he felt – is that the fans have an idea of how a footballer should dress, how to behave and how to speak. In the thesis, he agrees with former Dutch coach Louis Van Gaal, who reflects in a recent interview that in general “this is not talked about in the football world. There is an old-fashioned reality and it is very conservative in thinking and acting. In football you have to have a lot of courage and strength to come out.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
