Gary Andrews

It’s not often that I use this place to hawk out my football-related work (you’d all get bored quickly, I’m sure), but the latest podcast I’ve recorded is about more than just sport.

For the last two months, I’ve been working on a special one-off twofootedtackle podcast on attitudes to homosexuality within football and what the authorities are doing to tackle homophobia in the game.

As somebody who started researching this from a position of knowing very little about the subject, it’s been fascinating to look closer at the topic. I’ve spoken to a range of people, from a member of a gay football team, to a transgender fan, to one of the few sports journalists to write about homophobia in the game. Every single interview has made me think and often reassess my own views. Hopefully it’ll do the same when you listen to it.

The documentary is just under 45 minutes long, so please do stop by twofootedtackle to have a listen. I’ll be really interested to hear what you think.

written by Gary \\ tags: football and homophobia, football podcast, homophobia in sport, the Justin Campaign, twofootedtackle

Over at Pitch Invasion, I discuss Gareth Thomas’s coming out and ask if we can expect something similar in football. The answer, I suspect, is probably not.

Out of all the things I’ve written on sport, this has definitely been one of the most thought-provoking pieces for me. One thought that occurred to me post-article was the treatment of players post-outing.

I’d imagine that there’s a few sportsman where their sexuality is reasonably well-known, but it’s not in the media’s interest to out them, giving they stopped doing that for the sake of it several years back.

But once they’re out, there’s nothing stopping the media going to town, if they want to. And that, in itself, may be worse.

Throw in, for football at least (which tends to be a lot less tolerant than rugby) the dressing room politics and the terrace chants and its easy to understand why Justin Fashanu remains the only footballer to have come out.

I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with Max Clifford, but he’s probably not alone in being surprised that we haven’t had another footballer come out in the last decade.

There’s a lot of other considerations in this that people with far better knowledge of the topic than I could discuss, but it’s interesting none the less.

And, at the end of the day, to me Gareth Thomas is a legend for his leadership and play during that Six Nations championship. He’s always been one of my favourite Welsh players (the fact he now plays for the Blues reinforces his). That is he gay is utterly irrelevant. I somehow doubt there’ll be any equivalent in football any time soon.

written by Gary \\ tags: Gareth Thomas, homophobia in sport, Pitch Invasion