Did you see the survey? Did you answer the questions? Did it make you stop and think about how homophobia affects the world? It is not only the Policy Officers of Social Inclusion who work on homophobia, the Sports Working Group touches upon the area as well in the first Activity Plan of the Sports Working Group (SWG).
When discussing the Activity Plan (AP) of the SWG, it was not easy to reach agreement on certain areas. High ambitions and eagerness to impress the Network and Europe were challenges when piecing together the AP of the SWG. One of the difficult areas was the idea of discussing about homophobia in football. This is an area that is rarely touched upon. However, that was one of the reasons why the secretary Patricia Anthony was so eager to make this discussion part of at least the next year’s plan of the Sports Working Group.
Seeing the e-mail to the Network from the Policy Officer last week about the topic of homophobia, added even more inspiration to try to achieve something in this topic, and homophobia in the masculine sport of football is also in the attention of the media these days.
Danish national football goalkeeper and player for Manchester United Anders Lindegaard blogged about this topic last month and reveals that according to numbers 12 percent of the male Danish population is gay, however, none of the approximately 1000 guys associated with Danish professional football have declared themselves as homosexual. Lindegaard has the impression that the problem is not to be found within the football teams but more to be found amongst the fan culture based around football. He then goes on to say that a recent published study from the “British Journal of Sociology” shows that 93 percent of the British football fans would support homosexual football players. This surprises him, as well as Patricia Anthony, but then again, it might be easy to agree upon supporting such minority, but it takes no genius to understand that any minority or person who stands out from the “normal” will be an obvious victim for physical terror, so the actual outplay of any situation will not be known before it actually happens. However, what can be surprising is that in some places the fans are openly admitting that they do not support the club having players representing sexual minorities, such as in the Russian football club of Zenit Moskva.
The Danish Football Federation (DBU) is being pushed by many people to create a campaign, in order to be the front leader in the campaign of accepting homosexual people, hopefully leading to some players coming forward with the truth about their sexuality. However, DBU argues that they are not interested in getting involved with people’s sexualities by making such a campaign. Lindegaard then argues that such a campaign will not encourage people to become gay, but rather promote that any hatred created because of homophobia is unacceptable in the game of football, just as is the case with the fight against racism. Not doing anything indicates that there is no problem, which is far from the truth. However, doing something will be a step towards making the boys that quit playing football feel accepted by the society, and it will be an inclusion of minorities. Homophobia is not only an issue in football, since football is far from the only masculine sport with history of either macho men or popular Beckhams or Ronaldos with their stunning wives and girlfriends on their side. However, being such a popular sport with so much media attention and federations involved with the game, football has the opportunity to be the front leaders of this topic, the question is simply, where does it start?
Tackling this issue is not easy, and that is also why it almost did not make the Activity Plan of the SWG. However, seeing the development of discussion in the media about it, and following policy officers trying to dig in research material about homophobia have assured the SWG board that this interesting discussion is of high relevance of the SWG and AEGEE. This is definitely not the last that you have heard about it.
Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-Kobenhavn and Secretary of the Sports Working Group