I bet we can all think of a soccer player or two who we would like to be gay. But how many ‘out’ gay soccer players are there and who are they? The important word there is ‘out.’ If you take the generally agreed statistic of ‘one in ten’ people being gay, then there should be at least one gay payer per team, and at least two gay players in any one match at any time. And then when you count the number of teams in even one country, say Great Britain, you should be looking at enough gay players to fuel every locker room fantasy you’ve ever had.

But, we come back to that word again; who many are actually ‘out’ and how many are just being given the gossip treatment? The first ‘non-out but possibly gay ‘cos we’d like him to be at the moment’ soccer player must be Cristiano Ronaldo. I tracked down some info on him which may or may not be true when asking the question ‘is Cristiano Ronaldo gay?’ on a few Q & A sites. The answer? Well, the closest I got to what might be true was someone saying that when they lived next door to him, when he was younger, it was known in the village that he was bi-sexual but preferred women to men, whatever that means.

All the other sites I saw on this subject were, more or less, simply trying to fulfill our fantasy, that CR is gay and would one day appear on our doorstep and want to leap into bed with us. Some were funny, there were edited interviews, snap-shots of him just happening to look at another guy and so on, but the answer, sadly, probably is that no, he is not.

So enough of who we’d like to be but who isn’t a gay soccer player? Who is actually out? As far as I can tell, none of them!

According to Zimbio.com, Xisco is ‘England’s first gay soccer player.’ Which is actually not true. Justin Fashanu came out while playing professional football, found life tough in the sport as a gay man, finding that ‘footballers are very narrow-minded people’ as he put it in an interview, and killed himself in May 1998. This act did a little raise the awareness of homosexuality in football, but it’s still not the done thing to be out. So maybe Xisco is one of the first to come out in recent years, he’s certainly not the only gay player. “Francisco Jiménez Tejada Xisco has become the first openly gay soccer player in England’s Premier League. Xisco isn’t completely out, but his secret has now been revealed. The 22-year-old Spanish striker currently plays for Newcastle United.” zimbio.com

Ah, but there is a catch here. Apparently Xisco is only out because photos of him kissing other guys have appeared on the net. One online commentator said, ‘Francisco Jiménez Tejada, the Spanish soccer player known to fans as Xisco, has become the first openly gay soccer player in England’s Premier League. Whether he likes it or not.’ (querty.com)

So, that’s two soccer players who may or may not be gay. Why is it so hard to discover these facts? Well, as Fashanu implied, it’s a pretty narrow-minded game. And, when you look at soccer fans (and players) you can see where he was coming from. Those thousands of men who line the terraces every Saturday, acting all macho and threatening, yelling and cheering on their teams, they don’t mind if guys hug and kiss on the pitch, but if they suspected they did that in a bedroom, well, that’s the end of that player’s career.

All a bit hypocritical if you ask me, especially if we take the one in ten rule again and divide 30,000 fans on the terraces by ten. That’s 3,000 gay fans every Saturday in one stadium alone. Watching at least two gay players, while condemning gay men…

Bottom line; there are, there must be, gay soccer players out there, but it is not a sport and environment where it is safe or advisable to come out.